subimperial practices Re: Overseas investment by China's private and public corporations

On 2026/08/26 22:00, Marv Gandall via groups.io wrote:
> ...
> This has led to Marxists identifying a profusion of "imperialist" and 
> "sub-imperialist" countries, diluting the concept which once referred 
> only to those countries which had formal "empires".

No Marv, the initial (and subsequent) adoption of some of this 
terminology was not claiming the subimperial sites of capitalism had 
'empires.' It was whether the subimperial 'practices' (writ large) of 
states and capitalists in places like Brazil - as Ruy Mauro Marini 
observed them first in 1965 - were “collaborating actively with 
imperialist expansion, assuming in this expansion the position of a key 
nation,” while still acknowledging “antagonistic cooperation between the 
bourgeoisie of the underdeveloped countries and imperialism.”

That bourgeoisie is distorted, however: “The form which dependent 
capital assumes upon reaching the stage of monopolies and finance 
capital.” Stagnation occurs due to overaccumulation of capital, 
resulting in so-called ‘premature deindustrialisation,’ in turn due to 
local capitalist ‘super-exploitation’ (which limits buying power) and 
the accompanying repression of poor and working people that is required 
to sustain extreme inequality: “Brazilian capitalism is a monster, but a 
logical monster: if popular consumption does not provide a market for 
what the most dynamic sectors of industry produce, so much the worse for 
popular consumption; capital will continue to accumulate without it. The 
result of this is a fundamental specialization of the Brazilian economy 
which is so logical that it becomes absurd: on the one hand the mass 
which produces surplus value and has essentially no access to 
consumption; on the other, the groups and strata which accumulate and/or 
consume surplus value. The divorce between the classes could not be more 
radical.”

Compared to the productive circuits of capital, more profits are then 
found in the financial circuit. Profitability in the extractive 
industries is contingent upon global commodity price cycles. Hence: 
“subimperialism implies two basic components: on the one hand, a medium 
organic composition on the world scale of national productive apparatus, 
and, on the other, the exercise of a relatively autonomous expansionist 
policy, which is not only accompanied by a greater integration in the 
imperialist productive system, but also is maintained under the hegemony 
exercised by imperialism on an international scale.”

If we work with that sort of mandate from Marini, would you not agree, 
that we can then derive these:

*Global and regional practices considered subimperial:*
·  State collaboration with imperialist multilateralism (degree of 
control and self-interested influence at unreformed Washington-New 
York-Geneva multilaterals, especially IMF/WB, WTO, UNFCCC, UNSC, G20)
·  Corporate contributions to global value chains (measured by layers of 
participation and share of profits)
·  Corporate benefits from unequal ecological exchange (measured by the 
extent of positionality and uncompensated extraction especially of 
non-renewable natural resources)
·  Export of surplus capital via FDI, loans and trade (due to 
‘overaccumulation crisis’, especially in order to undermine regional 
competitors, measured by excess capacity and pricing strategies, e.g. 
‘dumping’)
·  Military entanglements of a self-interested or regional-hegemonic 
nature (e.g. current cases of frictional Chinese border conflicts from 
the Himalayas to the South China Sea; Russia’s invasions of Ukraine; 
Syria’s carve-up, revealing failures of Russia and Iran; India-Pakistan 
conflicts with China backing the latter; South African troops in 
Mozambique and DRC; Israel’s genocide of Palestine profiting BRICS 
firms; failure of BRICS bloc to retain coherence in relation to Board of 
Peace and to U.S.-Israeli wars on Iran and Lebanon)*
*

*Domestic practices consistent with subimperialism: *
·  High levels of corporate concentration and financialisation
·  Overaccumulation of capital in China, displaced to other BRICS 
economies unable to withstand devaluation in spite of tariffs, and 
increased dependency on commodity production and export processing
·  Ossified class structure with high levels of social repression and 
rising inequality
·  Accumulation by dispossession especially through neoliberal public 
policy and worsening super-exploitation of labour and ecological destruction
·  Reactionary official socio-cultural tendencies (examples include 
Brazilian evangelicism under Bolsonaro; Russian homophobia; Indian 
Islamophobia and patriarchy; Chinese hostility to Muslim Uighurs, 
Buddhist Tibetans, ethnic Mongolians and Hong Kong democrats; and South 
African xenophobia; plus in the new BRICS regimes, Egyptian militarist 
authoritarianism; Ethiopian ethnicism; Indonesian police brutality; 
Iranian discrimination based on gender and sexual preference; UAE’s 
tribal autocracy)

Corrections are welcome. If you like, I can send more on the way 
subsequent Marxists have written about subimperialism, e.g. here in 
South Africa both before and after 1994, and in the BRICS:

• Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems ‘semi-periphery’ (1975)
• Ibbo Mandaza’s warning about subimperialism practices of the 
apartheid-era South African state and capital (1980)
• David Harvey’s application of the subimperialism concept to post-1970s 
footloose capital’s ‘spatial fix’ (2003)
• Sam Moyo’s and Paris Yeros’ application of Marini’s theory to the 
BRICS (2013)
• Samir Amin’s labelling of post-apartheid South Africa as 
‘subimperialist’ (2019)
• Gorden Moyo’s confirmation that in the African economy, BRICS are 
subimperial (2024)


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