Transcending Imperial/Sub-Imperial Partnerships: Dangers of G7/Brics+/G20 Assimilations

The imperialist G7 core needs partnership with the leading emerging economies, and in venues such as the G20 – hosted in Delhi in 2023, Rio de Janeiro in 2024 and Johannesburg in 2025 – does appear to be forging one, to the detriment of all but the elite layers of society, and at the risk of planetary destruction given how successfully the partnership has prevented the resolution of global-scale crises. The idea of imperialism was, in modern capitalist times, associated with competitive internecine battles between a few great European powers in the late 19^th century. Their internal capitalist-crisis tendencies spurred an unprecedented geographical expansion into colonial territories. Colonial military power was typically deployed to conquer territory and establish formal state management and later, informal neo-colonial political-economic power relations. Today, that imperialist formula – capitalist crisis formation in the core, its geographical displacement, facilitative financial institutions, and neo-colonial grabbing of resources and territory – remains relevant. The main additional element that became more vital after World War II was the economic, socio-cultural, geopolitical and military dominance of the United States. Such dominance has increasingly been exercised through Western-headquartered multilateral institutions whose operations favour the interests of the largest multinational corporations and especially financiers. But in spite of tensions associated with policing operations for these firms – led by the Pentagon, State Department and the U.S. security establishment, especially in the form of coups against governments hostile to capital, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – and in spite of a new protectionism in the West, there are far deeper imperial/sub-imperial ties still being forged. It is here, when legitimacy crisis requires assimilation of BRICS+ into the G20 and other multilateral forum (Bretton Woods Institutions, UN climate summits, etc), that imperial partnerships with sub-imperial powers are at their most dangerous.