South Africa and the New Scramble: The Demise of Sub-imperialism and the Rise of the East

It is not clear who makes the argument that the BRICS are ‘anti-imperialist’. Bond names five authors, including this author, but they seem a phantom target: as far as can be ascertained, none of the five authors use the term as cited by Bond (2015: 15). What is common is the argument, as Escobar (2013) notes in the article by him that Bond cites, is that the BRICS are unexpectedly powerful (‘for the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world’s three leading economies—Brazil, China and India—is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North’) and this is leading the BRICS to ‘not only deploy their economic clout but also take concrete steps leading towards a multipolar world’. None of this means they are ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anti-imperialist’, and to ignore these shifts leads to analytical and political missteps, as we argue below.

‘Imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable’ (Lenin 1970: 674); and ‘[t]he struggle among the world imperialisms is becoming more acute […] what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of the productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?’ (ibid: 744–745, emphasis in original).

In more recent work Bond (2012) has more carefully constructed the historical growth of South African financial institutions and speculative excesses.

While capital accumulation can be carefully delineated following Marx’s M-C-M sequences, it is often very hard to define what constitutes primitive accumulation. ‘Accumulation by dispossession’, as Harvey coins it, covers an exceedingly wide range of phenomena outside of the processes of capital accumulation proper. As Harvey (2003: 153) says: ‘A close look at Marx’s description of primitive accumulation reveals a wide range of processes: the commoditization and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; the conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights; the suppression of rights to the commons; the commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neo-colonial and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); the monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade; and usury, the national debt, and ultimately the credit system as radical means of primitive accumulation’. To these, one then adds today’s myriad forms associated with structural adjustment, land grabs, commodity booms, and neoliberalism generally.

For the counter case, see Foster (2002).

International agencies and South African government reports often lag considerably in catching the transition of multinational firms from South African to British or US (e.g. Anglo-American to AAC, South African Breweries to SAB), rendering data surveys questionable. See the data and comments in Verhoef (2011).

Estimates of South Africa’s FDI in the rest of Africa vary quite widely among those who use project-based data versus those who rely on official capital flow data, e.g. between researchers (the Human Science Research Council, Business Map, South African Institute of International Affairs) and the South African Reserve Bank and international agencies such as UNCTAD. For the range of data, see Wolfgang (2006: 17–19), and for related problems with Chinese FDI, Kaplinsky and Morris (2009).