East-West/North-South – or Imperial-Subimperial? The BRICS, Global Governance and Capital Accumulation

Two leading critics of imperialism — John Smith and David Harvey — have engaged in a bitter dispute over how to interpret geographically-shifting processes of super-exploitation and power. Missing, though, is consideration of ‘subimperialism,’ a category drawn from Ruy Mauro Marini's 1960s-70s dependency theory, with its focus on Brazil's relationship with the West: a fusion of imperial and semi-peripheral agendas of power and accumulation with internal processes of super-exploitation. The risk is that by splitting hairs on geographically-generalized categories, Smith and Harvey obscure crucial features of their joint wrath, which is the unjust accumulation processes and geopolitics that enrich the wealthy and despoil the world environment. The concept of subimperialism can resolve some of the Smith-Harvey disputes, but only if read through Marini and Harvey in a more generous way than does Smith. One of the best examples of the phenomenon is the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc, which for a decade from 2009–18 has increasingly asserted an ‘alternative’ strategy to key features of Western imperialism, while in reality fitting tightly within it. This fit works through amplified neoliberal multilateralism serving both the BRICS and the West, the regional displacement of overaccumulated capital, financialization, and persistent super-exploitative social relations: the spatio-temporal fixes and accumulation by dispossession that amplify global crisis tendencies.