Re: [Marxism] What is a subimperialist?

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
During the first years of the military regime, Brazil displayed a
most menacing "subimperialist" policy, thus justifying Ruy Mauro
Marini's definition, which of course did _not_ imply that Brazil had
become a minor member of the imperialist gang like, say, Denmark or,
even, Greece...
The Brazilian oligarchy had a long tradition of collaboration with
foreign powers: it  dates back to the implantation in Rio (1808) of
the complete Portuguese court by the long and strong arm of Britain.
That is, it starts with very beginnings of the history of independent
Brazil (and it is even possible to trace it even further back, to the
1703 Methuen treaty between Lisbon and London).

***

Thanks for excellent leads, as ever, Nestor. These are the two features to 
remark upon in South Africa, as well as something Nestor didn't suggest, 
namely the legitimation of imperialism by Thabo Mbeki's and Lula's 
half-hearted reform attempts within Washington/Geneva multilateral agencies. 
The SA oligarchy's history of regional looting goes back to Rhodes, the 
British SA Company's invasion of Zimbabwe and the birth of the Anglo 
American Corporate empire with its vast migrant labour system. But there's a 
more recent problem, which I spell out in more detail in the 2005 Socialist 
Register (I can send anyone the full version plus four supporting articles 
from Rev of African Poli Econ, HM and Monthly Review if desired). The first 
couple of sections below hint at how the ANC government *lubricates* the 
economic, geopolitical and even military agenda of Washington/London. That 
lubrication earns Pretoria the title subimperialist, but we also must 
document the material looting of Africa by Johannesburg capital (with 
Pretoria's active encouragement). And it's crucial to also record the 
anti-imperialist and anti-subimperialist forces, including Jubilee SA, 
Cosatu and the radical social movements.

Cheers,
Patrick

US Empire and
South African Subimperialism

Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded

Imperialism, subimperialism and anti-imperialism are all settling into 
durable patterns and alignments in Africa - especially South Africa - even 
if the continent's notoriously confusing political discourses sometimes 
conceal the collisions and collusions. 'All Bush wants is Iraqi oil,' the 
highest-profile African, Nelson Mandela, charged in January 2003. 'Their 
friend Israel has weapons of mass destruction but because it's [the US] 
ally, they won't ask the UN to get rid of it... Bush, who cannot think 
properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. If there is a 
country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the United States 
of America.'[1] Mandela's remarks were soon echoed at a demonstration of 
4,000 people outside the US embassy in Pretoria, by African National 
Congress (ANC) secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe: 'Because we are endowed 
with several rich minerals, if we don't stop this unilateral action against 
Iraq today, tomorrow they will come for us.'[2] After the fall of Baghdad, 
Mandela again condemned Bush: 'Since the creation of the United Nations 
there has not been a World War. Therefore, for anybody, especially the 
leader of a superstate, to act outside the UN is something that must be 
condemned by everybody who wants peace. For any country to leave the UN and 
attack an independent country must be condemned in the strongest terms.'[3]
    This was not merely conjunctural anti-war rhetoric. Mandela's successor 
Thabo Mbeki is just as frank when addressing the broader context of imperial 
power, for example when welcoming dignitaries to the August 2002 
Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development: 'We have all converged 
at the Cradle of Humanity to confront the social behaviour that has pity 
neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. This social 
behaviour has produced and entrenches a global system of apartheid.'[4] 
Mbeki's efforts to insert the phrase 'global apartheid' in the summit's 
final document failed, due to opposition by US secretary of state Colin 
Powell, who in turn was heckled by NGO activists and Third World leaders in 
the final plenary session. A year later, in the immediate run-up to the 2003 
World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mbeki even 
hinted that Third World governments should align themselves with radical 
social movements: 'They may act in ways you and I may not like and break 
windows in the street but the message they communicate relates.'[5] 
Moreover, in light of Pretoria's centrality to the new India-Brazil-South 
Africa bloc and the G20 group often credited with causing the Cancun summit's 
collapse, the logical impression is that the anti-imperialist movement has 
an important state ally in Africa.
    Unfortunately, these postures can best be understood as 'talking left, 
walking right', insofar as they veil the underlying dynamics of 
accumulation, class struggle and geopolitics. To illustrate, in early 2003, 
at the same time as Mandela's outburst, the ANC government permitted three 
Iraq-bound warships to dock and refuel in Durban, and the state-owned 
weapons manufacturer Denel sold $160 million worth of artillery propellants 
and 326 hand-held laser range finders to the British army, and 125 
laser-guidance sights to the US Marines.[6] South Africa's independent left 
immediately formed a 300-organization Anti-War Coalition which periodically 
led demonstrations of 5000-20,000 protesters in Johannesburg, Pretoria and 
Cape Town. Despite the embarrassment, Pretoria refused the Coalition's 
demands to halt the sales. George W. Bush rewarded Mbeki with an official 
visit in July 2003, just as the dust from the Baghdad invasion had settled. 
'Let us use this visit to impact as best as possible on the consciences of 
the American electorate,' the South African Communist Party (SACP) 
secretary-general, Blade Nzimande, remarked. 'It would, we believe, be a 
mistake to press for a cancellation of the visit. But it would be equally 
mistaken to present the invasion of Iraq as a "thing of the past", as 
"something we've put behind us", as we now return to bi-national US/SA 
business as usual.'[7]
    But business as usual seemed to prevail. As Johannesburg's Business Day 
editorialized, the 'abiding impression' left from Bush's Pretoria stopover 
was 'of a growing, if not intimate trust between himself and president Thabo 
Mbeki. The amount of public touching, hugging and backpatting they went 
through was well beyond the call of even friendly diplomatic duty.'[8] 
Organizing large demonstrations in Pretoria and Cape Town, the Anti-War 
Coalition countered: 'The ANC and SACP claim to be marching against the 
war . while hosting the chief warmonger, George Bush. The ANC's public 
relations strategy around the war directly contradicts their actions, which 
are pro-war and which have contributed to the deaths of thousands of Iraqi 
civilians.'[9] Public relations finally caught up to realpolitiks, as 
Mandela, too, recanted his criticism of Bush in May 2004, because 'It is not 
good to remain in tension with the most powerful state.'[10] A month later, 
Mbeki joined the G8 summit in Sea Island, Georgia, along with Africa's other 
main pro-Western rulers: Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, John Kufuor of 
Ghana, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Yoweri 
Museveni of Uganda. Treated only to a lunch meeting which began late and 
ended early, the Africans promised the G8 to help unblock the multilateral 
'logjam' that emerged at the Cancun WTO summit. The next day, Mbeki was in 
Washington for the funeral of Ronald Reagan - notorious supporter of the old 
Pretoria regime, even during the mid-1980s states of emergency - and 
justified his presence to National Public Radio: 'For those of us who were 
part of the struggle against apartheid, it was actually during Reagan's 
presidency [that] the US government started dealing with the ANC.'[11]
    How can we understand this political inconsistency? How much does it 
reflect the requirements of a US-led capitalist empire that uses Africa for 
surplus extraction and the spreading and deepening of global neoliberalism, 
and that especially relies on South Africa for legitimacy and subimperial 
deputy-sheriff support? To answer, consider first the context of modern 
imperialism, which in Africa combines an accumulation strategy based on 
neoliberalism and the extraction of ever-cheaper minerals and cash crops, 
with increasing subservience to US-led, indirect, neocolonial rule. The next 
step is to locate South Africa's position as the regional hegemon, 
identifying areas where imperialism is facilitated in Africa by the 
Pretoria-Johannesburg state-capitalist nexus, in part through Mbeki's New 
Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and in part through the logic 
of private capital.

Neoliberalism and surplus extraction

What does imperialism 'need' from Sub-Saharan Africa, whose 650 million 
people generate just 1% of global GDP? During the twentieth century, a great 
organic tradition of anti-imperialist political economy and radical politics 
emerged to explain general and specific cases of African subordination and 
promote revolutionary solutions. More recently, a revival of commentaries 
concerning imperialism's logic has provided at least three strands of 
argument that are especially relevant for the purposes of this essay. First, 
the transition from post-War prosperity to the neoliberal era, beginning 
around 1980, can be traced to problems experienced in maintaining capital 
accumulation in the core regions of capitalism. Second, these problems were 
managed from the core - especially the Bretton Woods Institutions and the US 
state/military - through techniques that amplified uneven development and 
threatened Africa's social and economic reproduction. And third, these forms 
of management left the continent and its main political actors at the beck 
and call of imperial power, particularly the US state, notwithstanding a 
variety of multilateral outlets and regional associations.
     Recent analyses of the sustained crisis tendencies in global 
capitalism's core regions have shown that the current economic conjuncture 
follows logically from a long structural crisis of capitalism characterized 
by three decades of lower global GDP growth during a period of persistent 
'overaccumulation', untenable speculation and periodic financial collapses, 
frantic outsourcing of production across the world and hyperactive trade, 
the emergence of system-threatening ecological problems, soaring inequality, 
and the near-universal lowering of both labour's remuneration and the social 
wage.[12] In the last decade, one symptom of global capitalism's desperation 
is the extraction of surpluses from the Third World at an unprecedented 
rate. Thus, from a situation of net positive financial flows of more than 
$40 billion per year to 'developing economies' during the mid-1990s, the 
East Asian crisis was followed by a $650 billion South-North drain for the 
four years 1999-2002.[13]
    Although Africa is typically given very little attention in 
contemporary Marxist accounts of imperialism, there is no question that the 
continent has been drawn deeper into global circuits of crisis management 
through the irresponsible liberalization of trade and finance that, in turn, 
cheapened the continent's products for northern consumption.[14] While some 
commodity prices have risen in recent years - oil, rubber and copper, thanks 
to Chinese demand - the major coffee, tea and cotton exports many countries 
rely upon continue to stagnate or fall.[15] Debt servicing also grew ever 
more onerous, notwithstanding the Bank/IMF 'Highly Indebted Poor Countries' 
(HIPC) relief initiative. From 1980 to 2000, Sub-Saharan Africa's total 
foreign debt soared from $60 billion to $206 billion, and the ratio of debt 
to GDP rose from 23% to 66%, leaving Africa repaying $6.2 billion more than 
it received in new loans in 2000.[16] Meanwhile, donor aid was down 40% from 
1990 levels, and capital flight exacerbated the problem of access to hard 
currency. James Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana established that a core group of 
30 Sub-Saharan African countries, with a joint foreign debt of $178 billion, 
suffered a quarter century of capital flight by elites totalling more than 
$285 billion, including imputed interest earnings, leaving Sub-Saharan 
Africa 'a net creditor vis-à-vis the rest of the world.'[17]
    Drawing upon Rosa Luxemburg's insights into the interactions between 
capitalism and non-capitalist aspects of production and social reproduction, 
David Harvey has provided a nuanced explanation of how the permanent process 
of primitive accumulation[18] evolves into what he terms a system of 
'accumulation by dispossession'[19] That process is very important for 
understanding contemporary imperialism in Africa. Accumulation by 
dispossession intensifies as a result of the onset of capitalist crisis and 
the widespread adoption of neoliberalism, as the system seeks to mitigate 
and displace (though never fully resolve) crisis tendencies. Harvey 
interprets these processes as 'spatial and temporal fixes' for 
overaccumulated capital, processes which also serve as crisis management 
tools.[20]
    Beyond these processes, the sphere of reproduction - where much 
primitive accumulation occurs through unequal gender power relations - 
remains central to capitalism's looting. This is especially evident in areas 
such as Southern Africa which are characterized by migrant labour flows, 
largely through the superexploitation of rural women in childrearing, 
healthcare and eldercare. More broadly, this is part of what Isabella Bakker 
and Stephen Gill term 'the reprivatization of social reproduction.'[21] For 
Africans, the denial of access to food, medicines, energy and even water is 
the most extreme result; people who are surplus to capitalism's labour 
requirements find that they must fend for themselves or die. The scrapping 
of safety nets in structural adjustment programmes worsens the vulnerability 
of women, children, the elderly and disabled people. They are expected to 
survive with less social subsidy and greater pressure on the fabric of the 
family during economic crisis, which makes women more vulnerable to sexual 
pressures and, therefore, HIV/AIDS.[22] Even in wealthy South Africa an 
early death for millions was the outcome of state and employer AIDS policy, 
with cost-benefit analyses demonstrating conclusively that keeping most of 
the country's five million HIV-positive people alive through patented 
medicines cost more than these people were 'worth'.[23]
    The imposition of neoliberal policies in this spirit has amplified 
combined and uneven development in Africa. In macroeconomic terms, the 
'Washington Consensus' entails trade and financial liberalization, currency 
devaluation, lower corporate taxation, export-oriented industrial policy, 
austere fiscal policy aimed especially at cutting social spending, and 
monetarism in central banking (with high real interest rates). In 
microdevelopmental terms, neoliberalism implies not only three standard 
microeconomic strategies - deregulation of business, flexibilized labour 
markets and privatization (or corporatization and commercialization) of 
state-owned enterprises - but also the elimination of subsidies, the 
promotion of cost-recovery and user fees, the disconnection of basic state 
services to those who do not pay, means-testing for social programmes, and 
reliance upon market signals as the basis for local development strategies. 
As Gill has shown, enforcement is crucial, through both a 'disciplinary 
neoliberalism' entailing constant surveillance, and a 'new constitutionalism' 
that locks in these policies over time.[24]
     Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin point to US empire's management capacities 
via the neoconservative petro-military-industrial complex in the Bush White 
House and the Pentagon, and the Washington Consensus nexus of the US 
Treasury, Bretton Woods Institutions and Wall Street.[25] While they do not 
see this as emanating from the need to displace a structural economic crisis 
at home, the Sub-Saharan African case seems, in fact, to demonstrate both 
the structurally-rooted need of global capital to extract surpluses, and the 
importance of Washington's political-economic power. However, in a recent 
survey, Robert Biel identified two central contradictions in US imperialism 
vis-à-vis Africa: 'First, central accumulation always tends to siphon away 
the value which could form the basis of state-building, bringing with it the 
risk of "state failure", leading to direct intervention. Second, the 
international system becomes increasingly complex, characterized by a range 
of new actors and processes and direct penetration of local societies in a 
way which bypasses the state-centric dimension.' Because of the complexity 
of indirect rule, and the difficulty of coopting all relevant actors, Biel 
continues, 'A reversion to the deployment of pure power is always latent, 
and the post-September 11th climate has brought it directly to the fore. 
This is a significant weakness of international capitalism.'[26]
    Likewise, Panitch and Gindin argue, 'An American imperialism that is so 
blatantly imperialistic risks losing the very appearance that historically 
made it plausible and attractive. This is especially important. Since the 
American empire can only rule through other states, the greatest danger to 
it is that the states within its orbit will be rendered illegitimate by 
virtue of their articulation to the imperium.'[27] Indeed, one critical area 
of agreement between most of the political economists today, is the ongoing 
relevance of the national state, not only to accumulation via traditional 
facilitative functions (securing property rights, the integrity of money, 
and the monopoly on violence), but also to the 'coauthorship' of the 
neoliberal project, in turn reflecting a shift in the balance of forces 
within societies and state bureaucracies. South Africa is an excellent case 
in point, we shall observe.
    In sum, thanks largely to capitalist crisis tendencies and the current 
orientation to accumulation by dispossession, imperialism can neither 
deliver the goods nor successfully repress sustained dissent in Africa, not 
least in Sub-Saharan Africa, rife with 'state failure' and 'undisciplined 
neoliberalism' (witnessed in repeated IMF riots). The ideological 
legitimation of 'free markets and free politics' requires renewal, 
therefore. For this, the US needs a subimperial partner, even one whose 
politicians are occasionally as cheeky as those in Pretoria - and who have 
become, hence, just as vital for broader systemic legitimation as Washington's 
talk-left, walk-right allies in Delhi and Brasilia. After all, anti-imperial 
critique continues to emerge throughout Africa, not just rhetorically (as 
cited at the beginning of this essay) but also in practical form, as when 
trade ministers from low-income Africa - not the G20 or South Africa, India 
and Brazil - withdrew their support for a consensus at the WTO's Seattle and 
Cancun summits. Thus NEPAD becomes an especially important surrogate for 
imperialism, as argued below. Next, however, we consider the expansion of US 
geopolitical and military activities.

MORE (from pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx)


[1]    South African Press Association (Sapa), 29 January 2003.
[2]    Business Day, 20 February 2003.
[3]    Reuters, 28 June 2003.
[4]    Thabo Mbeki, 'Address at the Welcome Ceremony of the WSSD,' 
Johannesburg, 25 August 2002.
[5]    The Straights Times, 3 September 2003.
[6]    Andy Clarno, 'Denel and the South African Government: Profiting from 
the War on Iraq,' Khanya Journal, 3, March 2003.
[7]    Umsebenzi, 2, 13, 2 July 2003.
[8]    Business Day, 11 July 2003.
[9]    Anti-War Coalition Press Statement, 1 July 2003.
[10]  Mail and Guardian, 24 May 2004.
[11]  Washington File, 11 June 2004.
[12]  See, e.g., Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, London: Verso, 
2003; Robert Pollin, Countours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the 
Landscape of Global Austerity, London: Verso, 2003; Ellen Meiksins Wood, 
Empire of Capital, London: Verso, 2003; and Robert Biel, The New 
Imperialism, London: Zed Books, 2000.
[13]  United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Trade and 
Development Report 2003, Geneva, 2003, p.26.
[14]  Giovanni Arrighi, The African Crisis: World Systemic and Regional 
Aspects,' New Left Review, 15, 2002; John Saul and Colin Leys, 'Sub-Saharan 
Africa in Global Capitalism,' Monthly Review, July 1999.
[15]  Michael Barratt-Brown, 'Africa's Trade Today,' Paper for the Review of 
African Political Economy and CODESRIA 30th Anniversary Conference, Wortley 
Hall, Sheffield, 27 - 29 May 2004. See also Michael Barratt-Brown and 
Pauline Tiffen, Short Changed: Africa and World Trade, London: Pluto Press, 
1992.
[16]  World Bank, Global Finance Tables, Washington, DC, 2002.
[17]  James Boyce and Leonce Ndikumana, 'Is Africa a Net Creditor? New 
Estimates of Capital Flight from Severely Indebted Sub-Saharan African 
Countries, 1970-1996', Occasional Paper, University of Massachusetts/Amherst 
Political Economy Research Institute, 2002.
[18]  Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political 
Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Durham: Duke 
University Press, 2000.
[19]  David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford and New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2003.
[20]  David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, second edn., London: Verso.
[21]  Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, 'Ontology, Method and Hypotheses,' 
in I.Bakker and S.Gill, eds., Power, Production and Social Reprodution, 
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p.36.
[22]  See, e.g., Dianne Elson, 'The Impact of Structural Adjustment on 
Women: Concepts and Issues,' in B.Onimode (ed), The IMF, the World Bank and 
the African Debt, London: Zed Books, 1991; and Sara Longwe, 'The Evaporation 
of Policies for Women's Advancement,' in N.Heyzer et al, eds., A Commitment 
to the Worlds Women, New York: UNIFEM, 1991. A comprehensive African 
literature review by Dzodzi Tsikata and Joanna Kerr shows that 'mainstream 
economic policymaking fails to recognize the contributions of women's unpaid 
labour - in the home, in the fields, or in the informal market where the 
majority of working people in African societies function. It has been argued 
that these biases have affected the perception of economic activities and 
have affected economic policies in ways that perpetuate women's 
subordination.' See Dzodzi Tskikata,and Joanna Kerr, e, Demanding Dignity: 
Women Confronting Economic Reforms in Africa, Ottawa: The North-South 
Institute and Accra: Third World Network-Africa, 2002.
[23]  In the case of the vast Johannesburg/London conglomerate Anglo 
American Corporation, the cut-off for saving workers in 2001 was 12% - the 
lowest-paid 88% of employees were more cheaply dismissed once unable to 
work, with replacements found amongst South Africa's 42% unemployed reserve 
army of labour. For more, see Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid 
to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Foreword to the 2nd edition, London: Pluto 
Press, 2004.
[24]  Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, 
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
[25]  Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, 'Global Capitalism and American Empire,' 
in Panitch and Leys, Socialist Register 2004.
[26]  Robert Biel, 'Imperialism and International Governance: The Case of US 
Policy towards Africa', Review of African Political Economy, 95, 2003, p.87.
[27]  Panitch and Gindin, 'Global Capitalism and American Empire,' p.33. 


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism