>----- Original Message -----
>From: <mailto:monacojerry at gmail.com>Jerry Monaco
>For instance intra-Third-World economic connections between
>Brasil-India-South Africa is also looked at as a bad-deal by many
>U.S. corporations. There was an article in a foreign policy journal
>I read in the 1980s tht predicted such deals and said that they were
>a danger to the U.S. which was why the author advocated a "slow"
>transition in South Africa. Now it seems that these elite fears of
>intra-Third World economic alliances are coming true.
>
>
>No, this is actually not a problem for imperialism. It is better
>considered 'subimperialism', and indeed is a useful if not necessary
>component of accumulation by dispossession.
>
>Working closely with transnational capital and multilateral
>agencies, the governments/capital of India, Brazil and South Africa
>are deputy sheriffs, legitimisers of neoliberalism, and looters of
>their regional hinterlands.
These "subimperialists" aren't exactly doing the US's bidding in the WTO, are they?
But aside from that, I think this "accumulation by dispossession" line is overdone. It's a catchy phrase, but what does it really mean, and how novel is it? If you're talking about driving peasants off the land and putting traditional craft production out of business, that's as old as capitalism. But there's not much accumulation of any kind going on in SA, as you've pointed out yourself. Brazil remains Brazil, with advanced sectors of industry co-existing with intense poverty. Whom is Brazil looting on any large scale? And India is developing modern industry at a fairly rapid rate - not quite up to China's pace, but getting there. What hinterland is India looting?
Doug