The global south (excluding China) is falling further behind the global north due to trade and finance between the two being organised along imperialist lines.
Michael Roberts is an Economist in the City of London and a prolific blogger.
Cross-posted from Michael Roberts’ blog
Every year the Historical Materialism journal holds a conference in London. It is attended by (mostly) academics and students to discuss Marxist theory and critique capitalism.
This year the conference seemed very well attended and the best organised ever. There was a huge range of sessions and plenaries on economics, culture, technology, imperialism, war and gender issues. There were many ‘streams’ of presentations on fascism, technology (AI), imperialism, climate change and, of course, Marxist theory. I could not be in two places at once and review all the papers, so my coverage of the conference will be biased by my own preferences.
Let me start by recounting my own presentation in a session on imperialism. My paper was called Catching up or falling behind? In this, I considered whether the poorer countries of the so-called Global South were ‘catching up’ with the richer countries of the so-called Global North? The measurements of ‘catching up’ that I used were 1) per capita income levels; 2) labour productivity levels; and 3) the human development index compiled by the UN. I took the average annual growth trend for each of these measures for the G7 (or the so-called ‘high income’ economies) and compared that with those of the BRICS. I projected these trends forward to see if the gap between the rich Global North economies would eventually be closed by the Global South economies (BRICS). On all three measures, the Global South was not closing the gap and neverwould – with the possible exception of China.
Why was the gap not being closed? The main reason was imperialism. Wealth (value) is being persistently transferred from the Global South to the Global North. Also, profitability of capital in the Global South was falling faster than labour productivity growth was rising, and this slowed down productive investment and economic growth in the Global South. China was the exception because its investment growth was less determined by the profitability of capital than in any other major Global South economy. I found that the annual gain in value to the imperialist economies of the Global North was about 2-3% of GDP each year, while the annual loss was similar for the much more populated economies of the Global South. In other words, if it were not for imperialist exploitation, the G7 economies (including the US) would not be growing at all, while the Global South economies would be growing much faster and starting to catch up.
Imperialist value transfers through trade (% of GDP)
Source: The Economics of modern imperialism, Historical Materialism journal, 4, 2021
Source: IMF
In the same session, Pedro Matto made a convincing critique of the concept of sub-imperialism. This concept argues that the Global North may gain transfers of value from Global South countries, but the larger capitalist economies of the South, like Brazil, Russia, South Africa, India or China also gain transfers of value from weaker peripheral economies in their regions. In that sense, these countries are sub-imperialists.
I have never been convinced of this concept for three reasons: first, it implies that every country is both ‘a bit imperialist’ and a ‘bit exploited’. This really weakens the concept of imperialism based on just a few mature, developed capitalist economies of the Global North, as Lenin first identified them, exploiting the rest of the world. Second, as Matto’s critique said, if every country is a bit imperialist, it weakens any direction for anti-imperialist struggle. Also, there is just no empirical evidence of major transfers of value from the likes of Zambia to South Africa; or from Paraguay to Brazil; or from poorer Asia countries to China that in any way matches the size of transfers of value through trade and financial flows from the BRICS to the G7+ economies.
Also in this session Cristina Re and Gianmaria Brunazzi presented an intriguing theory of what they called ‘debt-driven imperialism’. The US used to be a creditor in the world economy, running trade surpluses, while lending and investing abroad. But since the 1970s, it increasingly ran trade deficits and so built up huge debts with the rest of the world, particularly with Europe, Japan and China. But because the dollar was the world’s trading and reserve currency, this debt was not a disadvantage, but instead a new economic weapon for US imperialism to dominate other countries.
I have to say that I did not find this theory convincing. For me, debt imperialism is where poor countries run up huge debts (loans) from imperialist institutions in order to grow, but then in economic crises are forced to default, devalue their currencies and impose severe austerity measures to meet their obligations with Global North banks and the IMF etc. The US is an exception as a debtor because of the ‘extraordinary privilege’ of the dollar and because it can easily finance its trade deficits through investment from abroad into US companies and financial assets. But I do not see how it follows from this that US debt is a new avenue of domination for US imperialism.
Let me also report on a massively attended ‘flagship’ session on Rethinking Imperialism and War. Michael Hardt argued that imperialism (presumably both the US and Europe) was morphing into ‘global war regimes’ as militarism takes over from economic domination. Another speaker Morteza Samanpour argued the following (taken from his abstract): “capitalist globalization does not homogenize time but intensifies its differentiation. Through logistical, financial, and extractive operations, capital simultaneously unifies and fragments spatio-temporalities, producing active disjunctures that serve its global reproduction.” And “an internationalist, anti-imperialist political strategy must attune itself to the fractured, uneven temporalities of the present—particularly with regard to the contemporary war conjuncture and the proliferation of imperial formations beyond the historical West. It calls for a renewed strategic rationality capable of productively engaging the disjunctive social times of capital in the service of a genuinely emancipatory internationalism.”
I must say I struggled to understand what all this meant – I’m very much a simpleton who needs simple language. Anyway, I think the gist of it was an attack on what is apparently called ‘campism’, namely that just because there are powers globally resisting the policies of US imperialism, that does not mean that Marxists “should endorse authoritarian states like Iran, or Russia or China simply because they oppose the U.S. and Israel.” I have sympathy with that view, although the political economist in me objects to what Samanpour called the “proliferation of imperial formations beyond the historical West”, by which does he mean that China or Russia are imperialist or even Iran or Saudi Arabia?
The other speakers is this mega session concentrated on how to fight imperialism and war. Eleonora Cappuccilli and Michele Basso looked to international class-based organisations that they are trying to build and not to ‘resistant’ states as the way to defeat imperialism and stop war, although they talked of a ‘living labour’ movement (I thought a simpler term might be a ‘workers’ movement) and seemed to argue that migrant and ‘precarious labour’ would be the spearhead in fighting imperialism, which seemed unlikely to me.
Feyzi Ismail argued that investment in and the maintenance of military infrastructure are big drivers of global carbon emissions and environmental destruction. Global military activities – excluding active warfare – already account for approximately 6% of total global emissions, Stopping the cycle of prioritising military responses to security, access to national resources, climate-induced migration or natural disasters, means mobilising mass movements – not only the climate movement, but movements against war and austerity through trade unions and workers.
Source: OECD
Overall, I found this session confusing, but maybe I am getting old. The claim is that imperialism is not confined to the ‘usual suspects’ of the Global North, but now, the world order is multi-polar with the main battle between two big imperialist powers, one declining one, the US; and one rising one, China. My view is different. I do not see the US and China as equally antagonistic and aggressive imperialisms. Those who regularly read this blog and my papers on China’s economic development know that I do not view China as imperialist in the economic sense i.e. gaining huge transfers of value through trade and financial flows from poor countries. Also, I do not consider China as capitalist in the sense that the law of value and production and investment for profit rule. Instead, China has an economy where state investment and planning dominate over the capitalist sector. That does not mean, however, that the Chinese government is a bastion of revolutionary international struggle against imperialism, as the ‘campists’ claim. Indeed, China’s ‘Communist’ leaders are outright nationalists in orientation.
In Part two of my review of this year’s HM, I shall look at the sessions on the climate crisis and ecology; and on technology, particularly artificial intelligence; and also I shall sum up the session of my second presentation that discussed key trends in the world economy.
Be the first to comment