Racial capitalism and American exceptionalism drives violence and colonialism in the Global South

Unmaking the Political Economy of Empire through an Alternative Internationalism COVID-19 in South Africa is a pandemic of racial capitalism and global white supremacy, exemplified in approaches that champion vaccine nationalism and apartheid. Ever since the potent deployment of neoliberal social policy, most parts of the Global South were covertly and overtly forced into a project of the “Americanization of social policy.” Layla Brown-Vincent, for example, provides the link between public policy and racialized neoliberal globalization by observing U.S. responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.38 She suggests that, “while the US government struggles with the nearly insurmountable difficulties presented by its profit-driven health care system, coupled with its gross lack of willingness to take the pandemic seriously, it becomes abundantly clear that while the Corona is a virus of pandemic proportions, the true pandemic is racial capitalism.”39 South Africa’s domestic and international policy choices need to be seen as located within a hierarchical, racialized financial architecture that privileges Western nations, thereby maintaining their genetic survival and dominance. This is especially the case in relation to policy efforts that champion both vaccine nationalism and apartheid. If COVID-19 has thrown into relief the political, health, and economic decadence of Western capitalist civilization, a corollary of this is that such decadent civilization is now sustained by debt. In the Hebrew scriptures, the writer of the Book of Proverbs noted that “the wealthy rule over the poor, a bor rower is a slave to a lender.”40 The slave/master relationship constitutes the rubric and foundations of colonial modernity and public policy making in the contemporary era. Throughout the twentieth century, the maintenance of and resistance to the slave/master relationship took on different types of internationalisms. The status quo slave architecture was preserved by the mythological status of the United States as an exceptional civilization.41 In the post-Second World War era, this was initially championed by Harry Truman’s U.S.-led internationalism that insisted on the role of embedded liberal internationalism and postwar peace and prosperity to prevent the return of world war. Liberal internationalism cemented a social contract that further entrenched racial hierarchies, inequalities, and preservation of white life. International financial institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and the General Agreement of Trade and Tariffs, and later the World Trade Organization, were justified as instrumental in preventing another global war, thereby establishing U.S. global hegemony. South Africa should broaden medical solidarity and reject the IMF- and creditor-driven limit placed on government sector salaries. Because of these limits, former colonized countries have been losing medical personnel to the North Atlantic states. States must use their precious resources to enhance public medical education and train medical workers within communities to provide public health services. The medical internationalism of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, with the Cuban brigades in the lead, must become a model for the world through the World Health Organization.42 Cuba’s revolutionary transcendence of imperial health care was achieved through a sovereign national vision, predicated on global solidarity and the development of a biotechnology industry consisting of more than thirty research institutions and manufacturers, under the aegis of the state-run conglomerate BioCubaFarma. Cuban initiatives challenge the commodification in the global vaccine value chain. Cuba plans to export its Soberana-2 vaccine to other Latin American countries and the Global South in general.43 It is fashionable in the international discourse of nation-states to refer to governmental actions in the global capitalist epoch as “neutral” happenings in race relations, abstracted from imperial violence. Yet, the history of the nation-state is a violent one, fraught with institutional racism and racialization par excellence. The South African political scientist Surren Pillay urges the intellectual community to challenge the historical evolution of the nation-state. He argues: “Rather than Westphalia as a central moment, we should start with 1492 as central to our account of modernity. This is the date that marks the encounter between the West and Rest—the West and the Other, the West and the New World.”44 More recently, Mahmood Mamdani posits that “the nation-state was born of two developments on the Iberian Peninsula. One was ethnic cleansing, whereby the Castilian monarchy sought to create a homogeneous national homeland for Christian Spaniards by ejecting and converting those among them who were strangers to the nation—Moors and Jews. The other development was the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas by the same Castilian monarchy that spearheaded ethnic cleansing.”45 In a related critical tradition, Gurminder K. Bhambra argues that “contemporary politics is generally viewed through the lens of the nation-state, which is widely, but erroneously, understood to have its origins in the system of sovereign states that came into being in Europe in 1648.”46 However, as Bhambra continues, “the racialized hierarchies of empire defined the broader polity beyond the nation-state and, after decolonization, have continued to construct inequalities of citizenship within states that have only recently become national.”47 The only way out of the global crisis is a reinvented third world internationalism and a divorce from empire, colonial ideas, and institutions that covertly and overtly perpetuate the suffering of human and nonhuman communities alike. Frantz Fanon, in recognizing that the colonized world had materially birthed the Global North, prophetically declared: “So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would almost be an obscene caricature.”48 Unmaking South Africa’s health inequalities would require the abandonment of the racialized neoliberal institutions that inform its contemporary health policy choices. The entire private health sector must be nationalized, and smaller medical centers need to be created so that people can easily access public health facilities. The government must withdraw from public insurance for private health care. Public health systems must be strengthened, including the production of medical equipment and medicines, as well as the distribution of essential medicines (the prices of which must be regulated). The idea that the global health architecture is organized around the commodification of public goods could never be more apparent. States in the Global North have dismissed the call from South Africa and India to suspend intellectual property rules regarding the vaccine. These northern states have underfunded the COVAX project, which, as a result, is at a high risk of failure, with growing expectations that many people in developing countries will not see a vaccine before 2024. Insurgent vaccine nationalism and global apartheid define contemporary approaches to the pandemic, with countries like Canada building up reserves of five vaccines per Canadian. Countries in the Global South like South Africa, meanwhile, must use precious scarce resources to enhance public medical education and train medical workers within communities to provide public health services. An alternative form of internationalism was what the former slaves and colonized polities conceptualized in opposition to a colonial modernity dating back to 1492. It was ignited by the Haitian Revolution of 1804, heralding Black internationalism and a break with institutionalized slavery and imperial domination, and culminated in the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the subsequent formation of the Non-Aligned Movement to offset bipolar rivalries of the United States and Soviet Union. Adom Getachew postulates that, “while the Anglophone world emerged as the central site of black internationalism by the end of Second World War, anticolonial worldmaking was not limited to the central characters of the Black Atlantic. Broader political formations such as the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement advanced the project of constituting a post-imperial world order.”49 The aim was to subvert colonial violence and unmake the world of empire through third world internationalism, solidarity, and a new human, born from the subaltern construction of political and social realities for global liberation. It allowed the newly independent countries to lead a development paradigm based on their national, popular, and sovereign interests. The colonized peoples hoped to construct a postimperial financial architecture through the New Economic International Order. Visions of a postimperial world, however, were prematurely aborted through the aggression of the capitalist states that incessantly subverted the former slave’s agency. As geographer Richard Peet notes, third world efforts at achieving economic reform continued in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and through the call for a New Economic International Order. These efforts were increasingly resisted by the United States, with repressive imperial ideas coming particularly from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank.50 The story of decolonization cannot be adequately narrated along an antagonistic axis of disparate territorial autonomy against the global imperium. Rather, decolonization in its fullest sense, Getachew suggests, has to be explored as the possibility of a truly nonimperial world order.51 Yet, the Global South experienced the opposite, as the Cold War years inflicted structural violence on third world countries. The liberal international order was sustained to preserve the dominance of a racialized U.S. empire and its institutions.