The way the world is going, she and her children might be the precursor of the dwelling habits of the future generations, those who manage to survive the coming nuclear war between the rising bloc of rising nations and decaying bloc of decaying nations, the war between the BRICS and the Pricks.

The BRICS ─ Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and five new members — have no “biggest BRIC,” each Bric nation relishes its independence and the group is cemented by their distaste for the offensive Pricks. Fortunately, for the BRICS, their entourage contains China, the new superpower that encourages cooperation rather than domination and has initiated a “Belt and Road” that facilitates free trade throughout the world.

The Pricks — United States, Great Britain, and the European Union — have the United States as their power Prick, which is led by their president, the biggest Prick. In slavish obedience to genocide Israel, the U.S. identifies itself as the Super Prick. This bloc has recently featured severe discord, lack of cooperation, and inauguration of high tariffs that impede global trade. Domination is its focus. with cooperation a temporary means to enable domination.

For one simple reason, the Pricks are finding it difficult to control and use the BRICS for their personal gain ─ the BRICS have economic dominance.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
GDP PPP, Int$: 2025

Coming into 2025, the BRICS have a greater share of the economic pie, six times the population digesting the pie, and are growing in principal categories — GDP/PPP, population, and adherents at a faster rate.

The Pricks devalue the Brics by claiming they are a loose and uncoordinated confederation, unable to agree on vital issues. Brazil is accused of harassing former President Jair Messias Bolsonaro and may be subjected to sanctions; Russia is led by an irresponsible tyrant and is heavily sanctioned; India gets a pass despite the heavy-handed tactics toward its Muslim community; China is led by a despotic dictator, and South Africa is guilty of genocide toward its white population.

The Pricks pose themselves as a model of decency and decorum. They have ballot boxes and freedom of speech, which enables their citizens to elect the biggest pricks and then freely criticize their selections by vocal erections. In the U.S. the next presidential election process — fund raising, organization, public relations, the “eye on the prize”— starts shortly after a new president takes office. Winning candidates in elections expend more time and energy in gaining victory and preparing for their next victory than performing their duties during their term in office.

The economic, social, and political advancements of their principal superpowers, China for the BRICS and the United States for the Pricks, determine the success of the BRICS and the Pricks. A brief examination of each nation’s potential to rise in the firmament or descend into chaos tells the story.

The Trump administration shows the hidden failures of the United States pluralistic democracy. The past has no continuity; just the opposite, many of the legislations from previous administrations are discarded. and the country, rather than advancing to a progressed new, returns to a rejected old. One example from Understanding AI:

…. Sen. Hawley asked Donald Trump to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, an $11 billion transmission line that is supposed to carry electricity from Kansas wind farms to homes in Illinois and Indiana. The proposed line would pass through Hawley’s state of Missouri, annoying farmers whose land would be taken by eminent domain.

According to the New York Times, Hawley “explained his concerns to the president, who has repeatedly expressed his distaste for wind power, saying he would not permit any new wind projects during his administration.” Trump then called Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who agreed to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the project, throwing its viability into question.

Impulse overrides soul searching, allegiance to leader is more important than professional education and experience; rash and subjective action replaces careful thought. The America of 2025, with its decaying infrastructure, troubled inner cities, dependence on fossil fuels, continuous problems of crime, drug addiction, health care, and immigration, closely resembles the America of 2010. One big difference ─ adversity and polarization of the population has increased, Americans are at the breaking point with one another. The country, which is rich in resources, has extensive farmland, enjoys suitable and varied climates, and contains an educated and diligent population, is not well managed; it is mismanaged.

The Xi JInping administration shows the hidden success of China’s people’s democracy. The past has continuity; legislations and plans from previous administrations are massaged and enhanced, and the country, rather than remaining stagnant, advances to a new level. Soul searching from millions of cadres provides suggestions for millions of improvements. All leaders have professional education and experience; careful thought displaces rash and subjective action.

The China of 2025, with its continually increasing infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, superhighways, high speed trains, and airline routes that link every remote place in China with central cores, with modern building complexes that replace the shanty towns and provide agreeable living space for an aging population and marginalized rural farmers, with its expanded megacities that are considered technology and planning marvels, and with a unified and obedient population ─ no adversity or polarization here ─ has only a fleeting resemblance to the China of 2010.

Dubbed an engineering marvel, the highly anticipated Raffles City Chongqing project is nearly complete. CapitaLand Group

Sheltering their deficiencies, the Western democracies shift the critical analysis to public relations stunts that highlight the supposed and exaggerated deficiencies of the Chinese system. The Westerners make no effort to learn and understand the workings of China’s political, social, and economic systems. Fabrications are added to the limited “don’t care to know” and conveyed to the public as authorized knowledge. One example is the “debt trap” verbiage, applied to Chinese lending, which began during Sri Lanka’s first debt crisis and has stuck around as an effective means to vilify the PRC.

We have the falsehood. Washington Post (WAPO), “This China has a hand in Sri Lanka’s economic calamity,” analysis by Ishaan Tharoor, July 20, 2022:

One of the major players in Sri Lanka’s calamity is China. Beijing is Sri Lanka’s lone biggest creditor, accounting for some 10 percent of the country’s foreign debt. Between 2000 and 2020, it extended close to $12 billion in loans to the Sri Lankan government, largely for a slate of major infrastructure projects that turned into white elephants — including a costly port facility in the Rajapaksas’ hometown of Hambantota, which was effectively ceded to Chinese control half a decade ago after Sri Lankan authorities recognized they could no longer pay off the loans.

Examination of the Sri Lanka debt crisis exposes the mendacity and viciousness of the WAPO report. Almost every sentence is spurious; China does not engage in “debt trap diplomacy” and has been one lender who makes financial sacrifices that rescues nations from debilitating borrowing.

We have the truth. The Atlantic, “The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth,” by Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire, February 6, 2021, had already contradicted WAPO statements.

Steep payments on international sovereign bonds, which comprised nearly 40 percent of the country’s external debt, put Sirisena’s government in dire fiscal straits almost immediately. When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress.

There was also never a default. Colombo arranged a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and decided to raise much-needed dollars by leasing out the underperforming Hambantota Port to an experienced company—just as the Canadians had recommended. There was not an open tender, and the only two bids came from China Merchants and China Harbor. Sri Lanka chose China Merchants, making it the majority shareholder with a 99-year lease, and used the $1.12 billion cash infusion to bolster its foreign reserves, not to pay off China Eximbank. The China impressed on our minds is not the China that exists.

The United States moves on fumes, on the energies of its past without renewable energies for an improved future. China moves on constantly reinforced energy, all engines operating at top speed, each day becoming a new future. The Pricks know they will not be able to compete economically with the BRICS. They have a choice of consolidating and working together and maintaining reduced economies, cooperating with the Brics in mutual agreements, or, by the usual United States method, resolving the situation by military action.

The threat of military force alarms and subdues the BRICS. They may be compelled to yield much in order to save all. China, guided by its Mandate of Heaven, “a political and religious doctrine that justifies the rule of an emperor based on virtue and ability to govern,” and which it has extended to relations between all nations, might do what it did in the fifteenth century. At that time, China was, by far, the leading commercial power in the world, and huge Chinese fleets sailed the world for markets for its surplus products. After meeting the imperial powers of France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands and observing their nefarious methods in subduing the Africa and Indian peoples, stripping them of resources, and forcing upon them the products manufactured from the resources, China scuttled its fleet and went into solitary confinement.

The reason for Xi Jinping’s self-sufficiency drive is clear. Save the world from nuclear conflagration and let the rest of the world rot. Pricks always lose and always think they have won.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Call it the “new cold war,” the “beginning of World War III,” or – in Trump’s words – “endless war,” this is the era that the world has entered. The US/Zionist war against Iran has paused, but no one has any illusions that it is over. And it won’t likely be resolved until one side decisively and totally prevails. Ditto for the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Likely the same with Palestine, where the barbarity of war worsened to genocide. Meanwhile, since Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” the empire is building up for war with China.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the empire’s war on the world assumes a hybrid form. The carnage is less apparent because the weapons take the form of “soft power” – sanctions, tariffs, and deportations. These can have the same lethal consequences as bombs, only less overt.

Making the world unsafe for socialism

Some Western leftists vilify the defensive measures that Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua must take to protect themselves from the empire’s regime-change schemes. In contrast, Washington clearly understands that these countries pose “threats of a good example” to the empire. Each subsequent US president, from Obama on, has certified them as “extraordinary threats to US national security.” Accordingly, they are targeted with the harshest coercive measures.

In this war of attrition, historian Isaac Saney uses the example of Cuba to show how any misstep by the revolutionary government or societal deficiency is exaggerated and weaponized. The empire’s siege, he explains, is not merely an attempt to destabilize the economy but is a deliberate strategy of suffocation. The empire aims to instigate internal discontent, distort people’s perception of the government, and ultimately erode social gains.

While Cuba is affected the worst by the hybrid war, both Venezuela and Nicaragua have also been damaged. All three countries have seen the “humanitarian parole” for their migrants in the US come to an end. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was also withdrawn for Venezuelans and Nicaraguans. The strain of returning migrants, along with cuts in the remittances they had sent (amounting to a quarter of Nicaragua’s GDP), further impacts their respective economies.

Higher-than-average tariffs are threatened on Venezuelan and Nicaraguan exports to the US, together with severe restrictions on Caracas’s oil exports. Meanwhile, the screws have been tightened on the six-decade US blockade of Cuba with disastrous humanitarian consequences.

However, all three countries are fighting back. They are forming new trade alliances with China and elsewhere. Providing relief to Cuba, Mexico has supplied oil, and China is installing solar panel farms to address the now-daily power outages. High levels of food security in Venezuela and Nicaragua have strengthened their ability to resist US sanctions, while Caracas successfully defeated one of Washington’s harshest migration measures by securing the release of 252 of its citizens who had been incarcerated in El Salvador’s torturous CECOT prison.

Venezuela’s US-backed far-right opposition is in disarray. The first Trump administration had recognized the “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó, followed by the Biden administration declaring Edmundo González the winner of Venezuela’s last presidential election. But the current Trump administration has yet to back González, de facto recognizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition is also reeling from a side-effect of Trump’s harsh treatment of migrants – many are returning voluntarily to a country claimed by the opposition to be “unsafe,” while US Homeland Security has even extolled their home country’s recent achievements. And some of Trump’s prominent Cuban-American supporters are now questioning his “maximum pressure” campaign for going too far.

Troubled waters for the Pink Tide

The current progressive wave, the so-called Pink Tide, was initiated by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s landslide victory in 2018. His MORENA Party successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, won by an even greater margin in 2024. Mexico’s first woman president has proven to be perhaps the world’s most dignified and capable sparring partner with the buffoon in the White House, who has threatened tariffs, deportations, military interdictions, and more on his southern neighbor.

Left-leaning presidents Gabriel Boric in Chile and Gustavo Petro in Colombia are limited to a single term. Both have faced opposition-aligned legislatures and deep-rooted reactionary power blocs. Chilean Communist Party candidate Jeanette Jara is favored to advance to the second-round presidential election in November 2025, but will face a challenging final round if the right unifies, as is likely, around an extremist candidate.

As the first non-rightist in Colombia’s history, Petro has had a tumultuous presidential tenure. He credibly accuses his former foreign minister of colluding with the US to overthrow him. However, the presidency could well revert to the right in the May 2026 elections.

Boric, Petro, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met in July as the region’s center-left presidents, with an agenda of dealing with Trump, promoting multilateralism, and (we can assume) keeping their distance from the region’s more left-wing governments.

With shaky popularity ratings, Lula will likely run for reelection in October 2026. As head of the region’s largest economy, Lula plays a world leadership role, chairing three global summits in a year. Yet, with less than a majority legislative backing, Lula has triangulated between Washington and the Global South, often capitulating to US interests (as in his veto of BRICS membership for Nicaragua and Venezuela). Regardless, Trump is threatening Brazil with a crippling 50% export tariff and is blatantly interfering in the trial of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, accused of insurrection. So far, Trump’s actions have backfired, arousing anger among Brazilians. Lula commented that Trump was “not elected to be emperor of the world.”

In 2021, Honduran President Xiomara Castro took over a narcostate subservient to Washington and has tried to push the envelope to the left. Being constitutionally restricted to one term, Castro hands the Libre party candidacy in November’s election to former defense minister Rixi Moncada, who faces a tough contest with persistent US interference.

Bolivia’s ruling Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) Party is embroiled in a self-destructive internal conflict between former President Evo Morales and his former protégé and current President, Luis Arce. The energized Bolivian right wing is spoiling for the August 17^th presidential election.

Israeli infiltration accompanies US military penetration

Analyst Joe Emersberger notes: “Today, all geopolitics relates back to Gaza where the imperial order has been unmasked like never before.” Defying Washington, the Hague Group met in Colombia for an emergency summit on Gaza to “take collective action grounded in international law.” On July 16, regional states – Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – endorsed the pledge to take measures in support of Palestine, with others likely to follow. Brazil will join South Africa’s ICJ complaint against Israel.

At the other end of the political spectrum are self-described “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and confederates Javier Milei of Argentina and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador. As well as cozying up to Trump, they devotedly support Israel, which has been instrumental in enabling the most brutal reactionaries in the region. Noboa duly tells Israel’s Netanyahu that they “share the same enemies.”

In February, the US Southern Command warned: “Time is not on our side.” The perceived danger is “methodical incursion” into our “neighborhood” by both Russia and China. Indeed, China has become the region’s second-largest trading partner after the US, and even right-wing governments are reluctant to jeopardize their relations with Beijing. The empire’s solution is to “redouble our efforts to nest military engagement,” using humanitarian assistance as “an essential soft power tool.”

Picking up where Biden left off, Trump has furthered US military penetration, notably in Ecuador, Guyana, Brazil, Panama, and Argentina. The pandemic of narcotics trafficking, itself a product of US-induced demand, has been a Trojan Horse for militarist US intervention in Haiti, Ecuador, Peru, and threatened in Mexico.

In Panama, President José Mulino’s obeisance to Trump’s ambitions to control the Panama Canal and reduce China’s influence provoked massive protests. Trump’s collaboration in the genocide of Palestinians motivated Petro to declare that Colombia must leave the NATO alliance and keep its distance from “militaries that drop bombs on children.” Colombia had been collaborating with NATO since 2013 and became the only Latin American global partner in 2017.

Despite Trump’s bluster – what the Financial Times calls “imperial incontinence” – his administration has produced mixed results. While rightist political movements have basked in Trump’s fitful praise, his escalating coercion provokes resentment against Yankee influence. Resistance is growing, with new alliances bypassing Washington. As the empire’s grip tightens, so too does the resolve of those determined to break free from it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Perry and Roger D. Harris.

And this brings me to what I referred to earlier as a reaffirmation of my views on the basic problem confronting the underdeveloped countries. The principal insights, which must not be obscured by matters of secondary or tertiary importance, are two. The first is that, if what is sought is rapid economic development, comprehensive economic planning is indispensable… if the increase in a country’s aggregate output is to attain the magnitude, of, say, 8 to 10 per cent per annum; if in order to achieve it, the mode of utilization of a nation’s human and material resources is to be radically changed, with certain less productive lines of economic activity abandoned and other more rewarding ones taken up; then only a deliberate, long range planning effort can assure the attainment of the goal…

The second insight of crucial importance is that no planning worth the name is possible in a society in which the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits (or security or other private advantage). For it is of the very essence of comprehensive planning for economic development – what renders it, indeed, indispensable – that the pattern of allocation and utilization of resources which it must impose if it is to accomplish its purpose, is necessarily different from-the pattern prevailing under the status quo…
— xxviii-xxix, Foreword to 1962 printing, The Political Economy of Growth, Paul A. Baran [emphasis added]

It is surely of some interest that the late Professor Baran — reassessing his important, insightful, and extremely influential 1957 book, The Political Economy of Growth — grounds his contribution to the liberation of the post-colonial world in two “insights”: 1. The necessity of “comprehensive” economic planning over the irrational decision-making of the market, and 2. The impossibility of having effective planning with the major productive forces in the hands of private entities operating for profits.

Put simply, Baran is arguing that the most promising humane and rational escape from the legacy of colonialism is for the developing countries to choose the socialist path going forward and adopt planning as a necessary, rational condition for achieving that goal.

It is of equal interest that many who consider Baran to be one of the fathers of dependency theory — the theory that development is most significantly hindered by the state-to-state structural barriers imposed by the “core” on the “periphery” or the “North” on the “South” — have abandoned Baran’s key “insights” for an approach that argues for open, unhindered “fair” exchange and the rationality of markets.

For many of today’s Western left, the locus of international inequalities is found in the economic relations between states. Exploitation — in the form of taking advantage of uneven development or resource differences — undoubtedly occurs in the relations between states, systematically in the colonial era, more indirectly today. That is just to say that competition between capitalist states within a global imperialist system will produce and reproduce various inequalities. It is popular to capture this as conflict between an advantaged North and a disadvantaged South — while the geographical reference is most inexact, it is widely understood. From Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Gunder Frank, through Amin, and an important consensus today, the central feature of imperialism is thought to be the vast differences in wealth between the rich and poor countries. Moreover, they share the belief that existing structures maintain those differences, structures established and protected by the richest countries.

Of course, they are right to object to these inequalities and the practices and institutions that preserve them. And Paul Baran was acutely aware of these structures, but also attendant to the specific historical conditions influencing the individual countries — their differences and similarities. He understands the trajectory of the post-colonial states:

Thus, the peoples who came into the orbit of Western capitalist expansion found themselves in the twilight of feudalism and capitalism enduring the worst features of both worlds, and the entire impact of imperialist subjugation to boot. To oppression by their feudal lords, ruthless but tempered by tradition, was added domination by foreign and domestic capitalists, callous and limited only by what the traffic would bear. The obscurantism and arbitrary violence inherited from their feudal past was combined with the rationality and sharply calculating rapacity of their capitalist present. Their exploitation was multiplied, yet its fruits were not to increase their productive wealth; these went abroad or served to support a parasitic bourgeoisie at home. They lived in abysmal misery, yet they had no prospect of a better tomorrow. They existed under capitalism, yet there was no accumulation of capital. They lost their time-honored means of livelihood, their arts and crafts, yet there was no modern industry to provide new ones in their place. They were thrust into extensive contact with the advanced science of the West, yet remained in a state of the darkest backwardness (p. 144).

At the same time, Baran is fully aware of the predatory nature of foreign capital, denying its “usefulness” and affirming its sole domestic benefit to the merchant class.

Perhaps his clearest statement of the logic of imperialism appears on pages 196-197:

To be sure, neither imperialism itself nor its modus operandi and ideological trimmings are today what they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Just as outright looting of the outside world has yielded to organized trade with the underdeveloped countries, in which plunder has been rationalized and routinized by a mechanism of impeccably ‘correct’ contractual relations, so has the rationality of smoothly functioning commerce grown into the modern, still more advanced, still more rational system of imperialist exploitation. Like all other historically changing phenomena, the contemporary form of imperialism contains and preserves all its earlier modalities, but raises them to a new level. Its central feature is that it is now directed not solely towards the rapid extraction of large sporadic gains from the objects of its domination, it is no longer content with merely assuring a more or less steady flow of these gains over a somewhat extended period. Propelled by well-organized, rationally conducted monopolistic enterprise, it seeks today to rationalize the flow of these receipts so as to be able to count on it in perpetuity. And this points to the main task of imperialism in our time: to prevent, or, if that is impossible, to slow down and to control the economic development of underdeveloped countries.

Notice that Baran acknowledges, along with today’s fashionable dependency theory, that imperialism’s “main task” is to impose underdevelopment. But imperialism’s agent is identified as the “monopolistic enterprise” and not specifically an antagonistic state or its government. Of course, the state hosting monopoly corporations does all it can to promote and protect their interests, but it should not be confused with either the exploiter or the beneficiary of exploitation: it is “the well-organized, rationally conducted monopolistic enterprise” that bleeds the workers of the developing countries. With monopoly capitalism dominating the state, the state plays a critical, essential role as an enabler for the most powerful monopolies in the global economy.

For Baran, the key to liberating the former colonies from the stranglehold of rapacious monopolies is not a reordering of international relations, not a campaign for a level international playing field, not alternative market institutions, nor a coalition of dissenters from the status quo, but a radical change in the social and economic structure of the oppressed country.

In this regard, Baran differs from many contemporary dependency theorists who pose multipolarity as an answer to the North-South inequalities and welcome the BRICS development as constituting an anti-imperialist stage. They believe that breaking the stranglehold of the dominant great power — the US — will somehow eliminate the logic of contemporary imperialism, that it will disable the “mechanism of impeccably ‘correct’ contractual relations” at the heart of “core” / “periphery” relations.

But this is not Baran’s thinking. He opts instead for an active engagement of the workers, peasants, and intellectuals on the periphery. His is a class approach. For Baran, working people are not dried leaves, blown this way and that by the powerful winds of great powers. Rather, they are the agents of their own liberation.

Baran draws out the potential of the post-colonial masses through his innovative concept of “surplus.”¹ Baran asks revolutionaries in the emerging countries to realize the potential surplus that they may access for development provided that they engage in a “reorganization of the production and distribution of social output” and accept “far reaching changes to the structure of society.” (p. 24). Baran emphasizes four available sources for the surplus:

One is society’s excess consumption (predominantly on the part of the upper income groups…), the second is the output lost to society through the existence of unproductive workers, the third is the output lost because of the irrational and wasteful organization of the existing productive apparatus, and the fourth is the output foregone owing to the existence of unemployment caused primarily by the anarchy of capitalist production and the deficiency of effective demand. (p. 24)

By recovering this surplus, Baran contends that the post-colonial world can begin “the steep ascent” — the escape from the legacy of colonialism and the stranglehold of capitalism. At the same time, Baran concedes that a resource-poor country, an economy violently distorted by a close neighbor — a country like Cuba — will need assistance from the socialist community, an assistance that has been less forthcoming since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The Multipolaristas and the BRICS advocates do not share Baran’s confidence in working people. They cannot conceive a revolutionary answer to the problem of development. They relegate socialism to the far, far-off future, and argue for a more humane capitalism. Their vision ends with establishing a new regime of “structural adjustments” that will blunt the economic power of the US to make way for a plurality of powers competing for global markets, but in a “friendly” way. This is the social-democratic vision taken to the global level. But this is not Baran’s vision.

Like their national counterparts, these global social democrats envision a world in which reforming capitalist social relations — taming the worst monopoly scoundrels — will result in the proverbial arc bending toward justice. BRICS, they believe, will give us a level playing field for the monopoly corporations to roam more fairly.

A recent Oxfam report on inequality in Africa suggests that there is plenty of potential surplus available for building a developmental program based on a class-based approach of appropriation and surplus recovery:

● Africa’s four most affluent billionaires have $57.4 billion in wealth, which is greater than ~50% of the continent’s 1.5 billion people.

● While Africa had no billionaires in 2000, today, there are 23 with a combined wealth of $112.6 billion. The wealth of these 23 ultra-rich Africans has grown by 56% in the last 5 years.

● The richest 5% on the continent have accumulated almost $4 trillion in wealth, more than twice the wealth of the rest of the people in Africa (by comparison, the richest 10% of US households hold two-thirds of US wealth).

● Almost half of the world’s most unequal countries are in Africa.

● The bottom 50% of Africans own less than 1% of the wealth of the continent (by comparison, the bottom 50% of US households own 3% of US wealth).

Presumably, the report does not include the billionaires like Elon Musk, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Rodney Sacks, and many others who relocated and invested outside of Africa. Eight of the top foreign-born US billionaires are from Africa.

Clearly, class, and not state-to-state relations, is at the center of Africa’s human development problem. The “potential surplus” accumulated in the hands of so few would well serve a peoples’ development program that could reverse the concentration of wealth now starving the continent’s poor. Appropriated wealth could well serve an industrial drive and the rationalization of agriculture. More than enough wealth is available in Africa to implement Paul Baran’s twin insights that open this article.

The BRICS movement — a coalition of partners aligning to create a different international exchange network that would be less one-sided, less privileging wealthy nations– is not itself a bad thing. The proverbial level playing field — the fair and free marketplace — is a proper goal for capitalist participants competing internationally. But it is not a Left project. It moves the goal no closer in the struggle for justice for working people. It is not class-partisan, and thus ultimately will likely benefit those who gain from the proper functioning of capitalist economic relations in the various countries disadvantaged by existing relations. And we know from the Oxfam report who they are.

One can see the limitations of multipolarity from the recent Rio de Janeiro meeting of BRICS leaders. There is much talk of a “more equitable global order,” of state-to-state “cooperation,” of broader “participation,” even a pledge to fight disease and extreme poverty. The foreign ministers and heads of state dutifully denounce war and aggression. The current President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “called BRICS a successor of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).” What he didn’t say was that NAM broke up when Cuba transcended toothless resolutions and declarations and actually defended Angola against apartheid South African aggression in a bloody war that brought the criminal regime to its knees. The BRICS response to the attack on Iran brings “toothlessness” back to mind.

Baran’s revolutionary path is not an easy one. Others have tried and failed. From Nkrumah and Lumumba to Thomas Sankara, revolutionaries in Africa have taken steps in this direction, only to be thwarted by powerful forces determined to snuff out even a beginning. That alone should tell the EuroAmerican left that it is the path worth following.

We should not pretend that reforming global market relations—any more than reforming national market relations– will secure justice for working people. That will come when the workers, peasants, and intellectuals of the global South decide that justice is impossible while “the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits.”

ENDNOTE:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

At 11:26PM, Sunday night, July 6, I received a text from my producers. 

I was in Rio de Janeiro, covering the BRICS summit for an international news agency. They wanted me to go live. The summit was only halfway done, but US President Donald Trump had already posted on Truth Social in retaliation.

“Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff,” he wrote. “There will be no exceptions to this policy. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Why was the president of the most powerful nation in the world worried about a group of a dozen countries meeting in Brazil? Because that bloc comprises some of the most powerful developing nations in the world, including Trump adversaries like China—but also Iran, who joined BRICS last year as a partner member, alongside Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. And because, as the world seems to be unraveling, the BRICS group is moving to reform world governance and global trade. And they likely have the best chance of doing it.

“I can affirm that if they keep with the agenda, and they implement what they put down on paper, we don’t see any block in the world that’s pushing much more than the BRICS,” Maureen Santos, the coordinator of the BRICS Policy Center’s Socio-Environmental Platform, told me.

The Summit

“For the fourth time, Brazil is hosting a BRICS Summit,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to kick off the summit on Sunday morning, “Of all the summits, this one is taking place in the most adverse global scenario. The UN turned 80 on June 26, and we have witnessed an unparalleled collapse of multilateralism.”

In Lula’s 10-minute opening speech, he denounced the “genocide” in Gaza and called for a two-state solution. He condemned the “violations of Iran’s territorial integrity” and reminded those in attendance that the BRICS was the heir of the non-aligned movement—the group of 121 nations that did not align with neither the US nor Russia during the Cold War. 

These sentiments were included in the final “BRICS Leader’s Declaration,” which was released on Sunday July 6—the first day of the summit—before Trump’s threats over social media.  The document didn’t explicitly mention the United States, but it rejected “unilateral protectionist measures” and condemned the violence in Gaza and Iran. 

Among the 126 final resolutions in the document were agreements on promoting peace, strengthening cooperation on health and sustainable development, combating climate change, battling hunger, reforming global governance and ensuring equal access to—and global regulation of  artificial intelligence. 

“A collective global effort is needed to establish an AI governance that upholds our shared values, addresses risks, builds trust, and ensures broad and inclusive international collaboration and access, in accordance with sovereign laws,” read the document. The common theme across all these issues was how to build a more equitable global system.

The leaders were vocal about a need to overhaul the global system of governance, where the United States, the EU, and the G7 countries are at the top, and everyone else is picking up the scraps.

The BRICS leaders called in the declaration for a “comprehensive reform of the United Nations, including its Security Council, with a view to making it more democratic, representative, effective and efficient.”

“The BRICS represents a proposal against hegemony,” BRICS Policy Center Director Marta Fernandez told me at a cafe in Rio de Janeiro. “They are demanding multipolarity—financial, cultural, and political multipolarity. And the United States is fighting to maintain a hegemony that is in crisis. It’s US hegemony that is in crisis. And in that sense, the BRICS represents a threat to the US.”

Probably the top issue of concern for the US president are calls to democratize the currency used in trade amongst BRICS countries. Currently, more than half of global transactions are in the US dollar. De-dollarization, or moving away from the US dollar as the top reserve currency, would mean a huge hit for the United States and a big win for democratizing global trade and finance.

Shortly after winning the November 2024 presidential elections, Trump fired off a warning to the BRICS countries.

“We are going to require a commitment from these seemingly hostile countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “There is no chance that BRICS will replace the US dollar in international trade, or anywhere else, and any country that tries should say hello to tariffs, and goodbye to America!”

The BRICS nations were not deterred. In the final declaration they called for the increased use of “local currencies,” and the incorporation of the use of these currencies in the BRICS interbank system in order to “facilitate and expand innovative financial practices” and “support greater trade and investment flows.” The head of the BRICS New Development Bank, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff announced last week that already a quarter of the bank’s lending portfolio was in local currencies and that they are looking to hit 30% by next year. 

“Obviously, the big BRICS demand is for monetary multipolarity, which goes against the hegemony of the dollar, which has become the reserve currency since World War II,” says Fernandez. “So it’s a direct attack on this system, controlled by the dollar.”

BRICS has many challenges, in part due to the diverse makeup of the cultures, countries, and governments that make up the eclectic, yet powerful international alliance.

The group is not looking to upend the global capitalist system. It’s not proposing socialism. The BRICS countries aren’t going to usher in revolutionary change. But they are pushing to alter the balance of power in the world to move from the hegemony of the United States and the European powers toward something more equal.

“Can anyone tell me why India can’t be included in the UN Security Council? Or a country like Brazil? Or Mexico?” Lula said during the summit. “Or Nigeria or Ethiopia, which has a population of just over 120 million people, or Egypt, which has over 100 million, or South Africa? Why not? There’s no reason why.”

Currently only China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States have veto power in the Security Council. This structure was implemented at the end of World War II and has remained in place ever since—something the BRICS countries say has to change.

BRICS Popular Council

The BRICS summit did not occur in a vacuum. Representatives say that ahead of the meeting, negotiators from the BRICS countries—which they call “sherpas”—met hundreds of times over the last year to come to agreement on such a wide range of topics.

This past year also saw the creation of a new Popular Council. The council was created last year as a space for grassroots groups to contribute to the BRICS agenda, policies, and future. Representatives from 120 groups from across the BRICS countries met in the months leading up to the summit.

“The existence of this Popular Council is amazing,” said Santos. “Because you know that the majority of the BRICS countries, right now, are very conservative and some of them even undemocratic and don’t have the civil space inside their countries. So bringing this agenda for the BRICS, it’s pushing the other countries to open space for civil society.”

For two days before the official BRICS summit, members of social movements, civil society, and academia from across the BRICS countries met in a large hall in Carlos Gomes Theater, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, for the Popular Council Forum.

Colorful banners from diverse social and labor movements, including Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), were laid out in front of the stage, where panels were held throughout the day. 

They delivered their recommendations to BRICS leaders on Sunday. Delegates of the Popular Council presented their findings, analysis and process during a press conference following the Popular Council forum.

Raymond Matlala, from the BRICS Youth Association of South Africa, said, “What I like about BRICS and why I think BRICS is so appealing to the global majority, the Global South is the principles of BRICS, the mutual respect. The people are leveled. No one comes with superior power. It’s also the respect of one country’s sovereignty. BRICS does not enter in domestic issues.”

How will BRICS respond to Trump?

Early on Monday morning, I responded to the text from my producers and went live at both 1AM and 2AM.

The presenter asked me how BRICS would respond to Trump’s late-night threat over social media. I said it was unclear, but I was sure it was not going to make them change course.

At a press conference the next day, following the close of the summit, Lula stood at a microphone in front of the hall in white shirt and a black suit. Blue carpeted floors. Blue wall behind him, “BRICS – Brasil 2025″ written across it. Journalists packed in rows of chairs before him. Camera shutters clicking. Cold air pumped into the room from two huge air conditioning units.

The first three questions were variations on the same theme: How would BRICS respond?

The answer: They wouldn’t. They didn’t have to.

“The world has changed. We don’t want an emperor,” said Lula, referring to Trump. “We are sovereign countries.” He said Trump’s threat of raising tariffs on BRICS countries wasn’t brought up at all during their meetings that day. It was not even an issue.

This is a subtle, but important point. Trump wants to be the center of attention. That’s how he derails and wins debates, with ever-more shocking statements, actions, decrees, and threats. In Trump’s world, the United States—backed by the US dollar and the US military—should be first, with the rest of the countries of the world revolving around it. That is exactly what the BRICS countries want to change. And the more Trump pushes, the more they are going to look the other way.

“At the moment the United States declares ‘America First,’ the BRICS are saying ‘we all come first,’” international relations analyst Pedro Costa Junior told me at the summit. “The Global South comes first. The community comes first. Not for one. But for everyone.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Faramarz Farbod.

Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.

Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!

What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.

China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.

Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.

The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time

For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:

• Since these European rulers are all bitterly against Russia;
• Russia possesses that cheap natural gas which could improve working class living standards; and
• the working classes could unite against their rulers and demand to have cheap Russian gas shipped to them.

How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.  

World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth  Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.

The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.

The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?

Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World

For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.

Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not

The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the  traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant.  As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:

• inclusive of many more combinations than the communism-liberalism-conservative, fascist and libertarian, linearly strung out;
• economic as well as political;
• must account for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
• decentered so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable under certain conditions. This means that all political tendencies would have to be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices;
• the spectrum must be flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia or between India (fundamentalist) and China and
• not limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum                      

This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?

• They are anti-imperialist.
• They are anti-war.
• They are anti-finance capital.
• They want to develop the productive forces of the world.

Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.

Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.

Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?

I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th  century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.

Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.

Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.

Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s  book After Capitalism.

What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers  created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.

This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.

The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding  onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.

The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy

There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not  universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.

Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.

Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.

What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.

There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:

• the treatment of peasants on the collective farms;
• the famines in Russia;
• the notion that Stalin was a dictator;
• that Russia operated in totalitarian way and
• the political trials of the 1930s.

Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.

So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.

Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.

Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds

For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:

• What is the role of the state?
• What is the role of a socialist party?
• What is the role of self-organizing workers? and
• What is place of markets?

To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.

Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing.  On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.

What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism

The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.

Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand  or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.

I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.

For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:

• beginning with historical anarchists culminating with Murray Bookchin (2 years);
• The Situationists of Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord culminating in Pannekoek and Gorter’s council communism (3 years);
• National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) converging in Lyndon Larouche’s book Dialectical Economics (1 year). More recently I’ve been influenced by William Engdahl, Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung, also in the Larouche orbit;
• world-systems theory following the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi;
• communist psychology of the Soviet Union whose main practitioners were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. Also one year’s involvement with Social Therapy founded by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in New York City;
• in 2000 the anti-war movement headed by ANSWER (8 years);
• the Occupy movement from 2011-2012;
• the founding of our own organization Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism from 2012 to today; and
• one year with anarchists from Olympia Assembly and the Industrial Workers of the World.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

On April 14, the specialist military publication Janes reported that Indonesia had “received an official request from Moscow, seeking permission for Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) aircraft to be based at a facility in [the country’s] easternmost province.” The area in question is Papua, and the relevant airbase, Biak Numfor, home to the Indonesian Air Force’s Aviation Squadron 27 responsible for operating surveillance aircraft of the CN235 variety.

Indonesian government sources had informed the magazine of a request received by the office of the defence minister, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, following a February meeting with the Security Council of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu. This was not the first time, with Moscow making previous requests to Jakarta for using a base for its long-range aircraft.

The frazzled response in Australia to the possibility of a Russian presence on Indonesian soil betrays its presumption. Just as Australia would rather not see Pacific Island states form security friendly ties with China, an anxiety directed and dictated by Washington, it would also wish those in Southeast Asia to avoid the feelers of other countries supposedly unfriendly to Canberra’s interests.

Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, who has an addict’s fascination with security menaces of the phantom variety, sprung at the claims made in Janes. “This would be a catastrophic failure of diplomatic relations if [Australian Foreign Minister] Penny Wong and [Prime Minister] Anthony Albanese didn’t have forewarning about this before it was made public,” he trumpeted. “This is a very, very troubling development and suggestion that somehow Russia would have some of their assets based in Indonesia only a short distance from, obviously, the north of our country.”

The Albanese government has tried to cool the confected heat with assurances, with the PM reaffirming Canberra’s support for Ukraine while stating that “we obviously do not want to see Russian influence in our region”. It has also accused Dutton for a streaky fabrication: that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto had “publicly announced” the details.

Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, also informed the press that he had spoken to his counterpart Sjamsoeddin, who duly replied “in the clearest possible terms [that] reports of the prospect of Russian aircraft operating from Indonesia are simply not true.”

Besides, a country such as Indonesia, according to Marles, is of the friendly sort. “We have a growing defence relationship with Indonesia. We will keep engaging with Indonesia in a way that befits a very close friend and a very close friendship between our two countries.” This sweetly coated nonsense should have gone out with the façade-tearing acts of Donald Trump’s global imposition of tariffs, unsparing to adversaries and allies alike.

Marles continues to operate in a certain twilight of international relations, under the belief that the defence cooperation agreement with Jakarta “is the deepest level defence agreement we’ve ever had with Indonesia, and we are seeking increasing cooperation between Australia and Indonesia at the defence level.” Whether this is the case hardly precludes Indonesia, as an important regional power, from conducting defence and foreign policy on its own terms with countries of its own choosing.

In January, Jakarta officially added its name to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group, an alternative power alignment that has been foolishly disregarded in terms of significance by the United States and its satellites. Subianto’s coming to power last October has also heralded a warmer turn to Moscow in military terms, with both countries conducting their first joint naval drills last November in the Java Sea near Surabaya. (Indonesia is already a market for Russian fighter jets, despite the cloud of potential sanctions from the US Treasury Department.) For doing so, self-appointed disciplinarians, notably such pro-US outlets as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, have questioned the country’s fabled non-aligned foreign policy. Engaging Russia in cooperative military terms supposedly undermined, according to the think tank’s publication The Strategist, Jakarta’s “own stated commitment to upholding international law.”

Such commentary is neither here nor there. The Indonesian military remains jealous and proprietary, taking a dim view of any notion of a foreign military base. Retired Major General TB Hasanuddin, who is also a Member of Commission I of the Indonesian House of Representatives, points to constitutional and other legal impediments in permitting such a policy. “Our constitution and various laws and regulations expressly prohibit the existence of foreign military bases.”

Any criticism of Jakarta’s recent gravitation to Moscow also refuses to acknowledge the flexible, even sly approach Indonesia has taken to various powers. It has done so while maintaining a firm independence of mind. In the afterglow of the naval exercises with the Russian Navy, Indonesia’s armed forces merrily went about the business of conducting military exercises with Australia, named Keris Woomera. Between November 13 and 16 last year, the exercise comprised 2,000 personnel from the navy, army and air force from both countries. As Australia frets and fantasises about the stratagems of distant authoritarian leaders, Indonesia having the last laugh.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Last week, on 26 February 2025, President Prabowo Subianto officially launched Indonesia’s first bullion banks, marking a significant shift in the country’s approach to gold and precious metal management.

This initiative aims to strengthen Indonesia’s control over its gold reserves, improve financial stability, and reduce reliance on foreign institutions for gold transactions.

Bullion banks specialise in buying, selling, storing, and trading gold and other precious metals. They allow both the government and private sector to manage gold-related financial transactions, including hedging, lending, and investment in the global gold market.

• READ MORE:  Indonesia joins BRICS: What now for West Papuan goal of independence?
• West Papua mining reports
• Other West Papua reports

Although bullion banks focus on gold, this move signals a broader trend of Indonesia tightening control over its natural resources. This could have a significant impact on West Papua’s coal industry.

With the government already enforcing benchmark coal prices (HBA) starting this month, the success of bullion banks could pave the way for a similar centralised system for coal and other minerals.

Indonesia also may apply similar regulations to other strategic resources, including coal, nickel, and copper. This could mean tighter government control over mining in West Papua.

If Indonesia expands national control over mining, it could lead to increased exploitation in resource-rich regions like West Papua, raising concerns about land rights, deforestation, and indigenous displacement.

Indonesia joined BRICS earlier this year and is now focusing on strengthening economic ties with other BRICS countries.

In the mining sector, Indonesia is using its membership to increase exports, particularly to key markets such as China and India. These countries are large consumers of coal and mineral resources, providing an opportunity for Indonesia to expand its export market and attract foreign direct investment in resource extraction.

India eyes coal in West Papua
India has shown interest in tapping into the coal reserves of the West Papua region, aiming to diversify its energy sources and secure coal supplies for its growing energy needs.

This initiative involves potential collaboration between the Indian government and Indonesian authorities to explore and develop previously unexploited coal deposits in West Papuan Indigenous lands.

However, the details of such projects are still under negotiation, with discussions focusing on the terms of investment and operational control.

Notably, India has sought special privileges, including no-bid contracts, in exchange for financing geological surveys — a proposition that raises concerns about compliance with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

The prospect of coal mining in West Papua has drawn mixed reactions. While the Indonesian government is keen to attract foreign investment to boost economic development in its easternmost provinces, local communities and environmental groups express apprehension.

The primary concerns revolve around potential environmental degradation, disruption of local ecosystems, and the displacement of indigenous populations.

Moreover, there is scepticism about whether the economic benefits from such projects would trickle down to local communities or primarily serve external interests.

Navigating ethical, legal issues
As India seeks to secure energy resources to meet its domestic demands, it must navigate the ethical and legal implications of its investments abroad. Simultaneously, Indonesia faces the challenge of balancing economic development with environmental preservation and the rights of its indigenous populations.

While foreign investment in Indonesia’s mining sector is welcome, there are strict regulations in place to protect national interests.

In particular, foreign mining companies must sell at least 51 percent of their shares to Indonesian stakeholders within 10 years of starting production. This policy is designed to ensure that Indonesia retains greater control over its natural resources, while still allowing international investors to participate in the growth of the industry.

India is reportedly interested in mining coal in West Papua to diversify its fuel sources.

Indonesia’s energy ministry is hoping for economic benefits and a potential boost to the local steel industry. But environmentalists and social activists are sounding the alarm about the potential negative impacts of new mining operations.

During project discussions, India has shown an interest in securing special privileges, such as no-bid contracts, which could conflict with Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

Implications for West Papua
Indonesia, a country with a population of nearly 300 million, aims to industrialise. By joining BRICS (primarily Brasil, Russia, India, and China), it hopes to unlock new growth opportunities.

However, this path to industrialisation comes at a significant cost. It will continue to profoundly affect people’s lives and lead to environmental degradation, destroying wildlife and natural habitats.

These challenges echo the changes that began with the Industrial Revolution in England, where coal-powered advances drastically reshaped human life and the natural world.

West Papua has experienced a significant decline in its indigenous population due to Indonesia’s transmigration policy. This policy involves relocating large numbers of Muslim Indonesians to areas where Christian Papuans are the majority.

These newcomers settle on vast tracts of indigenous Papuan land. Military operations also continue.

One of the major problems resulting from these developments is the spread of torture, abuse, disease, and death, which, if not addressed soon, will reduce the Papuans to numbers too small to fight and reclaim their land.

Mining of any kind in West Papua is closely linked to, and in fact, is the main cause of, the dire situation in West Papua.

Large-scale exploitation
Since the late 1900s, the area’s rich coal and mineral resources have attracted both foreign and local investors. Large international companies, particularly from Western countries, have partnered with the Indonesian government in large-scale mining operations.

While the exploitation of West Papua’s resources has boosted Indonesia’s economy, it has also caused significant environmental damage and disruption to indigenous Papuan communities.

Mining has damaged local ecosystems, polluted water sources and reduced biodiversity. Indigenous Papuans have been displaced from their ancestral lands, leading to economic hardship and cultural erosion.

Although the government has tried to promote sustainable mining practices, the benefits have largely bypassed local communities. Most of the revenue from mining goes to Jakarta and large corporations, with minimal reinvestment in local infrastructure, health and education.

For more than 63 years, West Papua has faced exploitation and abuse similar to that which occurred when British law considered Australia to be terra nullius — “land that belongs to no one.” This legal fiction allowed the British to disregard the existence of indigenous people as the rightful owners and custodians of the land.

Similarly, West Papua has been treated as if it were empty, with indigenous communities portrayed in degrading ways to justify taking their land and clearing it for settlers.

Indonesia’s collective view of West Papua as a wild, uninhabited frontier has allowed settlers and colonial authorities to freely exploit the region’s rich resources.

Plundering with impunity
This is why almost anyone hungry for West Papua’s riches goes there and plunders with impunity. They cut down millions of trees, mine minerals, hunt rare animals and collect precious resources such as gold.

These activities are carried out under the control of the military or by bribing and intimidating local landowners.

The Indonesian government’s decision to grant mining licences to universities and religious groups will add more headaches for Papuans. It simply means that more entities have been given licences to exploit its resources — driving West Papuans toward extinction and destroying their ancestral homeland.

An example is the PT Megapura Prima Industri, an Indonesian coal mining company operating in Sorong on the western tip of West Papua. According to the local news media Jubi, the company has already violated rules and regulations designed to protect local Papuans and the environment.

Allowing India to enter West Papua, will have unprecedented and disastrous consequences for West Papua, including environmental degradation, displacement of indigenous communities, and human rights abuses.

As the BRICS nations continue to expand their economic footprint, Indonesia’s evolving mining landscape is likely to become a focal point of international investment discourse in the coming years.

Natural resources ultimate target
This means that West Papua’s vast natural resources will be the ultimate target and will continue to be a geopolitical pawn between superpowers, while indigenous Papuans remain marginalised and excluded from decision-making processes in their own land.

Regardless of policy changes on resource extraction, human rights, education, health, or any other facet, “Indonesia cannot and will not save West Papua” because “Indonesia’s presence in the sovereign territory of West Papua is the primary cause of the genocide of Papuans and the destruction of their homeland”.

As long as West Papua remains Indonesia’s frontier settler colony, backed by an intensive military presence, the entire Indonesian enterprise in West Papua effectively condemns both the Papuan people and their fragile ecosystem to a catastrophic fate, one that can only be avoided through a process of decolonisation and self-determination.

Restoring West Papua’s sovereignty, arbitrarily taken by Indonesia, is the best solution so that indigenous Papuans can engage with their world on their own terms, using the rich resources they have, and determining their own future and development pathway.

Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Indonesia officially joined the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa — consortium last week marking a significant milestone in its foreign relations.

In a statement released a day later on January 7, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that this membership reflected Indonesia’s dedication to strengthening multilateral cooperation and its growing influence in global politics.

The ministry highlighted that joining BRICS aligned with Indonesia’s independent and proactive foreign policy, which seeks to maintain balanced relations with major powers while prioritising national interests.

• READ MORE: Indonesia joins BRICS group of emerging economies
• Other West Papua independence reports

This pivotal move showcases Jakarta’s efforts to enhance its international presence as an emerging power within a select group of global influencers.

Traditionally, Indonesia has embraced a non-aligned stance while bolstering its military and economic strength through collaborations with both Western and Eastern nations, including the United States, China, and Russia.

By joining BRICS, Indonesia clearly signals a shift from its non-aligned status, aligning itself with a coalition of emerging powers poised to challenge and redefine the existing global geopolitical landscape dominated by a Western neoliberal order led by the United States.

Indonesia joining boosts BRICS membership to 10 countres — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — but there are also partnerships.

Supporters of a multipolar world, championed by China, Russia, and their allies, may view Indonesia’s entry into BRICS as a significant victory.

In contrast, advocates of the US-led unipolar world, often referred to as the “rules-based international order” are likely to see Indonesia’s decision as a regrettable shift that could trigger retaliatory actions from the United States.

The future will determine how Indonesia balances its relations with these two superpowers. However, there is considerable concern about the potential fallout for Indonesia from its long-standing US allies.

The smaller Pacific Island nations, which Indonesia has been endeavouring to win over in a bid to thwart support for West Papuan independence, may also become entangled in the crosshairs of geostrategic rivalries, and their response to Indonesia’s membership in the BRICS alliance will prove critical for the fate of West Papua.

Critical questions
The crucial questions facing the Pacific Islanders are perhaps related to their loyalties: are they aligning themselves with Beijing or Washington, and in what ways could their decisions influence the delicate balance of power in the ongoing competition between great powers, ultimately altering the Melanesian destiny of the Papuan people?

For the Papuans, Indonesia’s membership in BRICS or any other global or regional forums is irrelevant as long as the illegal occupation of their land continues driving them toward “extinction”.

The pressing question for Papuans is which force will ultimately dismantle Indonesia’s unlawful hold on their sovereignty.

Will Indonesia’s BRICS alliance open new paths for Papuan liberation fighters to re-engage with the West in ways not seen since the Cold War? Or does this membership indicate a deeper entrenchment of Papuans’ fate within China’s influence — making it almost impossible for any dream of Papuans’ independence?

While forecasting future with certainty is difficult on these questions, these critical critical questions need to be considered in this new complex geopolitical landscape, as the ultimate fate of West Papua is what is truly at stake here.

Strengthening Indonesia’s claims over West Papuan sovereignty
Indonesia’s membership in BRICS may signify a great victory for those advocating for a multipolar world, challenging the hegemony of Western powers led by the United States.

This membership could augment Indonesia’s capacity to frame the West Papuan issue as an internal matter among BRICS members within the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs.

Such backing could provide Jakarta with a cushion of diplomatic protection against international censure, particularly from Western nations regarding its policies in West Papua.

However, it is also crucial to note that for more than six decades, despite the Western world priding itself on being a champion of freedom and human rights, no nation has been permitted to voice concern or hold Indonesia accountable for the atrocities committed against Indigenous Papuans.

The pressing question to consider is what or who silences the 193 member states of the UN from intervening to save the Papuans from potential eradication at the hands of Indonesia.

Is it the United States and its allies, or is it China, Russia, and their allies — or the United Nations itself?

Indonesia’s double standard and hypocrisy
Indonesia’s support for Palestine bolsters its image as a defender of international law and human rights in global platforms like the UN and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

This commitment was notably highlighted at the BRICS Summit in October 2024, where Indonesia reaffirmed its dedication to Palestinian self-determination and called for global action to address the ongoing conflict in line with international law and UN resolutions, reflecting its constitutional duty to oppose colonialism.

Nonetheless, Indonesia’s self-image as a “saviour for the Palestinians” presents a rather ignoble facade being promoted in the international diplomatic arena, as the Indonesian government engages in precisely the same behaviours it condemns Israel over in Palestine.

Military engagement and regional diplomacy
Moreover, Indonesia’s interaction with Pacific nations serves to perpetuate a façade of double standards — on one hand, it endeavours to portray itself as a burgeoning power and a champion of moral causes concerning security issues, human rights, climate change, and development; while on the other, it distracts the communities and nations of Oceania — particularly Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, which have long supported the West Papua independence movement — from holding Indonesia accountable for its transgressions against their fellow Pacific Islanders in West Papua.

On October 10, 2024, Brigadier-General Mohamad Nafis of the Indonesian Defence Ministry unveiled a strategic initiative intended to assert sovereignty claims over West Papua. This plan aims to foster stability across the Pacific through enhanced defence cooperation and safeguarding of territorial integrity.

The efforts to expand influence are characterised by joint military exercises, defence partnerships, and assistance programmes, all crafted to address common challenges such as terrorism, piracy, and natural disasters.

However, most critically, Indonesia’s engagement with Pacific Island nations aims to undermine the regional solidarity surrounding West Papua’s right to self-determination.

This involvement encapsulates infrastructure initiatives, defence training, and financial diplomacy, nurturing goodwill while aligning the interests of Pacific nations with Indonesia’s geopolitical aspirations.

Indonesia has formally joined the BRICS group, a bloc of emerging economies featuring Russia, China and others that is viewed as a counterweight to the West https://t.co/WArU5O2PfT pic.twitter.com/IQKmPOJqlS

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 7, 2025

Military occupation in West Papua
As Indonesia strives to galvanise international support for its territorial integrity, the military presence in West Papua has intensified significantly, instilling widespread fear among local Papuan communities due to heightened deployments, surveillance, and restrictions.

Indonesian forces have been mobilised to secure economically strategic regions, including the Grasberg mine, which holds some of the world’s largest gold and copper reserves.

These operations have resulted in the displacement of Indigenous communities and substantial environmental degradation.

As of December 2024, approximately 83,295 individuals had been internally displaced in West Papua due to armed conflicts between Indonesian security forces and the West Papua Liberation Army (TPNPB).

Recent reports detail new instances of displacement in the Tambrauw and Pegunungan Bintang regencies following clashes between the TPNPB and security forces. Villagers have evacuated their homes in fear of further military incursions and confrontations, leaving many in psychological distress.

The significant increase in Indonesia’s military presence in West Papua has coincided with demographic shifts that jeopardise the survival of Indigenous Papuans.

Government transmigration policies and large-scale agricultural initiatives, such as the food estate project in Merauke, have marginalised Indigenous communities.

These programmes, aimed at ensuring national food security, result in land expropriation and cultural erosion, threatening traditional Papuan lifestyles and identities.

For more than 63 years, Indonesia has occupied West Papua, subjecting Indigenous communities to systemic marginalisation and brink of extinction. Traditional languages, oral histories, and cultural values face obliteration under Indonesia’s colonial occupation.

A glimmer of hope for West Papua
Despite these formidable challenges, solidarity movements within the Pacific and global communities persist in their advocacy for West Papua’s self-determination.

These groups, united by a shared sense of humanity and justice, work tirelessly to maintain hope for West Papua’s liberation. Even so, Indonesia’s diplomatic engagement with Pacific nations, characterised by eloquent rhetoric and military alliances, represents a calculated endeavour to extinguish this fragile hope for Papuan liberation.

Indonesia’s membership in BRICS will either amplify this tiny hope of salvation within the grand vision of a new world re-engineered by Beijing’s BRICS and its allies or will it conceal West Papua’s independence dream on a path that is even harder and more impossible to achieve than the one they have been on for 60 years under the US-led unipolar world system.

Most significantly, it might present a new opportunity for Papuan liberation fighters to reengage with the new re-ordering global superpowers– a chance that has eluded them for more than 60 years.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, the tumult of the First and Second World Wars, coupled with the ensuing cries for decolonisation from nations subjugated by Western powers and Cold War tensions, forged the very existence of the nation known as “Indonesia.”

It seems that this turbulent world of uncertainty is upon us, reshaping a new global landscape replete with new alliances and adversaries, harbouring conflicting visions of a new world. Indonesia’s decision to join BRICS in 2025 is a clear testament to this.

The pressing question remains whether this membership will ultimately precipitate Indonesia’s disintegration as the US-led unipolar world intervenes in its domestic affairs or catalyse its growth and strength.

Regardless of the consequences, the fundamental existential question for the Papuans is whether they, along with their global solidarity networks, can reinvent themselves while nurturing the fragile hope of restoring West Papua’s sovereignty in a world rife with change and uncertainty?

Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Silenced Voices: Kashmir, Palestine, and BRICS Uncovered appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

But these moves are an essential aspect of the BRICS countries’ de-risking from Western banking systems. Following the sanctions on Russia, whereby billions of dollars of Russian reserves in US and European banks were seized, China and India were strongly motivated to reduce their exposure to Western regulators. China sold off huge portfolios of US Treasury bonds, and both China and India demanded physical deliveries of gold previously held by European custodians.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Inside China Business.

The major world powers – the ‘collective West’, China, India, Russia – provide it with most of the death toys and the fuel to run them. None of these hard-nosed political schemers want to see Israel collapse, nor do any of them lose much sleep over the plight of the Palestinians. I, like many others today, am devoting my life to help free Palestine and really, really don’t want to be disappointed, so I’ll temper my enthusiasm, hold off on celebrating the end of the monstrosity. I am not counting any chickens yet. It’s a long way till the final act when the fat lady belts out her last hava nagila.

Dan Steinbock has written a book titled The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military (2025). Steinbock is a leading international economic expert who has put his chips on the side of BRICS and multipolarism. That’s where the future is and the ‘collective West’ better wake up soon as it is being left behind. And that includes Israel, as the West’s swan song to 19th century imperial glory. He is CEO and founder of Difference Group (Paul Krugman is a member of the board), its purpose: In the past, the West drove the global economic prospects. Today, that role belongs to the Global South. We help governments, institutions, businesses, and NGOs navigate in the new and complex, multipolar environment.

The thesis of The Fall is simple: Aiming to turn a secular democracy into a Jewish autocracy/ theocracy, the most far-right government in the history of Israel has continued to push this judicial coup amid the fog of war. These cleavages in the Israeli society figure large in its political disintegration.

Most analysis of the dilemmas Israel faces looks to the occupation of the Palestinian territories in the 1967 War and the subsequent expansion of Jewish settlements as the chief problem. They are its proximate effect; following directly on the ethnic expulsions of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Steinbock makes it clear the Israelis never had any interest in anything but one Jews-only state, which was sort of achieved in the 1950s. Everything thereafter is footnotes.¹ A pro-forma future two-state solution with present de facto one-state realities.²

The US is both the problem, having encouraged Israel in its expansion from 1948 on, feeding it with lethal weapons, financing settlements condoning ethnic cleansing and murder on a daily basis, and the solution, as the current genocidal monster Israel would indeed ‘fall’ at the ‘twinkling of an eye’ if the US closed the spigot.

The last US president to try that was Bush I, whose feeble attempt to stop the settlement expansion led to his humiliating defeat from a vengeful Israel lobby a few months later in 1992. The penultimate protest, JFK’s stand against Israel acquiring nukes, led to his assassination and replacement by Israel sycophant LBJ. With both Republican and Democratic parties in lockstep today, supporting Israel’s textbook genocide, the only hope is public opinion, anti-apartheid activism, which is increasingly criminalized in the ‘collective West’.

Steinbock points to the mid-50s as the moment of truth, though we can go back to Jabotinsky in the 1920s, or Ben Gurion in the fateful 1948, when the slaughter began in earnest and was clear, certainly to the Palestinians, if not to a still naive collective West. The ‘bilateral’ ties with Washington and massive US military aid kicked in then and have reached staggering proportions now, a virtual blank cheque to reak havoc, no end in sight.

These ties led to such new-old doctrines as the Dahiya (suburb) doctrine of carpet bombing civilians, the Hannibal directive to murder Israelis stupid enough to be taken hostage, and mass assassination factories, backed by pioneering artificial intelligence. The socialism of labor Zionism was replaced by the hard-right coalitions driven by revisionist Zionism, thanks to US neoliberal economic policies, assertive neoconservatism and Jewish-American donors. It also explains the rise of the Messianic far-right, centrist parties, and the failure of the Left.

The Fall of Israel covers the country’s political and ethnic divides, economic polarization, social and military changes, the shifts in the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty, the apartheid regime in the occupied territories, the genocidal atrocities, the regional and global reverberations, and the ensuing human and economic costs, both prior and subsequent to Israel’s fatal war on Gaza. Not to mention the domestic hell – the economic polarization, the collapse of innovative, high tech start-ups, the talent brain drain, the undermined welfare state, rising poverty and the subsidized religious sector.

Steinbock documents the three waves of settlers from 1948, the last following the 1993 Oslo Accords, which should have ended the settlements, but was so flawed that it allowed their acceleration, now under policing by the Palestinian Authority, even as Hamas was elected in Gaza, and the PA totally discredited, but still the de facto ‘authority’, now just a fig leaf for creeping genocide. Israeli attacks on Palestinians increased, killing Palestinians on a daily basis, with occasional massive bombings of Gaza (2008, 2009, 2014, 2023) killing thousands each time.

Steinbock documents the atrocities, the complicity of the US. His many charts show the massive increase in West Bank land seizures in 2023, clearly part of a push to fully steal all the West Bank, even as there is no ‘exit strategy’ for the millions of Palestinians still alive. We know what Netanyahu would like to do to each and every one of those vermin, and at this point US politicians are more or less united on letting him ‘finish the job’. Steinbock (and all of us) pin our hopes on world mass opinion. None of the world leaders apart from the Axis of Resistance can be counted on. Arab leaders loathe the pesky Palestinians almost as much as US-Israel does. It is only the revolting masses that stand between them and the Palestinians.

Tactics? Strategy? Duh …

Their only strategy to achieve Apartheid 2.0 is denial of the facts on the ground, starting from 1948, denying the ethnic ‘cleansing’, the mass slaughter, the erasure of hundreds of Palestinian villages. Israelis pay no attention to the current slaughter, most hoping that the IDF and settlers kill all Palestinians still breathing. Israelis tactics are violence, murder, theft. In short, terrorism. But this is also its strategy since 1948, along with ‘divide and conquer’ of its Arab neighbors.

Steinbock doesn’t take seriously the option of total erasure of the Palestinians, though that is the stated goal of Israeli leaders. The victory of the dead. But even if they could dump the Palestinians in Sinai, that is not a strategy which can bring peace, which would require negotiating with your own dispossessed citizens, and neighbors. In good faith. Which is impossible for Israel, as it is terrorizing its own Arab and its neighbors. In short, Israel can only survive through 24/7 terror, which is very expensive and means 24/7 US military aid. This can continue only as long as the US can keep printing dollars to cover its own massive debt. 18% of government spending is just to pay interest on this debt. As this continues to increase, eventually the US will be bankrupt, unable to function under the mountain of debt. This inevitable bankruptcy of the US will finally hit Israel, bringing to an end the blank cheque on its daily horrors, but I keep reminding myself, it took Rome four centuries to finally collapse collapse.

What is particularly creepy is how Israel has used Palestinians as guinea pigs for testing its weapons of crowd control, now touting itself as the leader in the technology of totalitarian mind-body control. The only growth industry now for Israel is producing weapons, spyware, i.e., anything disgusting and lethal. This also began in the 1950s as Israel settled in to its schizoid de facto one-state- Jews-only state. The Israel Military Industry (IMI) began collaboration with the IDF, aiming to develop the most technologically advanced small arms systems for troops fighting in urban areas and harsh environments. The state-owned IMI (i.e., socialized death toys) was privatized in 2018, when it was taken over by Elbit Systems. (Poor Elbit is now the victim of western activists, who forced it to close up shop in Britain. Elbit has become our calling card for smashing windows and splashing red paint.)

Israel has had to work very hard to overcome its notoriety as terrorist and mass killer. And it worked! By the early 1980s, more than 50 countries on five continents had become customers for Israeli killing technology. Israel added some sugar to its military toys, famously bragging about its agricultural successes in ‘making the desert bloom,’ and uses that as PR abroad about how nice Israel really is. That and weapons, ‘butter and guns’, though its ‘butter’ is all milked from stolen land, and its guns are used not to defend, but to suppress popular uprisings in oppressive Israel-like regimes around the world.

Yes, Dahiya and Hannibal, but these ‘doctrines’ are merely (disgusting, inhuman) tactics rather than winning long run strategies. Israel’s tactics/ strategy have been violence, denial, theft with the goal of a Jews-only state, ignoring the natives who lived there, and then more violence. Which apparently works for world elites, including not just the US, but Chinese, Indian and Russian. No one besides plucky South Africa, Colombia and Bolivia have broken relations with the monster, despite rivers of crocodile tears.

The Palestinian strategy is primarily nonviolent resistance with a militant wing occasionally fighting back, which is fully legal for a nation under occupation but condemned as terrorism. Funny how the real terrorists call the shots. The militants address the egregious crimes of the occupiers; they do not target civilians, even medevac helicopters.³ This strategy of compassion for the wounded is based on Islam, where rules of engagement with the enemy are nonnegotiable. Another religious principle rejects assassination of enemy leaders.

Such ethical behavior is alien to Israel, which has assassinated hundreds of Palestinian, Lebanese, etc leaders, ‘rationally’ reasoning that the enemy will collapse without them. When Israel assassinates Palestinian leaders, they are mourned, they become martyrs, inspiring the next generation. Whatever personal flaws Nasrallah may have had, he is now a saint, an inspiration to all freedom-loving people. His body parts were gathered and temporarily hidden to prevent Israel from bombing them, and eventually will be buried probably in Karbala. Sinwar’s body was captured by Israel and most likely will not be returned (maybe dumped from a plane over the ocean like Bin Laden) as it will be a potent sword hanging over Israel’s head.

Israel’s mass murderers, such as Meir Kahane are gruesomely worshipped, but only by nutcase settlers. Israel has few such martyr-heroes, but then neither the Palestinians nor their Muslim allies target Israelis for assassination, not believing that it is a useful tactic or strategy, rather giving a romantic aura of martyrdom to any victim as indeed is the case when Israelis target Palestinians. The Palestinians’ goal is jannah, the path/ strategy is moral and ethical living, prayer, jihad, martyrdom. Tactics are waging war to the death against the enemy, picking up unexploded Israeli bombs and reusing them. All the time, appealing to humanity, to the basic decency of the outside world, calling on world opinion, boycotting, bringing criminal charges to bring peace.

Steinbock introduces necrotization, which seeks to transform a world of life into a world of death, because that is what displacement, dispossession and devastation ultimately require. It is the collective psychological obliteration of those who have nothing to lose, and therefore fight for their homes, refuse to move away, risk nothingness for being.⁴ Is this a strategy, or again just a tactic meant to kill or so disillusion Palestinians, so that whoever remains alive will be glad to leave. Whatever. It ignores the ‘last stand’ psychology of the dispossessed, who prefer to die fighting for their homes than to flee to a desolate refugee camp, so it really just amounts to genocide. It just occurred to me that a crude policy of terror, dispossession and genocide doesn’t need any subtleties like tactics vs strategy. The victory of the dead.

Jew vs Jew, Arab turmoil

The real showdown should be between the more universalist Jewish diaspora and the nationalist, racist Israeli Jews. Even as Trump is showered with Adelson’s millions to complete the Israeli dream of total control of the Middle East, some Jews are protesting, but have made zero difference politicly as the Democrats and Republicans are still in lockstep. So much for that strategy. What’s left? The brain drain and increased emigration of Jews from Israel as the crisis deepens. But that leaves the Kahane-ites in control. So much for that strategy.

He considers the rise of Islamic movements in particular the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under al-Banna, which spread to all the Arab world, rivaled by Arab nationalism under Nasser and Hafez Assad. In all cases, the MBs were crushed by neocolonial regimes, and then attempts to promote Arab nationalism failed, descending into personal dictatorships. Muslims make poor nationalists. Islam rejects ideologies that interfere with being good Muslims. In Iraq the Baath party reformers finally ending in the humiliating defeat of atheistic Saddam Hussein (who called on Allah in a panic at the end). Though battered, the MBs remain the only survivors of a century of anti-imperialist struggle, still determined to face off against the Zionist occupiers.

With Israel commanding everyone’s undivided attention, the Arab world remains shamefully ‘divided and conquered’, resentful, even hostile to Shia Iran’s lifeline to Gaza and Lebanon. Jordan and Saudi assistance to US-Israel to shoot down Iran’s missiles will never be erased. Jordan and Saudi leaders have a lot to account for before their people. Only when Israel is eventually brought to justice, can the Middle East develop more naturally. Islam remains the bedrock, and Islamic reforms will be the way forward, based now on the experience of the past century, including Egypti’s MB, Islamic Iran and Afghanistan. The Saudis and Gulf emirates are remnants of 19th century British imperialism and do not represent the future of the Egyptian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Jordanian, etc masses. But until the enemy is defeated, we must stand shoulder to shoulder (though the Saudis et al should keep a look out over theirs).

Russia, China

Steinbock doesn’t make predictions on their account. He puts his hopes on BRICS, especially China’s hint at engagement, its brokering Saudi-Iranian reconciliation, and Palestinian factions uniting. The latter was called the Beijing Declaration, calling for a larger-scale Israeli-Palestinian peace conference and a timetable to implement a two-state solution.

I think it is a mistake to be too hopeful. Russia and Chinese have highly developed economic relations with Israel; Russia provides it with the oil to use to bomb Palestinians; China is Israel’s largest trade partner – 18% of trade vs 10% for US and 2.5% for Russia. Chinese investment is more than US$15b, spawning seed capital in Israeli startup companies, as well as the acquisition of Israeli companies by major Chinese corporations that incorporate Israel’s know how to help invigorate the development of the modern Chinese economy more efficiently. China ranked second in 2015 after the US on collaboration with Israeli high-tech firms that are backed by Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist. Neither Russia nor China want to see Israel collapse. BRICS is not a coherent economic force. We are stuck with US-Israel, the Axis of Resistance, the Palestinian now scattered around the world, working with the handful of anti-Zionist diaspora Jews, until the US itself collapses. That seems to be our strategy.

All countries listen to China, Israel included. It would be lost if China made an serious move to threaten its economic ties. China’s recent two-state proposals prompted Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to move forward with plans to present a joint political vision for rehabilitating the Gaza Strip and establishing a Palestinian state after the Israel-Hamas war. To preempt such schemes, Netanyahu’s office presented its own vision of ‘Gaza 2035’ in May. The Israeli proposal labels Gaza as an ‘Iranian outpost’, taunting the quisling Arab leaders as ineffectual, traitors, allies of the hated Israel. So Gaza can be taken, as it isn’t really part of the Arab world, but an Iranian outpost which must be destroyed. More tactic than strategy and very silly. Israel would mobilize the emirates and Saudis to divvy out aid to Gazans and hunt down and eliminate Hamas, much like the Oslo Accords got the PA to police Palestinians as settlements proceeded. After 15 years, if things go well, some limited autonomy would be allowed, all the while under Israeli hegemony.

Steinbock puts his eggs in China’s basket in his vision of any future Middle East peace. At each step, China is filling in where the US fears (or is too lazy) to tread. Re Egypt, in the absence of Israel’s full withdrawal from the occupied territories, the bilateral trust with Israel has been eroding for decades. Today it is sustained mainly by US aid, which is vital to bottomless-pit Cairo. Meanwhile China’s multibillion-dollar economic cooperation initiatives are fostering rather than undermining Egyptian development. Ditto Jordan, where China is building a national railway network, an oil pipeline to link Iraq and Jordan, and a new Jordan-China university. Egypt and Jordan, weak and corrupt, are throwing themselves at China’s feet, much like Iran did over the past decade. China is waging a positive-sum war against/ with the world, promising prosperity and Chinese hegemony as a package deal. (At least this is not the subtle Bretton Woods ‘prosperity and US imperialism’.)

China’s Belt Road Initiative has reached around the world, despite US attempts to sabotage China with its own rail-ship road from India through the Middle East to Europe, but that assumes Saudi compliance, which is dead-on-arrival now. One can only laugh in disbelief as US hegemony is being K-Oed by the Chinese economic fist – everywhere. Unlike US-Israel, China has a clear strategy of nonzero sum cooperation with all, promising advantages where past ‘aid’ meant corruption, misuse of funds, more debt.

The US-China economic rivalry is providing lots of brainstorming by potential participants in both hopeful outcomes, but China remains cautious, more or less abiding by US sanctions on Russia. BRICS at least has raised the profile of the South, given them collective clout though still much less than the collective West.

With the Ukraine war unending, Russia is now unofficially joining all anti-US efforts, probably providing Iran and the Houthis with satellite information to keep the Suez Canal out of commission and for accurate bombing, possibly even providing a few missiles and drones. Why not? The world really is going to Hell in a handbasket, and the ride is rocky but exciting and even hopeful, considering the bad guys seem to be doing everything wrong, pushing Putin into the hands of enemy.

Nuke time?

The ongoing war on multiple fronts from the Axis of Resistance, with 100,000s of Hezbollah bombs ready, could push Israel to use its nukes.⁵ The Begin ‘doctrine’ was ‘formulated’ to justify bombing Iraq’s nuclear facilities and is still in play against Iran. Several nuclear sites were bombed in October, though not the main sites, and were accompanied by a promise to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities after the election.

Trump has already voiced his approval. But Iran’s success in bombing Israel twice in 2024 shows it has jumped ahead of Israel (and the US) in hypersonic missiles, which can be mobilized to really destroy little sitting-duck Israel. Israel is still loudly threatening Iran but my gut reaction is to imagine hundreds of hypersonic missiles reining down on Israel. Israelis are uniformly racist monsters now, so the civilian-military distinction is moot. When the whole world feels that way about you, all the king’s horse and all the king’s lackeys won’t be able to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.

In the West, Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), and the Abraham Accords (2020–2021) with some Gulf states are often portrayed as steps toward a two-state solution. In Israel, they are seen more as bilateral “normalization” deals with individual Arab countries that will over time marginalize or exclude Palestinians from a final peace solution. The Gaza War has jeopardized the future of such normalization agreements, while severely shuttering the existing deals. The trouble is neither the US nor Israel ever took the negotiations seriously. No one believed then or now that the two-state solution is possible. Meanwhile even US presidents don’t control things, as congress is completely in thrall to Israel and will not allow any pressure to be put on Israel to negotiate. The Knesset voted unanimously against a Palestinian state for the nth time (68, 9 Arab Israelis voting for a Palestinian state).

Given the likely Trump second term, funded by Adelson, probably none of this matters at all. Trump’s Project 2025 includes Project Esther, which plans to crush all anti-Israel dissent in the US and Europe and to create a Potemkin villlage of acceptable Palestinians, to be kept in line by Arab sheikhs with Israeli puppet masters. Netanyahu couldn’t have said it better.

Steinbock is hopeful re Russia, with its offer to Iran of S-400 anti-missile defense (a decade after Iran paid for them), showing the US that it is not the only kid on the block with nukes. But Steinbock’s only real hope is that world opinion, backed by a Jewish diaspora, will somehow click in and bring the US to its senses. I would add the Palestinian diaspora, which is already larger (in 2003 9.6m) than the Jewish one (8.5m), working together, will be the driving force of change. And Islam. It is the fastest growing religion (always has been) and the Middle East is now multiple-birthing Ziophobia and Islamophilia. It’s never been a better time to be a Muslim. We have a huge diaspora in the House of War. And we have Boycott Divest Sanction as the secular version of jihad. When Jews, Christians⁶ and Muslims can join forces, we can do anything.

The first real sign that South African apartheid would be dismantled was when (Jewish) MP Harry Schwarz met with ANC’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi to sign the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith in 1974, enshrined the principles of peaceful transition of power and equality for all, the first such agreement by black and white political leaders in South Africa. But it took another 2 decades of struggle until de Klerk opened bilateral discussions with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for a transition of policies and government.

It seems we have reached that first stage today. Ehud Olmert, who served as the Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister from 2005 to 2006, met Pope Francis October 17, 2024, to promote a peace plan that would see a Palestinian state existing alongside the state of Israel ‘on the basis of 1967 borders’ with a few territorial adjustments. Their plan calls for the city of Jerusalem to be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Old City being ‘administered by a trusteeship of five states of which Israel and Palestine are part.’

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu (Mongolia), Floating in the Wind, 2023.

In 1919, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’. Churchill, grappling at the time with the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq as Britain’s secretary of state for war and air, argued that such use of gas ‘would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected’.

Gas warfare had first been employed by France in August 1914 (during World War I) using tear gas, followed by Germany with the use of chlorine in April 1915 and phosgene (which enters the lungs and causes suffocation) in December 1915. In 1918, the man who developed the use of chlorine and phosgene as weapons, Dr Fritz Haber (1868–1934), won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is a sad fact that Dr Haber also developed the hydrocyanide insecticides Zyklon A and Zyklon B, the latter of which was used to kill six million Jews in the Holocaust – including some of his family members. In 1925, the Geneva Protocol prohibited the ‘use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, and of bacteriological methods of warfare’, disproving Churchill’s claim that such weapons ‘leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected’. His assessment was nothing more than war propaganda that disregards the lives of peoples such as the ‘uncivilised tribes’ against whom these gases were deployed. As an anonymous Indian soldier wrote in a letter home circa 1915 as he trudged through the mud and gas in Europe’s trenches: ‘Do not think that this is war. This is not war. It is the ending of the world’.

Maitha Abdalla (United Arab Emirates), Between the Floor and the Canopy, 2023.

In the aftermath of the war, Virginia Woolf wrote in her novel Mrs. Dalloway of a former soldier who, overcome by fear, uttered, ‘The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames’. This sentiment not only holds true of this former soldier’s post-traumatic stress disorder: it is how nearly everyone feels, besieged by fears of a world engulfed in flames and being unable to do anything to prevent it.

Those words resonate today, as NATO’s provocations in Ukraine put the possibility of nuclear winter on the table and the US and Israel commit genocide against the Palestinian people as the world watches in horror. Remembering these words today makes one wonder: can we awake from this century-long nightmare, rub our eyes, and realise that life can go on without war? Such a wonder comes from a fit of hope, not from any real evidence. We are tired of carnage and death. We want a permanent end to war.

Ismael Al-Sheikhly (Iraq), Watermelon Sellers, 1958.

At their sixteenth summit in October, the nine members of BRICS issued the Kazan Declaration, in which they expressed concern about ‘the rise of violence’ and ‘continuing armed conflicts in different parts of the world’. Dialogue, they concluded, is better than war. The tenor of this declaration echoes the 1961 negotiations between John McCloy, arms control advisor to US President John F. Kennedy, and Valerian A. Zorin, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations. The McCloy-Zorin Accords on the Agreed Principles for General and Complete Disarmament made two important points: first, that there should be ‘general and complete disarmament’ and, second, that war should no longer be ‘an instrument for settling international problems’. None of this is on the agenda today, as the Global North, with the US at its helm, breathes fire like an angry dragon, unwilling to negotiate with its adversary in good faith. The arrogance that set in after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 remains. At his press conference in Kazan, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg that the Global North leaders ‘always try to put [the Russians] in our place’ at their meetings and reduce ‘Russia to the status of a second-class state’. It is this attitude of superiority that defines the North’s relations with the South. The world wants peace, and for peace there must be negotiations in good faith and on equal terms.

Reem Al Jeally (Sudan), بحر العطاء (The Sea of Giving), 2016.

Peace can be understood in two different ways: as passive peace or as active peace. Passive peace is the peace that exists when there is a relative lack of ongoing warfare, yet countries around the world continue to build up their military arsenals. Military spending now overwhelms the budgets of many countries: even when guns are not fired, they are still being purchased. That is peace of a passive kind.

Active peace is a peace in which the precious wealth of society goes toward ending the dilemmas faced by humanity. An active peace is not just an end to gunfire and military expenditures, but a dramatic increase in social spending to end problems such as poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and despair. Development – in other words, overcoming the social problems that humanity has inherited from the past and reproduces in the present – relies on a condition of active peace. Wealth, which is produced by society, must not deepen the pockets of the rich and fuel the engines of war but fill the bellies of the many.

We want ceasefires, certainly, but we want more than that. We want a world of active peace and development.

We want a world where our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like.

Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco), Henna Angels, 2010.

In 1968, the communist US poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote ‘Poem (I Lived in the First Century of World Wars)’. I often remember the line about newspapers publishing ‘careless stories’ and Rukeyser’s reflections on whether or not we can awaken from our amnesia:

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Can you reach beyond yourself?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Will the BRICS economic and political alliance change the world’s U.S.-centered balance of power? As the annual BRICS summit wraps up in Russia, we host a debate between American economist Richard Wolff and South African sociologist Patrick Bond over the significance of the conference. This year, the nine BRICS countries invited 13 new “partner states” into their alliance, which Wolff calls “historic” and “a serious economic competitor to the United States and its role in the world.” Bond, on the other hand, argues that BRICS should be considered a “subimperial” formation, which expands and legitimates the existing world economic system rather than truly disrupting it.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a meeting of leaders at the BRICS Summit in Kazan on Wednesday. In his speech, he focused on the growing role and prospects of the economic group, and warned about the risks to the global economy from Western sanctions and protectionist policies.

Putin also announced Russia’s initiatives within the BRICS framework, including the formation of a grain exchange and a new investment platform.

Here are the key takeaways from the president’s address.

Multipolar world order being formed

World trade and the global economy as a whole are undergoing significant changes, the Russian president told the extended-format BRICS meeting. The center of business activity is gradually shifting towards developing markets, he added. “A multipolar model is being formed, which is launching a new wave of growth, primarily due to the countries of the Global South and East – and, naturally, the BRICS countries.”

Leading role of BRICS

The BRICS countries’ share of global GDP in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) will amount to 36.7% by the end of 2024 and will continue to expand, Putin predicted. Meanwhile, the share of the Group of Seven (G7) leading Western economies is projected to account for slightly above 30%.

“The trend for the BRICS’ leading role in the global economy will only strengthen,” Putin said, citing population growth, capital accumulation, urbanization, and increased labor productivity, accompanied by technological innovations as key factors.

West’s unilateral sanctions and debt burden

The Russian president warned of a potential new global crisis, citing the growing debt burden in developed countries, unilateral sanctions, and protectionist policies as key threats. “These factors are fragmenting international trade and foreign investment, particularly in developing nations,” Putin said.

He also pointed to high commodity price volatility and rising inflation, which are eroding incomes and corporate profits in many countries. Putin’s remarks also highlighted concerns over escalating geopolitical tensions and their impact on global economic stability.

New BRICS investment platform as a powerful tool

The Russian leader said that to fully realize the potential of the BRICS countries’ growing economies, the member states should intensify cooperation in areas such as technology, education, resources, trade and logistics, finance, and insurance, as well as increasing the volume of capital investment many times over.

“In this regard, we propose creating a new BRICS investment platform, which would become a powerful tool for supporting our national economies and would also provide financial resources to the countries of the Global South and East,” Putin said.

BRICS-based grain exchange

The Russian leader proposed a common BRICS grain exchange to protect trade between members from excessive price volatility. BRICS countries are “among the world’s largest producers of grain, vegetables, and oilseeds,” he noted. Such a bourse could be expanded to trade in other major commodities such as oil, gas and precious metals, Putin said.

The initiative is aimed at protecting national markets from negative external interference, speculation and attempts to cause artificial shortages of food products, according to Putin.

AI alliance of BRICS

Putin also proposed a BRICS AI alliance to regulate the technology and prevent its illegal deployment. “In Russia, the business community has adopted a code of ethics in this area, which our BRICS partners and other countries could join,” Putin noted.

Other proposals

The president also spoke about increasing transport connectivity between BRICS countries, saying this could provide additional opportunities for growth and diversification of mutual trade.

“Such promising projects as the formation of a permanent BRICS logistics platform, preparation of a review of transport routes, opening of an electronic communications platform for transport, and establishment of a reinsurance pool are being discussed,” Putin said.

The issues related to the transition of the global economy to low-emission development models are very important, according to the Russian president. The BRICS contact group on climate and sustainable development is closely involved in this work and will continue to counteract attempts by some countries to use the climate agenda to eliminate competitors from the market, he said. “We consider the initiatives on the BRICS partnership on carbon markets and the climate research platform to be promising,” Putin concluded.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by RT.

But the claim lacks evidence. An official from one BRICS member state told AFCL that the North had never formally expressed any intent to join the alliance and there had been no internal discussion of such a matter.

The claim was shared on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform, on May 9, 2024.

“North Korea has expressed interest in joining BRICS,” the claim reads.

The claim was shared alongside a photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the Russian President Vladimir Putin shaking hands, while posing for the photo. 

The same claim was shared on other social media platforms, including Telegram and X  – formerly known as Twitter – as well as some media reports. 

Crypto News, an internet outlet focusing on cryptocurrency, published an article on May 11 suggesting that North Korea was attracted to BRICS because such a strategic alliance would offer a way for the tightly sanctioned country to relieve some of the economic pressures it is facing. 

BRICS is an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates.

But the claim lacks evidence. 

‘No internal discussion’

AFCL contacted the U.S. embassies of five longtime BRICS member states - namely Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - but only the South African embassy responded as of press time, commenting that there had been no internal discussion within the organization of such a matter.

Keyword searches found no official or credible reports to back the claim. 

Separate keyword searches on North Korea’s official media outlets also found no information regarding its intention to join the BRICS.

Unrelated photo

A google reverse image search found the photo of Kim and Putin shaking hands published by Reuters on April 26 and it has nothing to do with the North’s intention to join the BRICS.

“North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok, Russia in this undated photo released on April 25, 2019 by North Korea's Central News Agency,” the caption of the photo reads.

Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dukin Han for RFA Korean.

Halas joins many others in envisioning all twenty-first-century resistance to US imperialism and the imperialism of its (largely ex-Cold War) partners as the same as resistance to imperialism in general. They divide the world into the US and its friends and those who, to some extent or another, oppose the US. Sometimes they characterize this as a conflict between the global North and the global South. Sometimes they refer to the imperialist antagonists collectively as “the West.”

From the perspective of the multipolarity proponents, if the countries resisting the US should neutralize US domination and that of its allies, then the world will become peaceful and harmonious. In their view, it is not capitalism that obstructs enduring peace, but US imperial aspirations alone. Accordingly, in the idealized future, multiple friendly, cooperative states (poles) will engage in peaceful, equitable economic transactions that all agree will be mutually advantageous — what Chinese leaders call “win-win.” If this isn’t achieved immediately, it will soon follow. Is not socialism down the road?

The reality is that as important as resisting US domination and aggression surely is, its decline or defeat will not put an end to imperialism, as long as monopoly capitalism continues to exist.

In the history of modern-era imperialism, the decline of every dominating great capitalist power has spawned the rise of another. As one power recedes, others step up and contest for global dominance — that is the fundamental logic of imperialism. And, all too often, war ensues.

• CLASS: Glaringly absent from the theory of multipolarity is the concept of class. Advocates of a multipolar world fail to explain how class relations– specifically the interests of the working class– are advanced with the existence of multiple capitalist poles. Halas tells us that the “BRICS+ is a coalition with a concrete class character rooted in the global South” but he doesn’t tell us what that “concrete class character” is. This is a critical question and a significant problem, given that Halas concedes that “most BRICS+ nations are capitalist”! Of the original BRICS members, capitalism is unquestionably the dominant economic system in Russia, India, South Africa, and Brazil. Of the candidate members scheduled for entry in 2024– Argentina (likely a withdrawal), Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates– all are capitalist. The idea that working class interests will be served, and socialism advanced by this group seems far-fetched.

• CLASS CONFLICT: Class struggle — the motor of the struggle for workers’ advances, workers’ power, and socialism — has been stifled by the governments of nearly all the BRICS and BRICS+ countries. In Iran, for example, Communism is illegal and Communists have been executed in large numbers. Communism is likewise illegal in Saudi Arabia. Modi has conducted class war against India’s farmers. South Africa’s working class has seen unemployment and poverty rise under the disappointing government. Egyptian workers labor under a brutal military government. How does their entry into BRICS promise socialism?

• GLOBAL NORTH/GLOBAL SOUTH: Halas and the “multipolaristas” would have it that the “contradiction” informing multipolarity is the clash between the “global north” and the “global south” or, paradoxically, the “West” and the rest of the world. Apart from the fact that the geographical division captures little—other than the imagination of social-media leftists– it gives the impression that Australia and New Zealand have something in common with impoverished Burundi. Or that Serbia and Germany are Western partners in exploiting small African countries. There is, of course, a division between wealthy countries and poor countries, between exploiters and exploited. Historically, the sharpest fault lines have been defined by colonialism and its successor, neo-colonialism. But the imperialist cards are shuffled from time to time due to resource inequities, uneven development, or other gained advantages. For example, the Arabian Peninsula was once a dominated colony of the Ottoman empire. That empire’s dissolution and subsequent developments led to an emergent Saudi Arabia infused with resource wealth and high up on the imperialist hierarchy. Today, India has three of the top 20 corporations in Asia by market value, larger than all Japanese corporations except for Toyota. India’s Tata Group has a market capitalization of over $380 billion, with its tentacles spread to 100 countries. The June 28 UK Morning Star editorial informs us: “Tata Steel’s threat to shut the blast furnaces at Port Talbot three months earlier if Unite goes ahead with strike action is blackmail. The India-based multinational does not believe steelworkers should have a say in the plant’s future… It’s outrageous that the future of British steelmaking should be at the whim of a billionaire on a different continent.”

• DECOUPLING: Halas suggests that BRICS+ offers an opportunity for countries to break out of the capitalist international financial structures imposed after World War II and the dominance of the dollar in global transactions. Such an option may exist in the future, but clearly it is intended as an option and not a substitute for existing structures and exchange instruments. As recently as late June of this year, PRC Premier Li Qiang said that “We should broadly open our minds, work closely together, abandon camp formations, (and) oppose decoupling…” [my emphasis] It is clear that the picture of global country-to-country relations– as envisioned by Peoples’ China’s second most prominent leader, Li, at the “Summer” Davos– offers no challenge to existing financial arrangements or to the dominance of the dollar. The antagonistic conflict between the old order and the new multipolar order is more a fantasy in the minds of some on the left than a real policy goal of the leading country in BRICS.

• ANTI-IMPERIALISM: Halas would like us to believe that twentieth-century anti-imperialism is multipolarity embodied in BRICS. He cites the UN votes on Palestinian status and oppression (predictably vetoed by the US) as an example of “global south” anti-imperialism. While symbolic and not without significance, it is hardly the principled anti-imperialist action we came to know in earlier times. It is worth reminding that Saudi Arabia was on the verge of abandoning Palestine for better relations with Israel before October 7. Egypt has long sold out the cause of Palestine, as has much of the Arab world. According to Al Jazeera, India is currently selling military supplies to Israel. Virtue-signaling at UN forums is not a substitute for concrete, material solidarity.

• CHINA: This is not the place for debating whether the Peoples’ Republic of China is a socialist country, a favorite parlor game of the Euro-US left. However, it is worth stating that — as the only self-acclaimed socialist country currently in BRICS — the PRC does not claim to be advocating, encouraging, or materially aiding the struggle for socialism outside of China. Unlike the former Soviet Union, the PRC does not prioritize or privilege investment or material support for countries embarking on the socialist path. The word “socialism” is largely absent from its foreign policy statements. While the Chinese leadership defends its outlook as “socialism with Chinese characters,” it does not demonstrably support “socialism with anybody else’s national characters.” Yet, some on the left see multipolarity and a largely capitalist BRICS as a road to socialism for the rest of us?

• WE HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE: In the 1960s, it was common for the left in Europe and the US to lose hope in the revolutionary potential of the working classes. Where working-class movements in Europe aligned with Communist Parties, they fully committed to a gradualist, parliamentary road to socialism. An anti-Communist New Left proposed a different vehicle of revolutionary change: The Third World. In the common parlance of the time, the Third World was the newly emergent, former colonies that were neither in the US camp nor the Soviet camp. Per this view, revolutionary change (and ultimately) socialism would grow from the independent road chosen by the leaders of these emergent nations. But instead, they were overwhelmed by the neo-colonialism of the great capitalist powers and absorbed by the global capitalist market, with few exceptions.

• AND EVEN EARLIER: Karl Kautsky, the major theoretician of the Socialist International, anticipated multipolarity in 1914, introducing a concept that he called “ultra-imperialism.” Kautsky believed that great power imperialism and war had no future. The imperialist system would, of necessity, stabilize and, due to declining capital exports, “Imperialism is thus digging its own grave… [T]he policy of imperialism therefore cannot be continued much longer.” For Kautsky, a stage of “concentration” of capitalist states, comparable to cartelization of corporations, will lead to inter-imperialist harmony. Lenin rejected this theory out of hand. For a discussion, go here.

Imperialism is not a stable system. Capitalist participants are always seeking a competitive advantage against their rivals. Sometimes they find it useful or necessary to form (often temporary) coalitions or alliances with others in order to protect or advance their interests. One such alliance was forged by the US after the Second World War in opposition to the socialist bloc and the national liberation movements.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US sought to keep existing coalitions intact by selecting or devising new enemies– the war on drugs, the war against terrorism, and wars of humanitarian intervention. Beneath these political ties existed a US established and dominated global economic structure privileging the US, but deemed necessary to protect the capitalist system.

This politico-economic framework served capitalism well, until the great economic crash of 2007-2009 and the ensuing cracks and fractures in the framework. The turmoil unleashed by the crisis dampened the pace of growth in international trade and accelerated the competition for markets. Further challenging the US-centered framework was the ability of People’s China to navigate the crisis rather painlessly. Where the US ruling class formerly saw the PRC as an opportunity, it began to see China as a rival in the imperialist system.

The post-Soviet global market — cemented by the so-called “globalization” process — began to unravel in the wake of twentieth-century economic instability, especially the 2007-2009 crash. Rather than defend existing free-trade dogma, capitalist countries were drawn to protectionism and economic nationalism. Beginning in the Trump Administration and accelerating during the Biden Administration, the US waged a tariff-and-sanctions war against economic competitors. US dominance of international financial institutions and the nearly universal dependence upon the US dollar gave US leaders even more weapons in this competition.

The US “pivot” to China in its defense posture and its growing hostility to Russia were reflections of its losing ground to the PRC’s growing economic might and Russia’s dominance of Eurasian energy markets.

Understandably, in this new era of economic nationalism, Russia, China, the leading power on the subcontinent, India, Africa’s top economic power, South Africa, and the largest economy in Latin America, Brazil, would look to counter aggressive US and EU competition. The era of mutual cooperation was ending, and the era of intense rivalry and national self-interest was emerging. It was in this environment that BRICS was born.

It was a capitalist response to a capitalist problem, not a path to socialism.

The main task for Communists and progressives is not to take sides, but to fight to ensure that these fractures and frictions do not explode into war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

In early June, a rumour began to circulate – which was widely reported in the Indian press as true – that the government of Saudi Arabia had allowed its petrodollar agreement with the United States to lapse. This agreement, made in 1974, is quite straight-forward and fulfills various needs of the US government: the US purchases oil from Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia uses that money to buy military equipment from US arms manufacturers while holding the income from the oil sales in US Treasury Bills and in the Western financial system. This arrangement to recycle oil profits into the US economy and the Western banking world is known as the petrodollar system.

This non-exclusive arrangement between the two countries never required the Saudis to limit their oil sales to dollars or to recycle their oil profits exclusively in US Treasury Bills (of which it holds a considerable $135.9 billion) and Western banks. Indeed, the Saudis are free to sell oil in multiple currencies, such as the Euro, and participate in digital currency platforms such as mBridge, a trial initiative of the Bank of International Settlements and the central banks of China, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Nonetheless, the rumour that this decades-long petrodollar agreement had come to an end reflects the widespread expectation that a seismic shift in the financial system will overturn the rule of the Dollar-Wall Street regime. It was a false rumour, but it carried within it a truth about the possibilities of a post-dollar or de-dollarised world.

Xu Lei (China), Map of the Mountains and Seas, 2003

The invitation extended to six countries to join the BRICS bloc last August was a further indication that such a shift is underway. Among these countries are Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, although Saudi Arabia has yet to finalise its membership. With its expanded membership, BRICS would include the two countries with the largest and second largest gas reserves in the world (Russia and Iran, respectively) and the two countries that accounted for nearly a quarter of global oil production (Russia and Saudi Arabia, all figures as of 2022). The political opening between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by Beijing in March 2023, as well as the signs that the US allies UAE and Saudi Arabia seek to diversify their political linkages, demonstrate the possible end of the petrodollar system. That was at the heart of the rumour in early June.

However, this possibility should not be exaggerated, as the Dollar-Wall Street regime remains intact and significantly powerful. Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that, as of the last quarter of 2023, the US dollar accounted for 58.41% of allocated currency reserves, which is far more than the reserves held in euros (19.98%), Japanese yen (5.7%), British pound sterling (4.8%), and Chinese renminbi (short of 3%). Meanwhile, the US dollar remains the main invoicing currency in global trade, with 40% of international trade transactions in goods invoiced in dollars despite the fact that the US share of global trade is just 10%. While the dollar remains the key currency, it nonetheless faces challenges around the world, with the share of the US dollar in allocated currency reserves declining gradually but steadily over the last twenty years.

Three factors are driving de-dollarisation: the US economy’s lack of strength and potential that began with the Third Great Depression in 2008; the aggressive use of illegal sanctions – especially financial sanctions – by the United States and its Global North allies against one quarter of the countries in the world; and the development and strengthening of relations between countries of the Global South, especially through platforms such as BRICS. In 2015, BRICS created the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank, to navigate a post-Dollar-Wall Street regime and to produce facilities to further development rather than austerity. The creation of these BRICS institutions and the increased use of local currencies to pay for cross-border trade created an expectation of hastened de-dollarisation. At the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva repeated the call to increase the use of local currencies and perhaps create a BRICS-denominated currency system.

There has been a vibrant debate about de-dollarisation amongst those who have worked in the BRICS institutions and in the large countries that are interested in de-dollarisation, such as China, about its necessity, prospects, and the difficulties of finding new ways to hold currency reserves and invoice global trade. The most recent issue of the international journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), a collaboration between Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Dongsheng, is dedicated to this topic. In the introduction to ‘The BRICS and De-Dollarisation: Opportunities and Challenges’ (volume 2, issue no. 1, May 2024), Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., the first vice president of the NDB (2015–2017), summarises his considerable reflections on the importance of moving away from the Dollar-Wall Street regime and on the political and technical difficulties of such a transition. BRICS, he correctly asserts, is a diverse group of countries with very different political forces in charge of the different states. The political agendas of its members – even with the new mood in the Global South – are particularly diverse when it comes to economic theory, with many of the BRICS states remaining committed to neoliberal formulas while others seek new development models. One of the most important points raised by Nogueira is that the United States ‘will in all likelihood use all the many instruments at its disposal to struggle against any attempt to dethrone the dollar from its status as linchpin of the international monetary system’. These instruments would include sanctions and diplomatic threats, all of which would dampen the confidence of governments that have weaker political commitments and are not backed by popular movements committed to a new world order.

Hung Liu, Sisters, 2000; Lithograph with chine collé on paper, 22 x 29 3/4 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the Harry and Lea Gudelsky Foundation, Inc.; © Hung Liu

De-dollarisation was moving at a very slow pace until 2022, when the Global North countries began to confiscate Russian assets held in the Dollar-Wall Street financial system and anxiety spread across many countries about the safety of their assets in the North American and European banks. Though this confiscation was not new (the United States has done this before to Cuba and Afghanistan, for instance), the scale and severity of these confiscations operated as a ‘confidence-destroying’ measure, as Nogueira puts it.

Nogueira’s introduction is followed by three essays by leading Chinese analysts of the current shifts in the world order. In ‘What Is Driving the BRICS’ Debate on De-Dollarisation?’, Professor Ding Yifan (senior fellow at Beijing’s Taihe Institute) charts the reasons why many Global South countries now seek to trade in local currencies and to offload their reliance upon the Dollar-Wall Street regime. He emphasises two factors that put into question whether or not the dollar will be able to continue to serve as an anchor currency: first, the weakness of the US economy due to its reliance upon military spending over productive investment (the former of which accounts for 53.6% of total world military spending) and, second, the US’s history of breach of contract. At the close of his article, Ding reflects on the possibility of the Global South countries accepting the Chinese renminbi (RMB) as their reference currency, since China’s manufacturing capabilities make the RMB valuable as a way to buy Chinese goods.

Yet, in his essay ‘China’s Foreign Exchange Reserves: Past and Present Security Challenges’, Professor Yu Yongding (member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) is cautious about the possibility of the RMB supplanting the dollar. For the RMB to become an international reserve currency, Yu argues, ‘China must fulfill a series of preconditions, including establishing a sound capital market (especially a deep and highly liquid treasury bond market), a flexible exchange rate regime, free cross-border capital flows, and long-term credit in the market’. This would mean that China would have to eschew its capital controls and begin to offer RMB treasury bonds for international buyers. RMB internationalisation, Yu argues, ‘is a goal worth pursuing’, but it is not something that can take place in the short run. ‘Distant water’, he writes poetically, ‘will not quench immediate thirst’.

Xu De Qi (China), China Flower, 2007.

So, where do we go from here? In his article ‘From De-Risking to De-Dollarisation: The BRICS Currency and the Future of the International Financial Order’, Professor Gao Bai, who teaches at Duke University in the United States, concurs that there is a pressing need to overcome the Dollar-Wall Street regime and that there is no easy way forward at this time. Local currency use has expanded – such as between Russia and China as well as between Russia and India – but such bilateral arrangements are insufficient. Increasingly, as a recent report from the World Gold Council shows, central banks around the world have been buying up gold for their reserves and thereby driving up its price (the spot price for gold is over $2,300 per ounce, far above the $1,200 per ounce price where it hovered in 2015). If no immediate currency is available to supplant the US dollar, Gao argues, then the Global South countries should establish a ‘reference value for settlements in their local currencies and an exchange platform to support such settlements. The great demand for such a valuation provides an opportunity for the creation of a BRICS currency’.

The new issue of Wenhua Zongheng provides a clear and thoughtful assessment of the problems with the Dollar-Wall Street regime and the need for an alternative. The wide array of ideas that are on the table reflect the diversity of discussions taking place within policy circles around the world. We are keen to summarise these ideas and test their technical feasibility and their political viability.

Irene Chou (China), The Universe Is My Mind, 2002.

It is important to note that two of the BRICS countries have elected new governments this year. In India, the far-right government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns to power, but with a much-reduced mandate. Given that the Modi government has put forward a policy of ‘national interest’, it is likely that it will continue to play a role in the BRICS process and to use local currencies to buy goods such as Russian oil. Meanwhile, South Africa’s ruling alliance, led by the African National Congress (ANC), has formed a government with the right-wing Democratic Alliance, which is committed to US imperialism and is not keen on the BRICS agenda. With the likely entry of Nigeria into the BRICS bloc, BRICS’ centre of gravity on the African continent might shift northward.

During the hard years of struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa, ANC member Lindiwe Mabuza (known as Sono Molefe) began to collect poems written by women in the ANC camps. Guerrilla fighters, teachers, nurses, and others sent in poems that she published in a volume called Malibongwe (‘Be Praised’), which referred to the 1956 Women’s March in Pretoria. In her introductory essay, Mabuza (1938–2021) wrote that in struggle ‘there is no romance’; there is ‘only pounding reality’. That phrase, ‘pounding reality’, merits reflection today. Nothing comes from nothing. You have to pound reality to make something, whether a new political opening in places such as India and South Africa or a new financial architecture beyond the Dollar-Wall Street regime.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The government of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has furiously denied the allegations, saying there is no such policy.

Nevertheless, the American Biden administration as well as Canada, Britain and Australia continue to demand accountability over claims that  New Delhi is engaging in “transnational repression” of spying, harassing and killing Indian opponents living in Western states.

The accusations have severely stained political relations. The most fractious example is Canada. After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused Indian state agents of involvement in the murder of an Indian-born Canadian citizen last year, New Delhi expelled dozens of Canadian diplomats.

Relations became further strained this month when The Washington Post published a long article purporting to substantiate claims that Indian security services were organizing assassinations of U.S. and Canadian citizens. The Post named high-level Indian intelligence chiefs in the inner circle of Prime Minister Modi. The implication is a policy of political killings is sanctioned at the very top of the Indian government.

The targets of the alleged murder program are members of the Sikh diaspora. There are large expatriate populations of Sikhs in the U.S., Canada and Britain. In recent years, there has been a renewed campaign among Sikhs for the secession of their homeland of Punjab from India. The New Delhi government views the separatist calls for a new state called Khalistan as a threat to Indian territorial integrity. The Modi government has labeled Sikh separatists as terrorists.

The Indian authorities have carried out repression of Sikhs for decades including political assassination in the Punjab territory of northern India. Many Sikhs fled to the United States and other Western states for safety and to continue their agitation for a separate nation. The Modi government has accused Western states of coddling “Sikh terrorists” and undermining Indian sovereignty.

Last June, a prominent Sikh leader was gunned down in a suburb of Vancouver in what appeared to be a professional hit-style execution. Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered by three assailants outside a religious temple. Indian state media described him as a terrorist, but Nijjar’s family denied he had any involvement in terrorism. They claim that he was targeted simply because he promoted Punjabi separatism.

At the same time, according to The Post report, the U.S. authorities thwarted a murder plot against a well-known American-Sikh citizen who was a colleague of the Canadian victim. Both men were coordinating efforts to hold an unofficial referendum among the Sikh diaspora in North America calling for the establishment of a new independent state of Khalistan in the Punjab region of northern India.

The Post article names Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s state spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), as orchestrating the murder plots against the Sikh leaders. The Post claims that interviews with US and former Indian intelligence officials attest that the killings could not have been carried out without the sanction of Modi’s inner circle.

A seemingly curious coincidence is that within days of the murder of the Canadian Sikh leader and the attempted killing of the American colleague, President Biden was hosting Narendra Modi at the White House in a lavish state reception.

Since the summer of last year, the Biden administration has repeatedly pressured the Modi government to investigate the allegations. President Biden has personally contacted Modi about the alleged assassination policy as have his senior officials, including White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA director William Burns. Despite New Delhi’s denial of such a policy, the Modi government has acceded to American requests to hold an internal investigation, suggesting a tacit admission of its agents having some involvement.

But here is where an anomaly indicates an ulterior agenda. Even U.S. media have remarked on how lenient the Biden administration has been towards India over what are grave allegations. It is inconceivable that Washington would tolerate the presence of Russian or Chinese agents and diplomats on its territory if Moscow and Beijing were implicated in killing dissidents on American soil.

As The Washington Post report noted: “Last July, White House officials began holding high-level meetings to discuss ways to respond without risking a wider rupture with India, officials said. CIA Director William J. Burns and others have been deployed to confront officials in the Modi government and demand accountability. But the United States has so far imposed no expulsions, sanctions or other penalties.”

What appears to be going on is a calculated form of coercion by the United States and its Western allies. The allegations of contract killings and “transnational repression” against Sikhs in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany are aimed at intimidating the Indian government with further embarrassing media disclosures and Western sanctions. The U.S. State Department and the Congress have both recently highlighted claims of human rights violations by the Modi government and calls for political sanctions.

The objective, it can averred, is for Washington and its Western allies to pressure India into toeing a geopolitical line of hostility towards China and Russia.

During the Biden administration, the United States has assiduously courted India as a partner in the Asia-Pacific to confront China. India has been welcomed as a member of the U.S.-led Quad of powers, including Japan and Australia. The Quad overlaps with the U.S. security interests of the AUKUS military partnership with Britain and Australia.

Another major geopolitical prize for Washington and its allies is to drive a wedge between India and Russia.

Since the NATO proxy war blew up in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has been continually cajoling India to condemn Russia and to abide by Western sanctions against Moscow. Despite the relentless pressure, the Modi government has spurned Western attempts to isolate Russia. Indeed, India has increased its purchase of Russian crude oil and is importing record more quantities than ever before the Ukraine conflict.

Furthermore, India is a key member of the BRICS forum and a proponent of an emerging multipolar world order that undermines U.S.-led Western hegemony.

From the viewpoint of the United States and its Western allies, India represents a tantalizing strategic prospect. With a foot in both geopolitical camps, New Delhi is sought by the West to weaken the China-Russia-BRICS axis.

This is the geopolitical context for understanding the interest of Western powers in making an issue out of allegations of political assassination by the Modi government. Washington and its Western allies want to use the allegations as a form of leverage – or blackmail – on India to comply with geopolitical objectives to confront China and Russia.

It can be anticipated that the Western powers will amplify the media campaign against India in line with exerting more hostility toward China and Russia.

• First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Finian Cunningham.

Halsey mill, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Elite Stretching Exercises to Warm Up the Conference of Polluters 28

Summary

In the months prior to the 2023 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference (hosted in Dubai), summits held by global, ‘multipolar’ and continental-African elites are worthy of consideration in part because their roles are the basis for pessimism about low-income African communities’ ability to withstand further extreme weather events. In the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa bloc, with its new (high-fossil) BRICS+ members from the Middle East, as well as in African Union, G20 and United Nations summiting in recent months, self-interest and internecine competition prevailed. Yet whether in Europe’s new carbon import tariffs or the push for African emissions trading, contradictions are emerging between imperial and sub-imperial climate powers. Still, two overarching elite objectives remain: first, to limit emissions cuts even if that threatens many species’ survival; and second, to avoid liability for ‘Loss & Damage,’ adaptation and other compensation expenses. A reassertion of climate justice and an expansion of African activism are in order, with some oppositional seeds beginning to bear fruit in even the most brazen sub-imperial climate power, South Africa.

Introduction

Many African cities have recently taken a pounding due to rain storms amplified by the climate crisis, including devastating floods leaving thousands dead. In the Mediterranean coastal town of Derna, Libya in September 2023, more than 13,000 residents died after two poorly-maintained dams collapsed when ‘Medicane’ (Mediterranean hurricane) Daniel dropped 400 mm of rain in 24 hours. (Usually September’s rainfall there is 1.5 mm.) In Blantyre, Malawi in February-March 2023, Cyclone Freddy arrived – from Australia – and killed 158 in mudslides. In Kinshasa, in December 2022, an estimated 200 died in flooding. In Lokoja and many Nigerian cities from June-October 2022, there were at least 600 fatalities. In Durban, South Africa in April 2022, a ‘Rain Bomb’ killed more than 500 after 351 mm fell in 24 hours. And in 2019’s Cyclone Idai, 90 percent of Beira, Mozambique was under water, with more than 2000 fatalities in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Likewise, droughts hit African cities particularly hard because water-demand management was generally not in place, as witnessed by Cape Town nearly suffering ‘Day Zero’ in 2018, a crisis repeated several times since in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, including the main city of Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth). The Western Cape’s late-September flooding included 300 mm in one day in Franshoek (near Cape Town), a record – with at least 11 dead (mainly because rising water led to the electrocution of eight people who had informal, unsafe connections as a result of the state’s failure to implement its Free Basic Electricity policy). In Somalia in November, 29 died in the towns of Baidoa, Bardere, Luuq, and Galkacyo due to record rainfall and flooding.

Dating to the early 1980s, many an ‘IMF Riot’ in Africa has followed food shortages or price hikes associated with austerity conditions (Walton and Seddon 1994). In 2022, soaring energy prices and unrepayable interest on foreign debt in a context of fast-declining African currency values raised tensions and protest levels in urban and rural areas alike (Bond 2023). African peasant livelihoods are even more difficult to repair in the wake of extreme climate incidents, especially drying soil, desertification, flooding, wild fires, deforestation and sea level rise. The Horn of Africa and South Africa recently demonstrated that when long-lasting droughts break, the rain can unleash unprecedented locust plagues. These are formidable problems for Africa’s majority in rural areas. The capacity to make demands for reparations is ever more important, not only in relation to climate crisis but also as a result of the increase in multinational-corporate extractive industries – including fossil fuel and mineral commodities whose prices rose dramatically in 2020-22 – taking over Africa’s increasingly-scarce arable land.

If we pose the question, the way Jun Borras et al (2022) did for Journal of Peasant Studies readers in 2022, the global scale appears ominous, given the adverse balance of forces: “What combinations of narratives and strategies frame climate change and the institutionalized responses to it in agrarian settings? What exclusions and inclusions result from this?”

Agrarian settings are very diverse, but by considering monolithic elite summitry, the problems faced in agrarian societies become clearer, as do activists’ countervailing approaches. The near-total exclusion of African people’s and environmental interests from global and ‘multipolar’ climate policy appears certain at COP28 and in the following months, given what we can learn from jockeying at mid-2023 international leadership summits. Prospects remain low for new global (as well as national and municipal) policies, programs and funding that can genuinely address the climate crisis. This was clearly witnessed through the ways that preliminary meetings established narratives for the 28^th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties – ‘COP28’ – to be held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December 2023.

Climate Justice (CJ) narratives include interrelated components that are typically demanded of global and continental elites by Africa’s most critical civil society advocates: slowing and reversing Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs) with genuine ‘decarbonization’ and appropriate carbon-sequestration approaches; promoting agro-ecological strategies for food production and soil restoration; assuring that adequate “Loss & Damage” payments go to victims to rebuild after extreme weather events; climate-proofing the built and social infrastructure (known as adaptation and resilience); and compensating Africans for not undergoing the high-carbon development trajectory the West and BRICS+ economies (Mwenda and Bond 2020). Each of these areas is discussed in the Conclusion, along with cases of CJ leadership (especially from South Africa). But can many more CJ activists in African civil (and uncivil) society influence their national and local leaders along these lines, and mobilize international-solidarity support, especially when it comes to participation in an increasingly fossil-biased United Nations process?

In deploying such critical narratives, debilitating strategic divisions typically emerge between climate advocates: insiders versus outsiders; CJ radicals versus ‘Climate Action’ moderates; and Global South versus Global North activists. Very rarely is a clear division of labor established, that can assist in identifying optimal roles for uncivil-society ‘tree-shakers’ whose work assists the civilized-society ‘jam-makers’ integrated into UNFCCC summitting (Bond 2018). And given the balance of power in relation to all these CJ demands (with the exception of the UN’s tepid, assimilation-oriented lip service to identity politics), there is very little prospect for progress at coming global climate summits. Following Dubai in 2023, the COP29 will be hosted by an Eastern European city (to be determined) in 2024. Perhaps only in late 2025 when the UNFCCC moves to the Amazon (Belém, Brazil), will change be possible.

What, then, are the current power relations, and how do African climate narratives adjust, in view of several major elite summits in August-September 2023, and the increasingly pro-fossil standpoint of the major historic African emitter, South Africa?

COP28’s adverse balance of forces, thanks to South African and Kenyan sub-imperialism

Signs of elite-Africa’s weaknesses within the UNFCCC are legion, especially in mid-2023 when two men were seen as the continent’s main leaders: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Kenyan President William Ruto. The former was a coal-mining tycoon (through Shanduka, which he owned until 2014 when he became deputy president), and has ambitions of a recarbonization of the South African economy through what in 2019 he termed the ‘game-changing’ offshore oil and gas deposits identified especially by TotalEnergies and Shell (although much exploration has been foiled by CJ activists in recent years) (Ramaphosa 2019). The latter, a self-described ‘hustler’ leader, witnessed his “profile rise with climate summit hustle,” as Africa Energy reported: “All of Kenyan President William Ruto’s personal energy, facility with words, public charm and ruthless cultivation of influential allies was on show” when he hosted the Africa Climate Summit (Marks 2023). Ruto’s opening speech set the tone: “We must see in green growth not just a climate imperative but also a fountain of multibillion-dollar opportunities that the world is poised to capitalize” (Ngam 2023).

But Ruto’s ‘influential allies’ – especially New York-based consultancy McKinsey, whose devastating role in Kenya Airways and South Africa’s Eskom led to international condemnations, as well as European Union Commission President Ursula van der Leyen, who is responsible for the world’s largest carbon trading scheme – also appeared to influence him. Critics across African civil society, organized as the “Real African Climate Summit” (2023), despaired over the hustling of Ruto:

“The so-called ‘think tanks committee’ set up to drive negotiations at the Summit is chaired by individuals who represent UK and US-based organizations and not African organizations. The content for the Summit – including major initiatives – is being led by McKinsey, with the World Resources Institute now competing to shape the agenda and its outcomes. Both are headquartered in the United States and do not champion Africa’s interests.  Some African organizations that advance Western agenda have also been given a disproportionately huge role in the organization of the event. The result is a Summit agenda that foregrounds the position and interests of the West, namely, carbon markets, carbon sequestration and ‘climate positive’ approaches… These concepts and false solutions are led by Western interests while being marketed as African priorities. In truth, though, these approaches will embolden wealthy nations and large corporations to continue polluting the world, much to Africa’s detriment.”

As a reflection of that concern, the second sentence in Van der Leyen’s keynote speech praised Ruto: “I very much welcome Kenya’s ‘Climate Change Act 2023’ that was launched during this Summit and that puts strong emphasis on carbon markets.” The civil society critique made the opposite point:

“Avoid all false solutions such as carbon markets and geo-engineering which are designed to encourage wealthy countries and people to continue polluting and turning Africa into a dumping ground and field for technological trials. Implement and adopt climate policies that promote a just and equitable phase-out of all new oil, gas and coal projects on the African continent in line with Africa’s development interests and the recommendations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, International Energy Agency and other scientific organizations by cutting public and private financing” (Real African Climate Summit 2023).

And their accusation of outside manipulation was more poignant because only fewer than half Africa’s 54 leaders attended the Summit (e.g., Ramaphosa choosing instead to go to Emmerson Mnangagwa’s disputed Zimbabwe election celebration and inauguration). The AU itself suffers relatively weak leaders: as chair, Comoros Islands President Azali Assoumani (who came to power in a 1999 coup) and Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki. The AU’s own judicial Tribunal had, three days earlier, condemned Faki for “brazenness” and “audacity,” and for having “become a law unto himself,” resulting in “lawlessness” and “reputational damage.” Six African countries were, at the time, suspended from the AU due to military takeovers: Gabon, Niger, Sudan, Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso.

The problem of local elites undermining the continent’s interests is an old one, reminiscent of Walter Rodney’s (1972, 41-42) warning (in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa): “the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system.”

Climate politics is an increasingly important example, dating at least to the 2009 Copenhagen COP15, where leadership of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) accused the lead African negotiator, Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, of conspiring with the conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy to “sell out the lives and hopes of Africans for a pittance” (Mwenda and Bond 2020). At that summit, G77-bloc negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping (then a Sudanese diplomat, subsequently exiled) explained to a PACJA meeting how some African delegations were “either lazy or had been ‘bought off’ by the industrialized nations. He singled out South Africa, saying that some members of that delegation had actively sought to disrupt the unity of the bloc” (Welz 2009).

That role continues, insofar as by far the highest GHG emitter in Africa, South Africa, has in recent months abused the diplomatic power of Environment Minister Barbara Creecy. She is a unique politician, e.g, as the only white ruling-party member elected to the African National Congress National (ANC) Executive Committee in 2021. She is able to co-exist with a strongly pro-fossil ANC leadership – not just Ramaphosa but openly pro-coal Energy Minister and ruling-party chairperson Gwede Mantashe (who in October 2023 accused climate activists of being CIA agents) – because of her deregulatory approach. To illustrate, Creecy’s bias reflects not only the permissions she regularly grants for offshore methane gas and onshore fracking, but also that the South African government and energy parastatal Eskom seek to introduce two gas-fired plants (4000MW strong) in the next few years by using 44 percent of the ‘Just Energy Transition Partnership’ (JETP) funding they raise, and by keeping coal-fired power plants open much longer (even in violation of JETP financial deals) (Bond 2024).

Indeed, Creecy spent August-October 2023 approving several high-pollution, high-emissions projects proposed by multinational corporations. Her support for TotalEnergies’ plan to drill for oil and gas offshore Cape Town required her to reject a 2022 court judgment against a similar Shell Oil proposal for the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast. She supported oceanic seismic blasting near the Namibian border by an Australian firm (Searcher) that seeks what geologists predict could be billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas deposits. Creecy’s excuse in these cases is that the Makhanda High Court’s September 2022 finding against offshore gas exploration – made by three judges, in part based on the refusal to take climate considerations seriously – was still (a year later) under appeal at the Supreme Court. Both Shell and its local ally, the former leftwing trade unionist and subsequent entrepreneur Johnny Copelyn, have been generous contributors to the South African ruling party, but courts such as Makhanda’s remain relatively independent of party-based favoritism (in contrast, say to Zimbabwe or the United States of America).

At the same time, Creecy approved a pollution waiver for the continent’s largest coal-fired power station (Kusile), so that the Eskom plant – generating 4800MW if operating at full steam – can emit lethal sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide without Flue Gas Desulfurization, permission which scientists predict will kill several hundred nearby residents. Also in 2023, she was sued by community-based environmentalists (the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance) for allowing the Indian steel giant ArcelorMittal’s foundries to emit toxic hydrogen sulfide gases above legal limits. Finally, her promotion of a controversial biodiversity offset to be managed by a poorly-resourced provincial parks agency assisted a notorious Turkish floating fossil-fuel energy generator, Karpowership, whose Liquefied Natural Gas-powered ships she gave permission to operate from three sensitive harbors in spite of sustained environmentalist opposition on grounds of the ships’ threat to local air quality, to marine life and to South Africa’s GHG emissions budget.

This approach extends to destructive continental activities, and indeed South African sub-imperial climate and broader environmental damage is not new. As Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (2011, 19) explained in 2011, a conflict of interest against the African continent is a feature of the BRICS’ relationship to imperialism: “The degree of participation in the Western military project is also different from one case to the next, although, one might say, there is a ‘schizophrenia’ to all this, typical of ‘sub-imperialism’.” To illustrate, more than 1200 SA National Defense Force troops have intervened in Mozambique since 2021 – at the direct behest of French President Emmanuel Macron and to the applause of the U.S. African Command, on behalf of TotalEnergies’ $20 billion Liquefied Natural Gas facility (against a local Islamic insurgency) (Bond 2022).

This follows the Pretoria army’s deployment since 2013 in a disastrous UN ‘peacekeeping’ force in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the vicinity of not only minerals exploited by South African firms, but also increasingly, fossil fuels (such as a Lake Albert $10 billion oil concession that in 2010 was granted to Khulubusa Zuma, nephew of the then South African president Jacob). A similar Central African Republic deployment followed South African extractive-industry capital but was curtailed when in 2013, militants overthrew a small SANDF force in Bangui. For Samir Amin (writing in his post-humous autobiography), such incidents reveal how the shift from apartheid sub-imperialism to post-apartheid neoliberalism meant “nothing has changed. South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is by the Anglo-American mining monopolies” (Amin 2019).

In early 2023, Creecy was chosen to manage crucial UNFCCC functions by Sultan Al Jaber, the presiding officer from the host UAE, who tellingly also serves as chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (a firm whose offices intervened in conference management in mid-2023 notwithstanding the obvious conflict of interest). Creecy will serve as co-leader (alongside the Danish environment minister) of the Global Stock Take (GST) – i.e., measuring how seriously national states have cut their economy’s emissions – having in 2022 co-chaired a COP27 committee assessing mitigation. Her aide Richard Sherman co-manages Loss & Damage Fund planning, a process that in October 2023 nearly broke down, he confessed: “It’s late, we’re tired, we’re frustrated. We have, to a large extent, failed you” (Sengupta and Goswami 2023).

No African delegation has ever had such climate-policy influence, at least since South Africa hosted the COP17 in Durban in 2011 followed by Morocco in 2016, on both occasions serving emitters’ interests (as discussed below). The 2023 GST exercise is anticipated to not only avoid crucial “phase out fossil fuels” language, but also greenwash the world’s combustion and leakage of methane, notwithstanding its 85-times greater potency as a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period. South Africa’s gas pipelines became notorious for eruptions in 2023, even in central Johannesburg – as massive methane gas development and pipeline projects were being put in place across the Indian and Atlantic coastlines and through on-shore fracking proposals.

Even if Creecy had wanted to address climate seriously, the global terrain is unfavorable. To illustrate, four August-September summits in quick succession set the stage for a disastrous COP28, allowing both the UAE and South Africa to play what can be considered a loyal ‘sub-imperial’ role in alliance with the West and BRICS. First, the August meeting of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa BRICS bloc in Johannesburg expanded the group to 11 members, including three – Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran – with extensive emissions and oil or gas production, and two others, Egypt and Argentina, with enormous reserves now being tapped. Second, the inaugural African Climate Summit occurred in Nairobi in early September. Third, the next weekend, the G20 met in New Delhi. And fourth, in New York City, from September 18-22, the UN General Assembly gathered world leaders. These were important moments in defining the African continental elite’s narratives, strategies, and alliances when it comes to global climate policy – and all fall short of the bare minimum required to protect Africans from worsening climate crisis.

Setting the UNFCCC stage by limiting the scope for emissions cuts and ‘polluter pays’ liability

Three UNFCCC COP precursors require mentioning for context – the 2009 COP15 in Copenhagen, the 2011 COP17 in Durban, and the 2015 COP21 in Paris – and power relations were also revealed in remarks by the leading U.S. climate official, John Kerry, in July 2023.

The Copenhagen Accord represented the end of global climate accountability, what with a secret meeting of five countries trumping the rest of the world, agreeing that a ‘bottom up’ voluntary system would replace the Kyoto Protocol’s binding provisions. As Bill McKibben (2009) complained of Barack Obama:

“He blew up the United Nations. The idea that there’s a world community that means something has disappeared tonight… when you get too close to the center of things that count – the fossil fuel that’s at the center of our economy – you can forget about it. We’re not interested. You’re a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves, we don’t want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for 50 years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America’s economy. We already did this with war and peace, and now we’ve done it with global warming. What exactly is the point of the U.N. now? He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters.”

Their damage would be long-lasting, yet the super-polluter leaders of ‘BASIC’ – Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, India’s Manmohan Singh and China’s Wen Jiabao – who were joined by Obama at that UNFCCC meeting subsequently left office, although Lula returned in 2023, in time to learn that the Amazon forest had inexorably shifted from carbon sink to net emitter. Meanwhile, Zuma appeared again on the climate scene in mid-2023 (just days before being pardoned for contempt of court in his ongoing KwaZulu-Natal corruption case): in Zimbabwe, he marketed ‘two million’ carbon offset credits from Russian Siberia – which were ridiculed as worthless and ultimately rejected by the Victoria Falls conference organizers (Lang 2023). Such obvious scamming aside, Zuma’s 2009 behavior at Copenhagen was consistent with the needs of the major polluting countries. So in 2011 during COP17 hosting duties, his leadership was celebrated by US State Department negotiator Todd Stern (2011), who told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the “significant success for the United States” in Durban, particularly the major historic polluter’s objectives in limiting liability, or what in the UNFCCC is termed Combined But Differentiated Responsibility.

The unwillingness of the U.S. to pay reparations, joined by BASIC and other large emitters, was confirmed in Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. According to Saleemul Huq and Roger-Mark De Souza (2015) of the Woodrow Wilson Center, “A concession by developing countries on liability and compensation was reflected in the Agreement’s decision text, which notes that there is no possibility of claiming liability and compensation for Loss and Damage,” i.e. costs of extreme climate-change incidents. And on 13 July 2023, Clinton’s replacement as U.S. Secretary of State during the Paris negotiations, John Kerry, testified to the House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee (2023) as the Biden Administration’s climate envoy. He was asked by conservative Florida Republican Brian Mast about climate reparations:

Mast: “Are you planning to commit America to climate reparations: that is to say, we have to pay some other country because they had a flood or they had a hurricane or a typhoon for awhile?”

Kerry: “No. Under no circumstances.”

Mast: “Very good, I’m glad to hear you say that I do have a no.”

Kerry: “Why don’t you create an exclamation point beside it.”

Mast: “I will write in an exclamation point for you and I’m glad that we have agreement on that I don’t know if my black pen will work. We’ll see. There we go, there’s your exclamation point!”

Kerry: “… There is the finalization of the fund that was created, the so-called loss and damage fund, which is simply a recognition. It does not have any liability in it. We specifically put phrases in that negate any possibility of liability.”

Those last five chilling words represent Washington’s outright rejection of ‘polluter pays,’ entailing a de facto default on climate debt, a rejection of legitimate liability obligations that are provided for in most national environmental management systems. Such a stance also serves Pretoria’s and the BRICS’ interests, for they too owe reparations.

BRICS+ climate sabotage in Johannesburg

The climate orientation of the BRICS and now BRICS+ (with six new members) is self-interested, as witnessed in sub-imperial/imperial unity with the United States, Europe and other large emitters in 2009, 2011 and 2015, as well as in preparations for the COP28. That self-interest reflects 11 countries which produce 58 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 43 percent of the world’s oil supply.

But no matter how much the BRICS – and specifically BASIC – leaders cohere with the imperialist powers in opposing adequate emissions cuts and reparations, there is also what Brazilian dependencia theorist Ruy Mauro Marini (1972) termed ‘antagonistic cooperation’: internecine conflicts following from domestic modes of capital accumulation that conflict with those of the global powers. To be sure, in practical (not rhetorical) respects, most of the BRICS are dominated by neoliberal financial, pro-trade ruling-class factions, consistent with destructive global capitalism, and in spite of sometimes extreme territorial conflict (in Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Central Asia, the Himalaya Mountains and the South China Sea) and financial ‘de-dollarization’ debates, there is a great deal of multilateral policy overlap at the UNFCCC.

And yet the carbon-intensive character of antagonistic cooperation has set the stage for a revealing climate-related contradiction with the West in relation to inclement ‘climate sanctions’ in the form of Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAMs). Starting in the European Union in October 2023 (but with tariffs only being applied in 2026), and likely followed by other Western importers, the CBAM adds tariffs to imports with high levels of embedded GHGs, where the exporting economy does not have adequate carbon taxes (thus representing an implicit subsidy of carbon emissions). In August, the BRICS’ Johannesburg Declaration complained,

“We oppose trade barriers including those under the pretext of tackling climate change imposed by certain developed countries and reiterate our commitment to enhancing coordination on these issues. We underline that measures taken to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss must be WTO-consistent… We express our concern at any WTO inconsistent discriminatory measure that will distort international trade, risk new trade barriers and shift burden of addressing climate change and biodiversity loss to BRICS members and developing countries” (emphasis added) (BRICS 2023).

The phrasing here represents a version of climate denialism, because there are already extreme distortions in international trade, investment and finance due to the capitalist system’s failure to internalize corporate GHG emissions, pollution and resource depletion into price calculations. Given the threat climate catastrophes and ecocide pose to the world, especially to the BRICS+ countries, the desire to retain prevailing anti-ecological distortions is “the greatest market failure the world has seen,” according to British economist Nick Stern (2007). Indeed, repeatedly since 2021, the host South African ruling class – both state and corporate – reiterated that coming Western climate sanctions against energy-intensive exports are the main reason the economy must decarbonize. Because of the excessive coal-fired power embedded in the country’s exported products, a tariff will be imposed by countries that have adopted higher carbon prices – $100/tonne in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, compared to Pretoria’s $0.35/tonne – so as to prevent ‘carbon leakage’.

Such tariffs could well be devastating to firms in South Africa’s so-called Energy Intensive Users Groups firms: 27 mainly Western multinational corporations which consume 42 percent of the country’s scarce electricity largely for processing non-renewable mineral resources. They logically resist decarbonization because there is less ‘baseload power’ and higher upfront capital costs associated with solar, wind and storage. The BRICS complain about tariffs that, “under the pretext of tackling climate change, [will be] imposed by certain developed countries.”

This grievance has, since 2010, been articulated by South Africans with a strong commitment to high-carbon development, none more vociferously than former Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies. Writing for the African Climate Foundation, Davies (2023) argued, “CBAM is a measure that, in my view, needs to be rejected, opposed and challenged in any way or forum possible. Developing a strategy for this is doubly urgent in view of its propensity to be replicated in several other jurisdictions.” The immediate stakes for South Africa, he suggested, were losses of $1.5 billion in annual steel, aluminium and iron exports to Europe, with chemicals, plastics and even automobiles to soon follow.

Davies (2023) did not consider the positive side of losing those exports, namely that South Africa would thereby suffer lower declines in its stock of non-renewable resources (i.e., the minerals that go into many of the processed metals) and therefore would benefit from retaining natural wealth for future generations. Nor did he factor in the electricity costs of the deep mining, smelting, metals processing, petrochemicals, internal-combustion-engine automobiles and other high-carbon exports. The merits of redirecting that power to labour-intensive industries, small businesses and households are obvious to any South African suffering sustained load-shedding. He ignored the Social Cost of Carbon from such energy-intensive industries, which if measured at $3000/tonne of CO2 emitted, and then applied to the 500 megatonnes of annual national emissions, is nearly four times in excess of South Africa’s anticipated 2023 GDP of $400 billion.

Davies’ own bias towards these high-carbon emissions could be identified in his career as Minister of Trade and Industry from 2009-19, when he supported construction of a new coal-fired power plant, shale fracking gas development, diesel and petrol cars and trucks (and no electric vehicles) and other high-carbon industries (especially the corrupt Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone), all driven by multinational corporations which externalized profits. Indeed in many cases, the profit repatriation process was facilitated by ‘Illicit Financial Flows,’ to the extent South Africa suffered a ‘grey listing’ by the Financial Action Task Force in February 2023 due to ever-looser Treasury and Reserve Bank controls, about which Davies never publicly complained.

Hence there are sometimes important differences between the material interests of imperial and sub-imperial economies, in terms of internecine competition. Mostly, the concrete material interests broadly coincide, insofar as BRICS ambitions are still to achieve a more substantive role in multilateral corporate rule, not to upend it (as so many committed to hype and hope like to pretend). Given that some insistent and even ‘anti-imperial’ South voices raise international economic injustices as a concern, the logical temptation of observers with progressive leanings is to support their rhetoric – even when unmatched by deeds. But climate sanctions against mega-emitters in the BRICS+ is not one of those times, even if the BRICS’ main climate negotiating bloc, BASIC, joined the battle against CBAM. As South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy (2023) complained on 20 September 2023 to a BASIC ministerial meeting,

“the window of opportunity is fast closing to pressure the EU and others that are waiting in the wings to impose unilateral taxes in the name of climate action, to either abandon their plans or adjust them to make them legal, fair and about climate change. According to our trade department, Africa stands to lose approximately $26 billion each year in direct taxes to the EU in the initial phase of the CBAM alone. Very soon others, including the USA, UK and Canada will follow the EU’s example and the list of taxed commodities will grow. The net impact will be to more than cancel out any climate finance and other support we have received from the global North and to undermine our sustainable development.”

African elites disappoint their constituents in Nairobi

South African leaders like Creecy are not the only forces on the continent opposed to climate justice, globally and at home. In the immediate wake of the BRICS summit in Nairobi and just before the G20, “The African Leaders’ Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change and Call to Action” bears consideration in part because of relatively limited media coverage of African CJ critics’ central concerns. In the wake of the BRICS’ summit, another important contradiction is that, on the one hand, African elites are aware that strategies (such as carbon markets) exist to address the world’s most extreme market imperfection: GHGs are not internalized within the cost of products. But on the other, their standpoint is to insist that there be no unilateral corrective measures taken, such as a CBAM import penalty which would balance the high-emissions products of especially South Africa, by imposing a tariff. So the AU (2023) declaration demanded, consistent with the BRICS and BASIC statements, that “trade-related environmental tariffs and non-tariff barriers must be subject to multilateral discussions and agreements and not be unilateral, arbitrary or discriminatory measures…”

Aside from backing the continent’s mega-polluters in this particular instance, the Nairobi Declaration generally succumbed to McKinsey-style diplomacy, e.g. “We, the African Heads of State and Government… commend the Arab Republic of Egypt for the successful COP27…” (AU 2023). Egyptian dictator Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi hosted the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in late 2022, an event seen by objective observers (not fellow heads of state speaking diplomatically) as a major failure in terms of both multilateral climate policy and event management, in no small part because of Egyptian elites’ cooptation by the U.S., other Western powers, the BRICS and Middle Eastern ultra-polluters. Egyptian civil society was, as ever, systematically oppressed, as has already been repeated in Dubai in 2023. To endorse the status quo means of West/BRICS-dominated climate multilateralism, is to automatically start off with a perspective hostile to Africa’s interests.

The Nairobi Declaration called “upon the international community to contribute to the following: Increasing Africa’s renewable generation capacity from 56 GW in 2022 to at least 300 GW by 2030…” (AU 2023). This ambition sounds laudable; however, within the AU’s accounting technique, ‘renewable’ includes mega-hydropower, which due to a variety of factors (including drought that debilitates dam capacity, or floods that threaten many dams’ integrity), is inappropriate. The AU host country, Ethiopia, threatens downstream Nile River communities with its Renaissance Dam, and two major proposed dams – the $100 billion+ proposed Inga Hydropower Project on the Congo River downstream from Kinshasa and Mpanda Nkua on the Zambezi River in Mozambique – would contribute to high methane emissions as riverine vegetation rots. Moreover, meeting a 300 GW target by 2030 would cost (according to an earlier draft) $600 billion, which is inconceivable given the continent’s extreme overindebtedness and the lack of a connection to genuine debt cancellation. Two of Africa’s most important economic ‘success stories’ of the 2010s, Zambia and Ghana, went into default in 2022-23.

The Nairobi Declaration insisted on “…a global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investment of at least USD 4–6 trillion per year and delivering such funding in turn requires a transformation of the financial system…” (AU 2023). But the only way such ‘transformation’ would allow investment in low-carbon capitalism of that magnitude, is if widescale nationalization of the financial sector was permitted, plus exceptionally large subsidies offered. What the AU does recognize is that currently, power relations do not permit this process. The only factor that Nairobi Declaration authors DO acknowledge is that currently, the interest rate is too high, especially given declining currency values:

“inordinate borrowing costs, typically 5 to 8 times what wealthy countries pay (the ‘great financial divide’), are a root cause of recurring developing country debt crisis and an impediment to investment in development and climate action. We call for adoption of principles of responsible sovereign lending and accountability encompassing credit rating, risk analysis and debt sustainability assessment frameworks and urge the financial markets to commit to reduce this disparity by at least 50 percent i.e from 5%-8 percent to 2.5 – 4.0 percent by 2025… incentivize global investment to locations that offer the most and substantial climate benefits…” (AU 2023).

This framing entails mild-mannered adjustments to international financing arrangements, at the margins. That may help a few borrowers, such as South Africa’s upper-middle class neighborhoods (with their obvious racial bias) or multinational extractive industries escaping the unreliable grid. Indeed, in the latter case, there are many firms now seeking to greenwash their energy inputs so as to avoid a CBAM penalty on exports, with early indications that they may end up ‘cherry picking’ the ‘low-hanging fruit’ associated with renewable energy opportunities, such as well-placed pumped energy storage. Already, their ‘wheeling’ of electricity from high-intensity solar sites – such as the Northern Cape deserts – have overwhelmed transmissions capacity there, given Eskom’s lack of investment in grid expansion in recent years. And in Africa’s most expansive financial economy, South Africa, high interest rates are required to attract capital, so even prime borrowers pay a 12 percent annual rate at best. And for equity (ownership) investors such as South Africa’s Independent Power Producers, such high returns on investment are typical (30 percent annually for venture capital), that the best solar and wind sites have already mainly been plucked (e.g. 4 GigaWatts of South Africa’s residential and small business markets’ solar panel needs during the first half of 2023 alone). There is no hope of generating the desired 300 GWs without extremely generous interest-rate write-downs or outright grants.

The African leaders’ specific appeal for lower rates (a 4 percent differential from what Western borrowers pay) will do very little to change this basic calculus given the continent’s affordability constraints and existing over-indebtedness: “a global carbon taxation regime including a carbon tax on fossil fuel trade, maritime transport and aviation, that may also be augmented by a global financial transaction tax” (AU 2023). This is certainly a laudable demand, but two problems arise. First, such carbon taxes tend to be ‘regressive’ in adversely affecting low-income rural people the most (especially with higher petrol prices), so it is vital to specify that distributive justice accompany any such fundraising.

Second, at the same time, the African leaders propose to augment state taxation with market-speculative mechanisms by, in effect, ‘privatizing the air’ through emissions trading and offsets: “Taking the lead in the development of global standards, metrics, and market mechanisms to accurately value and compensate for the protection of nature, biodiversity, socio-economic co-benefits, and the provision of climate services… Implementing a mix of measures that elevate Africa’s share of carbon markets” (AU 2023). To signal the seriousness of this gesture, the UAE announced it would buy $450 million worth of African carbon credits by 2030 (albeit in the form of a “nonbinding letter of intent”). European and U.S. representatives pledged unspecified support. (The embarrassment of Zuma’s carbon-market intervention in Zimbabwe went unmentioned.)

Ruto’s expressed desire was for African states to continue promoting high-carbon extractivism – deep mining, smelting, processing and fabrication – dominated by multinational corporations from the West and the BRICS. That will entail a commitment to protect these firms when they export minerals, metals and some finished goods to Western markets which have higher environmental standards. The Nairobi Declaration’s answer to this concern, however, would be that over time it will be renewable not fossil-fuel energy that will power extractivism: “Advancing green industrialization across the Continent by prioritizing energy-intense industries to trigger a virtuous cycle of renewable energy deployment and economic activity, with a special emphasis on adding value to Africa’s natural endowments” (AU 2023).

Yet that position runs the very real risk that as solar, wind and energy storage are rolled out across Africa, the ‘prioritization’ of extractive industries will allow the renewable sector’s low-hanging fruit to be plucked by corporations, with none left over for ordinary people. Concern is thus being raised by public-interest advocates over multinational energy corporations’ next generation of ‘green hydrogen’ exports from Africa to Europe (either in the form of battery cells or ammonia), instead of being available to local consumers (e.g. in the short term, bus and truck engines, but also potentially for widescale electricity generation). Meanwhile, the raw mineral base of a green economy, especially the hard lithium deposits in the single largest such mine – Bikita, Zimbabwe – are still being exported (by truck through Beira) without any beneficiation in spite of 2022 national legislation prohibiting such depletion. (In mid-2023, high-visibility opposition to this by the Harare-based Centre for Natural Resource Governance at least led to a brief closure of the mine.)

While the Nairobi Declaration recognizes the disproportionate impact of climate change on Africa, this was not a gathering to find solutions to the humanitarian crises that extreme weather events have already unleashed across the continent. Justice – supposedly the most crucial component of the energy transition – is not mentioned in the declaration, and it did not feature on the agenda. Perhaps unsurprisingly at a McKinsey-organized event, the focus was on monetizing the climate crisis to drive growth and development. “Has the summit merely set the stage for a new era of extractivism in the name of Western ‘green’ development?,” asked South African corporate-watchdog NGO Just Share’s Tracey Davies (2023), and answered affirmatively:

“Carbon markets featured prominently, with their potential to allow big polluters to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to offset them against the carbon sequestration effects of Africa’s forests and mangroves. But hundreds of activists who had gathered in Nairobi from across the continent asserted that carbon markets are really a mechanism for shifting the burden of emission reductions to the global south, while giving the rest of the world a license to continue polluting. There was also a huge focus on ‘clean cooking’, with speakers from the political and business elite expressing newfound concern for the hundreds of millions of Africans who cook with wood, charcoal and kerosene. This is a crucial problem to solve. But events at the summit, such as the launch of a joint report by the International Energy Agency and the African Development Bank, indicate that the admirable objectives of those working to address it are at serious risk of being hijacked by the global gas industry. It is obvious that some bright spark (at McKinsey?) has realized that the ‘clean cooking’ campaign is a beautiful vehicle for legitimizing plans for huge fossil gas expansion across the continent.”

G20 adds AU and subtracts climate ambition in Delhi, while the UN treads water in New York

The third major summit of mid-2023 that confirmed how difficult it will be to change dynamics in the United Nations process, was the G20 in Delhi on September 8-9. Hopes for the G20 had first been sparked in October 2008, when the initial meeting in Washington DC occurred in the midst of a major financial meltdown that required international economic support and legitimacy. Without any further accomplishments over the subsequent 15 years, the accomplishment most participants and commentators described as historic was adding the African Union (AU) as a formal member of the grouping. Additionally, University of Toronto researchers who study G20 promises and accomplishments argued that the 2022 Indonesia summit set goals that were largely achieved in the subsequent year when it came to climate (consistency with the Paris Climate Agreement at 85 percent success) and sustainable development (90 percent).

Some went so far as to claim that the G20’s skillful diplomatic hosting by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meant the network had finally become the vehicle to drive U.S. hegemony towards multipolarity, especially since the three subsequent G20 hosting functions will be in Brazil, South Africa and the United States. For economist Jeffrey Sachs (2023), at the Delhi summit,

“We saw the voice of the emerging economies say we want to have a change of the international economic order. And everybody went along with that and nobody broke the proceedings… the addition of Africa to the G20 – something I’ve been advocating for a number of years – it’s actually a pretty big deal for all the reasons that you and we have been discussing in recent weeks with the BRICS and the shifting power in the world… The discussions now move on to Brazil and Lula and he’s going to carry all of this forward in the double capacity as president of the G20 and as the key member of the BRICS. So next year we’ll have back-to-back the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia and we’ll have the G20 in Brazil, and I think things are actually going to change.”

Most notably, while not mentioning climate (aside from Lula also hosting the COP30 in 2025), Sachs hopes that as multipolarity emerges, the kinds of conditions that underdevelop Africa could also fall away:

“If [African countries] unite they will absolutely succeed and what we’ll see is Africa achieving seven to ten percent cumulative growth year by year in the next 40 years, like China did from 1980 to 2020, like India is doing from 2000 to 2040. Africa will be on the same path with the 20-year delay, I would say 20-year starting point. But what we’re going to see is a huge transformation if the Africans do what they really look like they’re doing right now, and that is uniting because as one continental economy that defends its interests and pursues its interests together in global venues and global leadership. It’s going to be a very different and very positive world.”

The structural features of climate crisis, over-indebtedness, primary-product export dependency, and vassal status to multinational corporations and Western donors – which West African military regimes may briefly interrupt but only at the level of who in the state manages the process – remain intact, if the BRICS multipolarity agenda continues to amplify the existing power structure. After all, remarked Adriano Nuvunga, chair of Mozambique’s Center for Democracy and Development, “The AU is an organization that primarily represents the interests of the powerful. It is toothless and ineffective, and it repeatedly proves itself incapable of ensuring prosperity, security, and peace for all Africans” (Cascais 2023).

The Nairobi summit had confirmed that in terms of climate policy, the powerful – in Africa and the G20 alike – are committed to privatizing the air and selling the right to pollute in carbon markets, so it was no surprise that so little emerged from Delhi to encourage environmentalists. There was a vague commitment to tripling renewable energy capacity (with no specific new subsidization mechanisms provided), which International Energy Agency Director Fatih Birol (2023) termed “far from being enough to be in line with the 1.5C target,” or to address widespread fossil addictions. Revealingly, just as at the 2021 COP26 in Glasgow, when the imperial/sub-imperial U.S., China and India alliance united to adopt “phase down” language in relation to coal, the G20 again avoided the term “phase out” or indeed mention of other fossil fuels other than coal. The prior year’s G20 host, Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia 2023), criticized the lack of generous climate financing, terming the Delhi commitments mere ‘rhetoric.’

For Modi, the main symbolic disappointments were the no-shows of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Modi won establishment praise for his global bio​​fuel alliance, along with the US and Brazil, to “help accelerate global efforts to meet net-zero emissions targets by facilitating trade in biofuels derived from sources including plant and animal waste,” although biofuels are also a threat to global food production due to competition for cropland. As Indian agricultural expert Devinder Sharma put it, this was “nothing short of historic blunder”, because the G20 should “think of feeding humans first, automobiles can wait. Food should never be diverted for activities that have nothing to do with domestic food security” (Mukherji 2023).

According to economist Jayati Ghosh (2023), the G20 also failed repeatedly at the level of geopolitics, where so much pressure on world grain prices emanated in 2022 in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On this point, she argued, the G20 under Modi was “backtracking from the statement in Bali, the Indonesian presidency, in which the invasion by Russia of Ukraine was condemned and in which there was a request for the withdrawal immediately.” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was pleased by the declaration because, as Ghosh (2023) pointed out, the G7 sees “the current leadership in India as more important to court than standing up for… Ukraine or even for human rights in India and other countries.” Ghosh (2023) continued,

“What is most appalling is that this G20 has done nothing for the major problems of our time… [in spite of] the major disasters that are occurring across the world… So, there was nothing, really, on any meaningful movement on climate change. There was nothing on resolving the major debt crisis, which in about 80 countries today is worsening the possibilities of dealing with climate change, as well. And yet this was an issue that India had made one of the major concerns of its presidency. Modi had actually said, ‘We are going to work towards a resolution of the debt crisis.’ Nothing on that. A terrible silence on the lack of taxation strategies, for example, wealth taxes on the very rich and sharing of information that would enable that, or even a better deal for corporate taxation than the one that is currently on the table. Nothing in terms of finding the resources that would enable countries to deal with not just the mitigation, but right now just the dealing with the impacts of climate change that so many are facing.”

Two weeks later, the United Nations leaders’ summit in New York confirmed Ghosh’s critique of elite paralysis. Secretary-General António Guterres (2023) summed up:

“Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects. Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods, sweltering temperatures spawning disease and thousands fleeing in fear as historic fires rage. Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge… Humanity has opened the gates of hell.”

A revival of New York climate protests – albeit far smaller than the 2014 and 2019 efforts – attempted to reflect the crisis and dissent, for as Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan (2023) remarked, “75,000 people marched through Manhattan, rallying near the United Nations headquarters. Though it was a message to world leaders, the banner on the rally stage read, ‘Biden: End Fossil Fuels’… with 149 protesters arrested outside of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank, as part of a growing movement challenging the financial backers of the fossil fuel industry.” Targets included “the Museum of Modern Art, for its close connection to its billionaire patron, Henry Kravis, cofounder of Wall Street investment firm KKR. Among the chants at the many protests was, ‘We need clean air, not another billionaire!’”

Conclusion: Africa’s hope may (?) rise from sub-imperialist South Africa’s dissidents

Dissenters against global climate elites have evolved since the early 2000s, when aspects of African climate justice were championed by high-profile world-class leaders, whose organizing is worthy of study. But first, what were their narratives, both in Africa and internationally? The CJ agenda built up in both global protest sites – especially the COPs – as well as from grassroots-based climate-conscious settings. Some included sites of climate catastrophes, especially in Southern Africa. But in making these geographical and scalar jumps, differences in demands between CJ and ordinary ‘climate action’ have become more obvious. Consider some examples of narratives related to CJ demands:

+ African activists, unlike their leaders, regularly use terms like reparations and ‘climate debt.’

+ When it comes to the often-tokenistic climate finance offered by the West, CJ activists insist on grants, not further piling up of foreign-currency-denominated debt.

+ CJ strategists have long suggested ways – such as ‘Million Climate Jobs’ in South Africa – that financing should contribute to bottom-up Just Transitions, not the Washington-London-Frankfurt-Paris-Brussels JETP variety suffered in South Africa.

+ When it comes to technology, CJ activists oppose Intellectual Property restraints on public-good technology (solar, wind and energy storage).

+ CJ activists despair at the privatized version of renewable energy on offer in most sites, with minimal options for collective ownership and management of local electricity grids.

+ Their energy-justice demands include Free Basic Electricity and other feminist-oriented decommodification strategies.

+ CJ activists put great efforts into participation, consultation and diversity, especially given how much climate crisis affects women, indigenous people, race and ethnicity, class and other identity components, in part because the present unjust burdens of loss, damage, adaptation and mitigation costs affect these groups the most.

+ CJ activists also insist on leaving Africa’s fossil fuels underground, and they valiantly fight both onshore and offshore exploration.

+ Some CJ activists argue that a downpayment on high-emitters’ climate debt is one way to compensate for resulting lost revenue, provided the funding gets straight to the people (e.g. according to a Basic Income Grant model used in Otjivero, Nambia in the early 2010s).

+ And many CJ activists advocate versions of ‘climate sanctions’ – e.g., divestment of $50 trillion in institutional investor assets out of fossil fuels, driven by international NGOs; or Xi’s September 2021 curtailment of coal-fired power plants along the Belt&Road; or even a (redesigned) climate sanctions promoted through European border tariffs – if it helps in their battles against high-carbon and high-methane-powered smelters, deep mining and other inappropriate energy guzzlers, and if revenues from such tariffs are circulated back to repay Europe’s climate debt.

These are some of the areas where the CJ tradition departs from mainstream climate policy. But the true test of the power struggle in this life-and-death situation continues to be the way such narratives are translated into climate protest and other pressure points aimed at shifting the views of the powerful, or weakening them. These include whether or not to legitimize elites, and how; where formal processes turn narratives into valuable – or on the other hand, coopted – engagements with otherwise-debilitating elite power structures; and lessons from the prior Africa-wide campaign that two decades ago resolved a major crisis: anti-retroviral medicine-access via a powerful multilateral system that made a substantial concession, thus raising life expectancy across the continent dramatically.

In that latter case, victory in the World Trade Organization in 2001 came from the combination of local dissent – led in South Africa by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) not only against their AIDS-denialist president (Thabo Mbeki) but against Big Pharma’s branch plants and Western government embassies – and global advocacy with international health NGOs (especially Medicins sans Frontieres) and social movements based in imperialist countries (especially ACTUP! in many United States cities). When in 1999 TAC began its international advocacy, it was inconceivable that the demand for free, generic, locally-produced AIDS-drug cocktails (then costing $10,000 annually) would be made available through African countries’ decimated public health systems (Bond 1999). But a United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria did provide funding (as did the U.S. government’s PEPFAR), thus – along with the Montreal Protocol which halted CFC emissions (thus reversing ozone hold damage) – serving as two global-scale precedents for what could be done if the balance of forces is finally shifted toward climate justice.

There is certainly potential for an African grassroots groundswell to rise up in the way so many African AIDS activists showed possible two decades ago, putting pressure on both their leaders and world elites (Heywood 2021). There is also the likelihood that the likes of Ramaphosa and Ruto continue to fail their constituencies. In that case, leadership from high profile activists will continue to condemn the elites, as has long been practiced by the likes of the late Wangari Maatthei, a Kenyan forest protector who became a Nobel Prize laureate and deputy minister; Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian architect and poet whose Niger Delta organising was recognised through the Right Livelihood Award; Ambassador Di-Aping, who after the Copenhagen COP15 was essentially banned from advocacy there but stayed active in other settings such “Rights of Future Generations” advocacy; scholar-activist Boaventura Monjane from the Mozambican peasant movement and University of the Western Cape Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies; Kenyan NGO organizers Mithika Mwenda and Augustine Njamnshi, who founded a network – PACJA – with more than 1000 member groups; Mozambican Friends of the Earth chapter leader Anabela Lemos; Zimbabwean Centre for Natural Resource Governance founder Farai Maguwu; and most importantly, as the continent’s leading youth voice, Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate. Some are also leaders of the 27-member Africa Climate Justice Collective which staged a Counter COP in late September 2023, and whose perspective is based on delegitimization and boycotting of the UN process, which contrasts with the combined insider-lobbying and protest that PACJA has carried out since 2009. Behind the local, continental and global leadership and movement-building, are grassroots activists who from the early 2000s have been articulating CJ approaches (Mwenda and Bond 2020).

That process began in Africa in 2004, when the Durban Group for Climate Justice formed from an international conference in order to critique the emerging system of carbon markets and offsets that had been mandated by global elites at the Kyoto COP in 1997. Others from South Africa straddled local, continental and global struggle scales in advocating climate justice: Kumi Naidoo, a Durban anti-apartheid activist who became head of Greenpeace International from 2009-15; Indian Ocean ‘Wild Coast’ activists Nonhle Mbuthuma and Sinegugu Zukula who successfully opposed offshore gas and sand mining; EarthLife Africa’s leader Makoma Lekalakala; Rural Women’s Assembly co-founder Mercia Andrews; Samantha Hargreaves and Trusha Reddy of the Women in Mining anti-extractivism network; Sunny Morgan of Debt4Climate; Vishwas Satgar, Charles Simane, Ferrial Adam, Awande Buthelezi, Janet Cherry and others in the Climate Justice Charter Movement which reaches furthest into eco-socialist networks; award-winning filmmaker Rehad Desai; groundWork NGO founder Bobby Peek; Green Connection’s Liziwe McDaid who helped catalyze widespread anti-gas coastal protests; Desmond D’Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance; environmental sociologist Jacklyn Cock; Malik Dasoo and Anita Khanna from Extinction Rebellion; Ferron Pedro of 350.org and Alex Lenferna of the Climate Justice Alliance which seek stronger ties to labour; and exceptionally tough lawyers at the Centre for Environmental Rights, Legal Resources Centre and Cullinan and Associates who support them.

In spite of fractured political traditions which mean there are sometimes several different and competing ideological currents and strategic orientations within the climate activist scene, their spurts of intense activism have sometimes paid off against Ramaphosa, Mantashe, Creecy and the local and multinational fossil corporations which, like Shell and Copelyn, feed South Africa’s politicians generous campaign contributions. Activist sites include beaches and petrol stations (of Shell and Total) where hundreds of protests have occurred against gas exploration since late 2021, Johnny Copelyn’s hotels, the headquarters of Eskom and the energy and environment ministries, Standard Bank (Africa’s largest, a prolific fossil-fuel financier), oil companies’ headquarters (especially Sasol and Total), a military supply firm associated with both Israel and offshore gas extraction (Paramount Group), and the World Bank’s Johannesburg and Pretoria offices. The latter institution was also on the African activist radar, attracting more than a thousand protesters in Morocco where the Bank’s Annual Meeting was held in mid-October.

Because African grassroots opponents of big polluters, their financiers and states which support them will intensify, the nuances of climate politics at global scale are often lost. But when a Nairobi Real Africa Climate Summit full of activists pinpoints obscure targets such as technological-fix false solutions and carbon markets, and when in many concrete settings the detailed critiques of polluting projects are subject to citizen scrutiny, there are often encouraging advances. The ideology of climate justice may, at some stage, intensify to full-fledged eco-socialism, instead of being dragged backwards to versions of climate action and ecological-modernization market and tech-fix strategies, as the elites seek. But the need to maintain profound skepticism about power relations within COPs and the narratives that flow from global climate politics, never fades – especially in Dubai in 2023 and what is likely to be a fossil-addicted Eastern European host in 2024, before moving to the Amazon where perhaps the balance of forces will be improved in 2025.

(A version of this article will appear in the Journal of Peasant Studies.)

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The post How the BRICS+, Africa Climate Summit, G20 and UN Prepare Us for Planetary Arson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Bond.

Why did so many on the left subscribe to this fallacy?

We must begin with the nature of imperialism in the Cold War.

The Cold War sustained unique, though historically bound alignments. The world was divided between socialist-oriented countries led by Communist or Workers’ Parties, the leading capitalist powers and their neo-colonies, and the non-aligned countries refusing to join in the anti-Communist crusade organized by the capitalist powers. Such a clearly defined order with an equally clearly defined conflict between the leader of the socialist camp, the USSR, and the leader of the capitalist camp, the US, led many to believe that the era of classical imperialism, the era of inter-imperialist rivalries, was over.

They were wrong.

The demise of the USSR and the emergence and intensification of numerous capitalist crises — political, social, ecological, and, especially, economic — created powerful centrifugal forces pulling apart the capitalist camp and dissolving its unity. In addition, global changes– the mobility of capital, the ready marriage of capital and labor in new regions and countries, inexpensive, effective transportation, the emergence of new technologies, new classes of commodities, and the commodification of public, common, and freely accessed goods — generated new competitors and intensified competition.

Crises and competition are the fertile soil of capitalist rivalries and state conflicts.

The world that emerged after 1991 had more in common with the world that Lenin knew before World War I than with the Cold War era and its clash of social systems and their blocs. Just as nineteenth-century capitalists strived to set the rules for peacefully carving up the world and establishing free trade by means of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the post-Cold War capitalist allies sought rules, alliances, trade agreements, and the elimination of barriers to capital movement, commodity exchange, and labor exploitation globally. Both periods were widely heralded as triumphant for capitalism and its inevitable reach to every corner of the globe.

But as the great nineteenth-century powers came to understand, uneven development, upstart rivals, and ruthless competition disrupted the promise of peace and harmony. After a promising interlude of relative peace — the first period of modest Western harmony since the Napoleonic wars — the new nineteenth century order began to unravel with economic instability, conflicts, military build-ups, colonial resistance, and nationalist wars.

Similarly, the post-Cold War capitalist powers enjoyed an interlude of rapidly expanding world trade — so called “globalization” — and the regulatory guidance of powerful international institutions. This harmony, too, proved elusive, to be shattered by a series of economic crises and regional wars at the turn of the twenty-first century. The so-called dot-com crisis marked “paid” on a decade of capitalist swagger and the ideology of there-is-no-alternative. Rocked again by a global “little” depression, a European debt crisis, a false debt-fueled recovery, a global public health disaster, and now a prolonged period of stagnation and inflation, the promised concord of capitalist rule has been shattered on the shoals of constant wars, social and political instability, and economic dysfunction.

That is the capitalist world of today — not so different from the capitalist world on the eve of 1914.

The most farsighted thinkers of the turn of the last century saw the end of capitalism’s nineteenth-century stability and apparent harmony as an opportunity. Lenin and others perceived the beginning of a new era ripe for revolutionary change. They foresaw a stage of capitalism bringing war, misery, and suffering on the masses in Europe and beyond. For these visionaries, the only escape from the despair inevitably wrought by the dominance of finance and monopoly organized in a global system of imperialism was revolution and socialism. The tragic First World War proved them right.

Today, without a vision to rescue working people — those feeling the brunt of capitalism’s expanding crises, more frequent wars, displacement of people, and bankruptcy of solutions — the field of politics is left to the right-wing opportunists, the faux-populists, the demagogues, the nostalgia peddlers, and other assorted hucksters of right and left. Bizarrely, most of the Euro-American left treat these charlatans as though they were aliens dropping from the sky, rather than the natural, logical product of the vacuum remaining from a left that lacks ideological clarity, cohesion, and a revolutionary program.

More broadly, even “liberal” governments are turning to nationalism, trade barriers, tariffs, and sanctions, the traditional posture of the right. Largely not noted by the left, the Biden administration, for example, has continued most of the trade and sanction regimens, and even the immigration policies, of the Trump administration.

As capitalism retrenches behind narrow self-interest, fierce, ruthless competition, and state-against-state conflict, the vast majority of the Euro-American left continues to circle-the-wagons around an increasingly discredited liberalism and social-democracy. With no answer to a world of ever-growing nation-state rivalries and global tensions, far too many on the left are locked into a defensive strategy that promises more of the same or a return to an imagined “golden age”: before Trump and right-wing populism or before Reagan, Thatcher and market fundamentalism. Failing to locate capitalism’s decadence in capitalism itself, this left promises to manage capitalism to better results– a hundred-year-old delusion.

Equally delusional is the notion — popular with a prominent section of the left– that an emerging bloc or order constitutes the foundation of a powerful movement against imperialism when that bloc itself is made up of capitalist-dominated states or states with a major capitalist economic sector. If Lenin is right — and we have overwhelming reasons to believe that he is — capitalism is at the very core of the system of imperialist rivalry. How can capitalism-dependent states collaborate, putting aside their own self-interest, to create a world without competition, friction, conflict, and war between states, themselves made up of competing capitals? Is not capitalism the essence of imperialism, and rivalry, conflict, and war the inevitable outcome? Has there been a counter-tendency since Lenin wrote Imperialism in 1916?

Beginning thirteen years ago, with the foundation of a modestly alternative grouping of five powerful states denied access to the top, exclusive club of capitalist states, the BRICS alignment became a cause for some leftists. Based more on blind faith than anything promised by the BRICS members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — leftists nonetheless cobbled together an ideological construct called “multipolarity.”

When radical political prospects appear dim, when the prospect of socialism seems remote, many on the left turn to the global chessboard, pretending that some chess pieces represent the social change that they long for in their own backyard. Frustrated with the long, hard road of winning the masses in their own country to a program serving working people, leftists in the US and EU invest vicariously in the actions of other governments that, for various reasons, are in opposition to the US and the EU governments.

This surrogate identification must not be confused unthinkingly with solidarity or internationalism. Both solidarity and internationalism emerge with sympathy for other peoples and their interests or with their governments only when those governments are serving the people. Solidarity with Cuba, for example, is grounded on the long-standing resistance of the people of Cuba to the demands, coercion, and aggression of the US and its allies. Since the government of Cuba organizes and supports that resistance, it, too, earns our solidarity.

The zeal for multipolarity arises from a fact and a hope. It is indeed a fact that the US government may have lost some of its ability to impose its will on the rest of the world and that global powers have risen to challenge US domination. This accounts for some of the increasing conflict and chaos in international relations.

But the multipolarity zealots interpret this as a setback to the system of imperialism when it is, at best, a setback for US imperialism. The fallacy is in assuming that the capitalist challengers are somehow benign and that they, magically, will restrain their interests in order to establish global harmony and peace. There is no basis in historical precedence or contemporary currency for this assumption, beyond mere hope.

Certainly, it is a radical misread of recent history and today’s events. In just the last weeks, relations between the governments of Canada and India reached a boiling point, conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out again, and two joined-at-the-hip reactionary governments, Poland and Ukraine sued and abused each other. All occurring without US government sponsorship. Venezuela’s government — a strong proponent of the multipolarity ideology — is itself in a bitter conflict with Guyana over 160,000 square kilometers of oil-rich territory, rejecting a “consultative referendum” proposed by the government of Guyana.

The presence of multipolarity’s icons within BRICS hardly ensures that bringing down US hegemony will disable the imperialist system: members India and the PRC maintain festering relations that break out into open warfare from time to time. Brazil under Bolsonaro was openly hostile and confrontational with all the more progressive countries of Central and South America (which reminds us that imperialism is about governments and socio-economic systems and not simply countries), and Russia is hotly contesting with France over valuable resources in Central Africa.

And the new members of BRICS carry even more contradictory baggage. Egypt and Ethiopia have a long-standing water dispute that will not be resolved by BRICS. Iran and Saudi Arabia have an existential dispute carried on by proxy, notably in Yemen. The Saudis are prepared to recognize Israel in order to acquire nuclear technology to match Iran, an action hardly suggestive of peace and prosperity.

Is there a common progressive, anti-capitalist, or anti-imperialist interest uniting this formation? Or are they united merely for expediency in this or any other bloc that will have them? Modi’s India, for example, accepts membership in nearly all international formations — Western-oriented or otherwise.

It is magical thinking to believe that without the heavy hand of the US empire, imperialist predation and conflict will melt away. Lenin scoffed at Kautsky’s notion that multipolar harmony (ultra-imperialism) would follow World War I, and events proved him right.

Moreover, the idealism invested in multipolarity and BRICS has fallen far short of what contemporary leftists have thought, as Patrick Bond and others have shown (despite his use of the unhelpful concept of “sub-imperialism”). BRICS sets a very low bar in reordering global relations, contrary to the wishes of many on the left.

Activists in Johannesburg, during the most recent BRICS meeting, organized a BRICS-from-below event. Though spawned by the center-left, social democratic Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the South African coordinator made a keen observation:

Trevor Ngwane, said, “BRICS wants leverage. Instead of saying, ‘We are capitalists fighting to be bigger capitalists’, they want to get strong, they start pretending that if they get strong, life will get better for the working class. We know that there will be a question: Does this mean you favour America?

“During the Struggle, there was a party that used to say, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’, so we must not be swayed and convinced to choose between these two; we must find our own way as socialists towards socialism.

“The problem with BRICS projects is that it’s all top-down. It’s something organised by governments.”

Yes, BRICS is organized by governments, capitalist-oriented governments for the most part, as Trevor Ngwane is keenly aware.

But more importantly, he challenges how BRICS (and by implication, multipolarity) is in any way related to the goal of socialism. It is socialism that is missing from BRICS and the multipolarity discussion. A program offered to working people that merely shuffles the deck of capitalist powers is no answer at all.

In a recent discussion of BRICS and the Eastern Economic Forum among three leading exponents of multipolarity, there is not one word about socialism. There is talk of development, of startups, of public-private partnerships, strategic priorities, and investments — even of Russian hypersonic missiles — but not one word about socialism.

One discussant claims to capture BRICS with this piece of sophistry: “So we’re dealing really not only with a geographic split, but with a split of economic structures, a mixed public-private economy, not like the Western public-private partnership, which you socialize the losses and privatize the profits, but something where the aim is really not to make a profit, but to make the overall economy grow.” Capitalism with a human face?

For sure, there are multipolarity advocates who believe that they see multipolarity as a step towards socialism. They recognize in the deepening economic, social, political, and ecological crises facing capitalism that socialism may be a solution. But as John Smith so frankly puts it in an Interview: “Convincing people that socialism is necessary is not so difficult; what is much more difficult is to convince people that socialism is possible.”

We live in a time when, rather than joining with people, organizations, or parties that advocate, organize, and fight for socialism, many on our left have become observers of a chess game between capitalist governments, cheering any force that attempts to diminish US power. How this will or will not benefit the exploited masses of the world is of little count.

Smith, the author of a thoughtful analysis of twenty-first century imperialism, succinctly summarizes our challenge in the face of profound crises of capitalism:

Wherever we are subjectively, objectively, the necessity to begin a transition towards communism is posed by this existential crisis. There is no other way out for humanity than this. Anything that distracts us from this, any sort of fantasy that some kind of a multipolar world will be better in any way, must be dispelled because we do not have any more time to waste.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

But the claim is false. The block decided to admit six new members, which would bring the total number of official members to 11, not 84. 

The claim was shared here in a post on Daum Cafe, one of the most influential online communities in South Korea. 

“The number of official BRICS members is in fact 84. They all agree and support Nesara Gesara. BRICS is dominating the world,” the Korean-language claim reads in part, referring to a conspiracy theory.  

The claim was also shared on South Korea’s largest blogging platform Naver Blog, two domestic online newspapers with anti-American and pro-Chinese views as well as Chinese-language social media posts, including this one by a YouTube user with 250,000 followers.

The claim began to circulate after the BRICS bloc met for its annual leader’s summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in August, where the alliance decided to admit new members. 

However, the claim is false.

Official BRICS members

The alliance currently has a total of five official members, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – which spells “BRICS.”

During the August summit, the leaders of the bloc decided to admit six new member countries: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, which will officially join the group in January 2024.

Although the BRICS leaders left the door open to future enlargement as dozens more countries voiced interest in joining a grouping they hope can level the global playing field, their latest move would bring the total number of the bloc’s official members to 11, not 84. 

Nesara Gesara

Nesara Gesara is a conspiracy theory suggesting a sweeping reset of the United States economy that would eliminate all debts. 

This theory draws from the National Economic Security and Recovery Act or Nesara, a proposed set of economic changes from the 1990s. This proposed act advocated for ending compound interest on loans, replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, and reverting U.S. currency to the gold standard. 

Although these measures were never formally presented to Congress, conspiracy theorists believe they were covertly approved and then hidden by George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.

The conspiracy is extensively consumed in South Korea by anti-American and pro-China Internet users who believe in a “new world order” led by China. Those users often claim that the expansion of BRICS can set the groundwork for such an order.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang.

The current members of BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—along with the countries accepted for membership: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran.

BRICS is an informal grouping of emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It provides a platform for its members to challenge the global financial system dominated by the United States and its allies in forums like the G7, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Sarang Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23), director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute and adjunct faculty at George Washington University, notes that many countries of the Global South are frustrated with the US dollar being the de facto world currency, because it leaves their

economies at the mercy of US interest rates and sovereign measures such as quantitative easing, and enables harsh US-led sanctions regimes. For the Global South, alternative pathways of both development financing and currency settlements are attractive ways to achieve autonomy, enhance economic growth and at least partly protect themselves against the extraterritoriality of sanctions.

Relatedly, the BRICS states appear to be seeking diplomatic autonomy, taking a variety of positions on the war in Ukraine that are at odds with Washington’s preferred view (The Nation, 6/27/23) and not always in perfect sync with that of the “R” in BRICS.

In August, BRICS invited six new members to join: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. More than 40 countries expressed interest in joining BRICS, while 23 formally applied to become part of the club (Al Jazeera, 8/24/23).

China too big?

Dozens of countries are trying to join BRICS, but clearly they don’t read Bloomberg (8/18/23).

The prospect of a group of nations almost entirely from the Global South working together to advance independent development sent the Bloomberg news service into attack mode. The outlet ran an op-ed by Howard Chua-Eoan (8/18/23) headlined “BRICS Is Broken and Should Be Scrapped.” His argument:

The big trouble with the BRICS is that China (with its still enormous economic clout) dominates the group—and Beijing wants to turn it into another global forum to echo its denunciations of the US and EU.

The assertion that China “dominates” BRICS is misleading. Three scholars (Conversation, 8/18/23) from Tufts University’s Rising Power Alliances project, which studies the evolution of BRICS and its relationship with the US, found that

the common portrayal of BRICS as a China-dominated group primarily pursuing anti-US agendas is misplaced. Rather, the BRICS countries connect around common development interests and a quest for a multipolar world order in which no single power dominates.

For instance, the authors note:

China has been unable to advance some key policy proposals. For example, since the 2011 BRICS summit, China has sought to establish a BRICS free trade agreement, but could not get support from other states.

Similarly, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) points out:

In 2015, the five [BRICS] states founded the New Development Bank, with infrastructure financing and sustainable development as its focus. Although China’s GDP is more than twice that of the rest of the BRICS states combined, it agreed to an equal partnership on governing the bank and an equal share of subscribed capital of $10 billion each.

‘US economic leadership’

Bloomberg (8/29/23) blames the rise of BRICS on “the US turn away from economic leadership.”

In another article, Bloomberg’s editorial board (8/29/23) worried that BRICS’ expansion “could weaken existing channels of cooperation at a time when collective action on global threats has never been more urgent.” For the authors, the BRICS countries are “sidelining the existing institutions” of “global governance,” thereby making “genuinely multilateral cooperation harder.”

The editorial’s concern is not with developing international “cooperation” or “collective action on global threats” per se; its concern is with maintaining the current global system. The root of the threat to the status quo, the editorial maintained, was lack of US leadership:

It’s no coincidence that the BRICS-11 arrives following the US turn away from economic leadership—accelerated by Donald Trump’s administration and affirmed by Joe Biden’s. The IMF and World Bank are increasingly rudderless. The WTO is all but defunct, as good as shut down by US obstruction. The organizing principle of US policy is no longer global prosperity but “Made in America.” Emerging economies can be forgiven for seeking alternatives to a global order that seems to put them last.

The timing of this shift couldn’t be worse. Higher interest rates are adding to the financial stresses confronting many low- and middle-income countries. If a new global debt crisis lies ahead, the damage won’t be narrowly confined. The costs of climate change are mounting, and the efforts of the once-and-future BRICS in containing them will be pivotal. These challenges are unavoidably global and demand a cooperative global response.

All this makes the fracturing of the multilateral order truly dangerous. Prodded by the BRICS enlargement, the US and its partners should work urgently to repair it.

The editors are wildly misreading BRICS’ appeal. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times (5/23/23), “What brings its members together is the desire not to be dependent on the whims of the US and its close allies, who have dominated the world for the past two centuries.” Likewise, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) wrote:

The multiple failures of the US-led world order to substantially support two core requirements of Global South states—economic development and safeguarding sovereignty—are creating a demand for alternative structures for ordering the world.

Astrid Prange made a similar point in Deutsche Welle (4/10/23):

In 2014, with $50 billion (around €46 billion) in seed money, the BRICS nations launched the New Development Bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition, they created a liquidity mechanism called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement to support members struggling with payments.

These offers were not only attractive to the BRICS nations themselves, but also to many other developing and emerging economies that had had painful experiences with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and austerity measures. This is why many countries said they might be interested in joining the BRICS group.

Contrary to the Bloomberg editorial’s claims, it’s not the US’s so-called “turn away from economic leadership,” or the stalling of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, that makes BRICS attractive. It’s precisely that the “multilateral order” Bloomberg refers to is US-led, and that the US has used its stranglehold on these institutions to exploit and control poorer nations.

The democracy problem(s)

Bloomberg (8/28/23) criticizes BRICS for lack of democracy; meanwhile, at the IMF, countries with 14% of the world’s population get 59% of the votes.

Bloomberg (8/28/23) also ran a piece by Giovanni Salzano, headlined “BRICS Enlargement Is Going to Worsen Its Democracy Problem.” The piece comments that, of the six states invited to join BRICS,

only Argentina can be considered a democracy—albeit a flawed one. That means the enlargement would leave the group dominated by non-democratic countries, with seven of them headed by hybrid or authoritarian regimes.

Leaving aside the “democracy problem” of states at the core of the US-led world system—such as Canada and the US itself—Salzano offers an overly narrow conception of democracy. He exclusively focuses on the internal political systems of the BRICS nations, ignoring whether BRICS might help address the dearth of democratic procedures in existing international organizations.

For example, as Al Jazeera (8/22/23) pointed out:

The five BRICS nations now have a combined gross domestic product (GDP) larger than that of the G7 in purchasing power parity terms. In nominal terms, the BRICS countries are responsible for 26% of the global GDP. Despite this, they get only 15% of the voting power at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

BRICS countries account for roughly 40% of the world’s population (Reuters, 8/24/23) while the G7 is home to just 10% (FT, 5/23/23). Jason Hickel (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20) of the London School of Economics observed:

The leaders of the World Bank and the IMF are not elected, but are nominated by the US and Europe…. The US has de facto veto power over all significant decisions, and together with the rest of the G7 and the European Union controls well over half of the vote in both agencies. If we look at the voting allocations in per capita terms, the inequalities are revealed to be truly extreme. For every vote that the average person in the global North has, the average person in the global South has only one-eighth of a vote (and the average South Asian has only one-20th of a vote).

It’s too early to say whether BRICS will help countries in the Global South to develop on their own terms. But Bloomberg’s opposition to the group is probably a good sign.

The post Bloomberg Hits BRICS as US Power Challenged appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

In recent months, US and European officials have scurried to Beijing for so-called talks, as if the year were 1972 and Richard Nixon were in the White House.

But there will be no dramatic, era-defining US-China pact this time. If relations are to change, it will be decisively for the worse.

The West’s two-faced policy towards China was starkly illustrated last week by the visit to Beijing of Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly – the first by a senior UK official for five years.

While Cleverly talked vaguely afterwards about the importance of not “disengaging” from China and avoiding “mistrust and errors”, the British parliament did its best to undermine his message.

The foreign affairs committee issued a report on UK policy in the Indo-Pacific that provocatively described the Chinese leadership as “a threat to the UK and its interests”.

In terminology that broke with past diplomacy, the committee referred to Taiwan – a breakaway island that Beijing insists must one day be “reunified” with China – as an “independent country”. Only 13 states recognise Taiwan’s independence.

The committee urged the British government to pressure its Nato allies into imposing sanctions on China.

Upping the stakes

The UK parliament is meddling recklessly in a far-off zone of confrontation with the potential for incendiary escalation against a nuclear power, a situation unrivalled outside of Ukraine.

But Britain is far from alone. Last year, for the first time, Nato moved well out of its supposed sphere of influence – the North Atlantic – to declare Beijing a challenge to its “interests, security and values”.

There can be little doubt that Washington is the moving force behind this escalation against China, a state posing no obvious military threat to the West.

It has upped the stakes significantly by making its military presence felt ever more firmly in and around the Straits of Taiwan – the 100-mile wide waterway separating China from Taiwan that Beijing views as its doorstep.

Senior US officials have been making noisy visits to Taiwan – not least, Nancy Pelosi last summer, when she was house speaker. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is showering Taiwan with weapons systems.

If this weren’t enough to inflame China, Washington is drawing Beijing’s neighbours deeper into military alliances – such as Aukus and the Quad – to isolate China and leave it feeling threatened. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, describes this as a policy of “comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against us”.

Last month, President Biden hosted Japan and South Korea at Camp David, forging a trilateral security arrangement directed at what they called China’s “dangerous and aggressive behavior”.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s “Pacific Defence Initiative” budget – chiefly intended to contain and encircle China – just keeps rising.

In the latest move, revealed last week, the US is in talks with Manila to build a naval port in the northernmost Philippine islands, 125 miles from Taiwan, boosting “American access to strategically located islands facing Taiwan”.

That will become the ninth Philippine base used by the US military, part of a network of some 450 operating in the South Pacific.

Dirty double game

So what’s going on? Is Britain – along with its Nato allies – interested in building greater trust with Beijing, as Cleverly argues, or backing Washington’s escalatory manoeuvres against a nuclear-armed China over a small territory on the other side of the globe, as the British parliament indicates?

Inadvertently, the foreign affairs committee’s chair, Alicia Kearns, got to the heart of the matter. She accused the British government of having a “confidential, elusive China strategy”, one “buried deep in Whitehall, kept hidden even from senior ministers”.

And not by accident.

European leaders are torn. They fear losing access to Chinese goods and markets, plunging their economies deeper into recession after a cost-of-living crisis precipitated by the Ukraine war. But most are even more afraid of angering Washington, which is determined to isolate and contain China.

That divide was highlighted by French President Emmanuel Macron following a visit to China in April, when he urged “strategic autonomy” for Europe towards Beijing.

“Is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.

Macron soon found himself roundly rebuked in Washington and European capitals.

Instead, a dirty double game is being played. The West makes conciliatory noises towards Beijing, while its actions turn ever more belligerent.

Cleverly himself alluded to this deceit, observing of relations with China: “If there is ever a situation where our security concerns are at odds with our economic concerns, our security concerns win out.”

After Ukraine, we are told, Taiwan must be the locus of the West’s all-consuming security interest.

Cleverly’s meaning is barely veiled: Europe’s clear economic interests in maintaining good relations with Beijing must be suborned to Washington’s more malevolent agenda, masquerading as Nato security interests.

Forget Macron’s “autonomy”.

Notably, this game of misdirection draws on the same blueprint that shaped the long build-up to the Ukraine war.

Moscow cornered

Western politicians and media repeat the preposterous claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” only because they created a cover story beforehand, as they now do with China.

I have set out in detail before how these provocations unfolded. Bit by bit, US administrations eroded Ukrainian neutrality and incorporated Russia’s large neighbour into the Nato fold. The intention was to covertly turn it into a forward base, capable of positioning nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow.

Washington ignored warnings from its most senior officials and Russia experts that cornering Moscow would eventually provoke it into a pre-emptive strike against Ukraine. Why? Because, it seems, that was the goal all along.

The invasion provided the pretext for the US to impose sanctions and wage its current proxy war, using Ukrainians as foot soldiers, to neutralise Russia militarily and economically – or “weaken” it, as the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin explicitly terms Washington’s key aim in the Ukraine war.

Moscow is seen as an obstacle, alongside China, to the US maintaining “full-spectrum global dominance” – a doctrine that came to the fore after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago.

Using Nato as sidekick, Washington is determined to keep the world unipolar at all costs. It is desperate to preserve its global, imperial military and economic might, even as its star wanes. In such circumstances, Europe’s options for Macron-style autonomy are non-existent.

Peace talks charade

The public’s continuing ignorance of Nato’s countless provocations against Russia is hardly surprising. Reference to them is all but taboo in Western media.

Instead, the West’s belligerent manoeuvrings – as with those now against China – are overshadowed by a script that trumpets its faux-diplomacy, supposedly rebuffed by “madman” Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This disingenuous narrative was typified by western double-dealing over accords signed in 2014 and 2015 in the Belarussian capital Minsk – after negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to stop a bloody civil war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbass.

There, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and separatist Ukrainians of Russian origin began facing off in 2014, immediately after yet more covert meddling. Washington assisted in the overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow. In response, ethnic Russians demanded greater autonomy from Kyiv.

The official story is that, far from inflaming conflict, the West sought to foster peace, with Germany and France brokering the Minsk accords.

One can argue about why those agreements failed. But following Russia’s invasion, a disturbing new light was shed on their context by Angela Merkel, German chancellor at the time.

She told Die Ziet newspaper last December that the 2014 Minsk agreement was less about achieving peace than “an attempt to give Ukraine time. It also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today… In early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them [areas in Donbas] at the time. And I very much doubt that the Nato countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”

If Russia could have overrun Ukraine at any time from 2014 onwards, why did it wait eight years, while its neighbour grew much stronger, assisted by the West?

Assuming Merkel is being honest, Germany, it seems, never really believed the peace process it oversaw stood a chance. That suggests one of two possibilities.

Either the initiative was a charade, brokered to buy more time for Ukraine to be integrated into Nato, a path that was bound to lead to Russia’s invasion – as Merkel herself acknowledges. Indeed, she accepts that Ukraine’s accession process into Nato launched in 2008 was “wrong”.

Or Merkel knew that the US would work with Kyiv’s new pro-Washington government to disrupt the process. Europe could do little more than delay an inevitable war for as long as possible.

Neither alternative fits the “unprovoked” narrative. Both suggest Merkel understood Moscow’s patience would eventually run out.

The theatre of the Minsk accords was directed at Moscow, which delayed invading on the assumption the talks were in good faith, but also at western publics. When Russia did finally invade, they could be easily persuaded Putin never planned to embrace western “peace” overtures.

Economic chokehold

As with Ukraine, the cover story concealing the West’s provocations towards China has been carefully directed from Washington.

Europeans like Cleverly are parading around Beijing to make it look like the West desires peaceful engagement. But the only real engagement is the crafting of a military noose around China’s neck, just as a noose was crafted earlier for Russia.

The security rationale this time – of protecting far-off Taiwan – obscures Washington’s less palatable aim: to enforce US global dominance by smashing any economic or technological threat from China and Russia.

Washington can’t remain military top dog if it doesn’t also maintain a chokehold on the global economy to fund its inflated Pentagon budget, equivalent to the combined spending of the next 10 nations.

The dangers to Washington are only underscored by the rapid expansion of Brics, a bloc of emerging economic powers headed by China and Russia. Six new members will join the current five in January, with many more waiting in the wings.

An expanded Brics offers new security and economic axes on which these emerging powers can organise, profoundly weakening US influence.

The new entrants are Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. China already brokered an unexpected reconciliation between historic foes Iran and Saudia Arabia in March, in preparation for their accession.

Brics+ will only strengthen their mutual interests.

That will be no comfort in Washington. The US has long favoured keeping the two at loggerheads, in a divide-and-rule policy that rationalised its continuous meddling to control the oil-rich Middle East and favoured Washington’s key regional military ally, Israel.

But Brics+ won’t just end the US role in dictating global security arrangements. It will gradually loosen Washington’s stranglehold on the global economy, ending the dollar’s dominance as the world reserve currency.

Brics+ now controls a majority of the world’s energy supplies, and some 37 percent of global GDP, more than the US-led G7. Opportunities to trade in currencies other than the dollar become much easier.

As Paul Craig Roberts, a former official in Ronald Reagan’s treasury, observed: “Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.”

In short, a weak dollar is going to make bullying the rest of the world a considerably more difficult prospect.

The US isn’t likely to go down without a fight. Which is why Ukrainians and Russians are currently dying on the battlefield. And why China and the rest of us have good reason to fear who may be next.

• First published at Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

First G6 summit at the Chateau de Rambouillet in November 1975 – Public Domain

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the West, and particularly the United States, found itself at a fork in the road. One road led to peace, justice, cooperation, nuclear disarmament, a revitalized UN, inclusiveness, pluralism, human rights, multilateralism, fair trade, regulated markets, food security, energy transition, sustainability, and humane governance. The other road led to militarism, intervention, warmongering, nuclearism, conflict, sanctions, regime-changing interventions, multiple trends toward inequality, predatory neoliberal globalization, hegemony, geopolitical primacy. Unfortunately, the. victorious side in the Cold War immediately chose the familiar more traveled road of hegemonic geopolitics, foregoing historic opportunities to pursue nuclear disarmament and humane forms of global governance, including a veto-free UN. The longer term harms of these serious lapses in geopolitical judgment are being currently experienced by way of the unresolved Ukraine Crisis and the negligently handled response to global warning.

The American president, George W. Bush a decade later after the Soviet implosion, summarized the ideological justification of this choice in self-assured language: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise… We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.” [Cover letter to official document, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2002] Such a statement was made some months after the 9/11 terror attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon, reaffirming the choice of the geopolitical continuity by declaring a ‘war on terror’ rather than seizing the opportunity for a momentous experiment in transnational cooperative anti-terror law enforcement.

The Ukraine War presented yet another opportunity to choose the less familiar road of compromise and diplomacy rather than the costly and problematic pursuit of victory, the opportunity costs for climate and reforms at home of further increased investments in hegemony and prolonged warfare, and yet again there was no hesitation about embracing an uncompromising militarism. What doubts arose involved an increased questioning of whether the financial burdens of this geopolitically tinged war making, that is, defeating Russia, warning China, and cynically inflicting the heavy incidental costs of such a strategy on the Ukrainian people who have not only been victimized by the Russian attack but by the hyper-nationalism of their own government including the acceptance of political guidance from Washington, despite its geopolitical priorities clashing with Ukrainian wellbeing.

This prevailing pattern of geopolitics is difficult to deny, and vividly illustrated by comparing the long and complicated outcome documents of the recent summits of G-7 leaders in May at Hiroshima and declaration of BRICS leaders at Johannesburg in August. The G-7 document has three notable features: a featured unconditional commitment to help Ukraine achieve a battlefield victory over Russia, a downplaying of the relevance of the UN and the failure to do more that pay lip service to the peace agenda embedded in the UN Charter, nuclear disarmament, and international law, bolstered by ‘feel good’ platitudes about the doing more to achieve the UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) by 2030. The G-7 countries having opposed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), affirming their continued reliance on deterrence, non-proliferation, and implicitly on U.S. ‘full-spectrum dominance,’ misleadingly softened by cynically affirming an intention to embrace nuclear disarmament ‘ultimately,’ which in elite security circles of the West is correctly interpreted as ‘never.’ After the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the global situation was as calm as it could ever hope to be, with geopolitical rivalry removed from the scene, and yet not a single move was made by Washington even to test the waters by proposing high profile moves to achieve nuclear disarmament and build up UN peacekeeping capabilities.

In contrast to the G-7, the BRICS Johannesburg Declaration looks toward  a world of peaceful competition and global cooperation, treats the Ukraine War as presenting a challenge that should be the occasion for diplomatic peacemaking rather than militarist war making. The most pronounced theme of the BRICS document is the resolve to become less dependent on the hegemonic global security and trade/finance/investment arrangements more harshly imposed on the Global South after the Soviet collapse, to resist the new imperialism of unipolarity and act in solidarity with various post-independence conflictual situations that has awakened the world to the reality that the struggle against ‘colonialism’ in Africa, Latin America, and Asia is far from over.

The recent tensions arising from the July coup in Niger manifest the entrapment of African states in the toxic reality of ‘colonialism after colonialism.’ This reality reflects the contradictions, corruption, and incompetence of the decolonized state that had been deliberately prevented from developing national economic, educational, and governance capabilities while under direct colonial control until 1960, and since then exploited by regimes of informal control. When left to fend for themselves these states, especially the former French colonies in West Africa, found that they could not do better by way of domestic governance than to accept a new humiliating phase of French tutelage slightly disguised by the façade of collaborating civilian elites.

BRICS are still at the early stages of establishing their own identity, an intricate undertaking given its own internal contradictions. For instance, India, Brazil, and South Africa do not want to burn most of their bridges to the West but do seek to create counterweights to the hegemonic aspects of unipolarity. Also, it is unclear whether the addition of six countries to BRICS membership will overall broaden its base and help increase its anti-hegemonic leverage or have the opposite effect—diluting a principal reason for the formation of BRICS by admitting to membership countries that seem presently unwilling to challenge hegemony or geopolitical primacy.

As of mid-2023 the difference in tone and substance between the two collective perspectives has significance. The. G-7 after a recital of peace and development platitudes shifts immediately to specifying its operational commitment to militarism, which is reinforced throughout the document by references to ‘Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.’ The opening words of the Hiroshima final statement are indicative: “We, the Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), met in Hiroshima for our annual Summit on May 19- 21, 2023, more united than ever in our determination to meet the global challenges of this moment and set the course for a better future. Our work is rooted in respect for the Charter of the United Nations (UN) and international partnership.” From the overall document, it is clear that ‘our determination’ in the quoted sentence is symbolically and substantively linked to securing victory in Ukraine however long it takes, an. interpretation confirmed by the document’s focus on outlining concrete steps in relation to winning in Ukraine with no sign of openness to diplomacy or political compromise.

This dubious course of action is confirmed as follows: “We are taking concrete steps to “support Ukraine for as long as it takes in the face of Russia’s illegal war of aggression.” A listing of such concrete steps is in marked contrast to the vague generalities when it comes peace and justice issues. In contrast, the BRICS give close attention to the worsening situation of Palestine, worries about migration, the urgency of an equitable approach to climate change, issue on which the G-7 address by silence or regressive postures.

How can we make sense of these G-7 choices that seem so obviously to imperil the human future by raising nuclear dangers to crisis levels and by diverting attention and resources from global public goods such as climate change, poverty mitigation, food and nutritional security, self-determination, peaceful resolution of conflict, enhanced UN capabilities, receptivity to multilateralism? Why do the political leaders of the West consistently turn their backs on the human interest as a time of planetary emergency?

A first line of response is to grasp that although the historical circumstances are fraught with unprecedented risk, geopolitical primacy has long been part of the way the world is organized. Even in the shadow of World War II, the UN exempted the most dangerously powerful countries from its own Charter framework by the veto as well as by giving the victors impunity for their international crimes while prosecuting punishing surviving leaders of the losers.  With respect to nuclear weapons, instead of eliminating them the solution found was to combine non-proliferation restraints on additions to the nuclear oligopoly as accentuated by unrestrained discretion in secretly developing roles for this weaponry in the war plans of the nuclear powers, not even mitigated by No First Declarations. In effect, the global security system was designed in 1945 to keep international law and the UN at the margins. What it was not designed to be was a unipolar structure that only emerged after the Berlin Wall fell. It is this structure that is currently under increasing challenge from Russia and China, themselves not prepared to bring geopolitical governance to an end. Multipolar challenges are also being directed at hegemonic and dysfunctional post-Cold War structures of the U.S. led NATO West. Unipolarity is also increasingly challenged by the Global South acting jointly and separately from the two geopolitical challengers. As the Global West drifts ever closer to declaring Cold War II, the Global South is inclining toward Bandung II.

Among the important manifestations of this new more hopeful global atmosphere are the following: widespread support by governments representing a majority of the world’s peoples for diplomatic accommodations in Ukraine and Iran and overall opposition to coercive diplomacy by way of sanctions; the launch by BRICS of a direct challenge to neoliberal globalization through the ‘dedollarization’ of international trade and financial arrangements for less developed countries; the operations of the New Development Bank (NDB) in promoting economic progress in less developed countries without the debilitating conditionalities of the support imposed by the World Bank and IMF; challenging NATO nuclearism by wide support among countries in the Global South for Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons(TPNW); support for Palestine’s right of self-determination and African coups directed at the colonialist features of post-colonial statehood.

The global outlook is becoming aware of and hostile toward U.S. hegemony, but showing a greater interest in a governance framework that displays deference to the UN Charter and international law. These developments, despite contradictions and elements of incoherence,  create a potential for a more benign geopolitics, less militarist, more committed to peaceful resolution of disputes, more concerned with equity in the world economy, and dedicated to cooperative solution of common global problems. If such trends continue, the historical transformation underway will gain momentum, weakening its hegemonic and unipolar characteristics and the early phase of a transition to a more benign, regulated, and multipolar version of geopolitics. Overall, glimmers of hope in a darkening sky.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Falk.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard D. Wolff.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

Photograph Source: Bb3015 – CC BY-SA 4.0

BRICS countries account for 43 percent of the world’s population and more of its wealth than the G7. Until Augusts 2023, composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, BRICS has won the world popularity contest, with 40 countries clamoring to join, according to South Africa in July. Twenty-two nations have formally asked for acceptance, and an equal number have informally expressed interest. Why? Unlike the western axis, highly militarized by NATO, BRICS is overall a peaceful economic organization. It’s all about development, which naturally appeals to a Global South sick of western colonialist resource extraction.

At the BRICS confab August 22-24, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Iran knocked on the door for membership and got it. They join officially in January. Some of these new members have lousy human rights records and vigorously oppress their populations. But BRICS has never been about interfering in the internal affairs of its sovereign members. It is about interstate development, trade and creating a gargantuan commodities bloc.

Specifically, with these new additions and the original five members, BRICS becomes an oil and gas colossus. When Algeria joins next year, that nearly merges BRICS and OPEC. When Venezuela eventually gets in, and it has already applied, BRICS will control over 65 percent of the planet’s oil production. Meanwhile, with nine more countries waiting in the wings in addition to Algeria and likely to be admitted at the 2024 get-together in the Russian city of Kazan, BRICS becomes truly formidable in fast-tracking peaceful development in the Global South.

Key to this peaceful approach is the BRICS bank, the New Development Bank headed by Dilma Rouseff, the leftist Brazilian president illegally ousted in a lawfare coup in 2016. A lot of hope is invested in this bank. Hope from Global South nations tired of International Monetary Fund and World Bank debt traps. Although so far the NDB may seem like a fairly typical neo-liberal institution, its explicit goals inspire some hope. With the NDB, good things could actually flow to the Global South.

Such as? Well, the NDB website says the bank focuses on clean energy and energy efficiency, transport infrastructure, water and sanitation, environmental protection, social infrastructure and digital infrastructure. The NDB has authorized capital of $100 billion, half of which derives from its five founding members. The bank’s membership is open to countries in the United Nations, while China and South Africa are its largest shareholders.

There has been much talk in recent months of a BRICS currency, backed by gold, to replace the dollar in its members’ trade. In fact, the dollar, due to the stupidity of Washington’s economic sanctions on foreign nations, has already been sidelined in a growing number of global transactions, as countries bypass it to conduct business in their own currencies. BRICS money, supported by gold, would likely be the final, fatal blow to the dollar’s world reserve currency status. Rumors were that a gold-backed BRICS currency would be addressed at the group’s August meeting in South Africa. However, this was only idle chatter. According to South African finance minister Enoch Godongwana August 25, BRICS is not currently considering creating a common currency. De-dollarization, on the other hand, remains very much in process.

That’s because the pressure to get this new currency exactly right would be intense. A common currency, RT quoted Godongwana, would require a central bank, “and that presupposes losing independence on monetary policies, and I don’t think any country is ready for that.” De-dollarization, however, continues apace, much to the detriment of the U.S. economy. Indeed, in his welcome address to the BRICS summit, Russian president Vladimir Putin proclaimed de-dollarization already irreversible. Not surprisingly, China and Russia have raced ahead with this and now conduct over 80 percent of their mutual trade in yuan and rubles.

The rest of the Global South duly follows. Because in recent years the world witnessed imperial Washington’s weaponization of its currency and concluded that holding their wealth in greenbacks was not safe, since displeasing the Empire means having financial assets stolen; in other words, non-westerners concluded that the Empire was not fiscally reliable. Similarly in its view of the Ukraine War, the Global South declined to follow Washington’s bellicose lead. Many of those countries saw little difference between the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – except perhaps that NATO in Russia’s front yard posed a dire military threat, while Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs were thousands of miles away from American coasts.

De-dollarization won’t happen all at once. Nope – the dollar will go out not with a bang but with a whimper (and we unlucky ducks who dwell in the heart of the Empire will be stuck holding the bag and probably penniless as a result), as the world incrementally conducts more and more business in local currencies. Expect Washington to try to sabotage these developments, rather than curb its insane sanctions addiction. Improving its behavior by ending sanctions or withdrawing the ever-present threat of brute force is anathema in the imperial capital. But still, awareness that its arrogance has got it into trouble now percolates through imperial elites. Word was that as part of the Empire’s recent Saudi diplomacy deal, Washington wants a guarantee that Riyadh will keep the petro dollar and not replace it with yuan. There was also the rumor that on her recent trip to Beijing, treasury secretary Janet Yellen implored the Chinese to buy over $800 billion worth of U.S. Treasuries.

Such an ask was of course a non-starter. Since vilification of Beijing became the entrée du jour on the U.S. foreign policy menu during the Trump years and continuing into the Biden ones, the Chinese have, naturally, ditched a ton of USTs and purchased gold. China is still the second largest U.S. creditor after Japan, and considering all the threats and insults hurled at it by idiot U.S. politicians and military men, no doubt Beijing views its UST holdings as an albatross, a huge liability, in the event of American sanctions. So no, Chinese leadership appeared unmoved by Yellen’s ridiculous pleas.

Financial prosperity serves as a marker of intelligent leadership. In 2022, the countries with the biggest increases in prosperity were Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia. The nations with the biggest financial market losses were Australia, Canada, China, Japan and, worst of all, the United States. Such stats incentivize BRICS countries to speed their separation from the west.

The original BRICS members all apparently want to expand the organization by taking in new applicants. Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for this during the summit. According to Xi’s statement, development is an inalienable right of all countries, and emerging nations are growing more and more relevant internationally. Xi urged BRICS countries to oppose “decoupling,” disrupting industrial and supply chains and economic coercion. Such exhortations contrast glaringly with the steady stream of Sinophobic sewage emitted by Washington in recent years. Xi also critiqued the so-called “rules-based international order,” arguing instead for principles of international law. Reasonable enough, considering that imperial Washington cooks up those so-called rules, which then everyone except the Exceptional Empire is supposed to follow.

In short, despite welcoming governments to which progressives object, BRICS offers an alternative to violent, oppressive, western hegemony. It has done so for 15 years, but now, in light of the Ukraine War, the weaponization of the dollar, Washington sanctioning 29 percent of the world economy over several decades and essentially having little to offer the rest of the planet, besides, as economist Michael Hudson has observed, the promise not to nuke it, provided it bows down and does what the U.S. wants – in light of all this, BRICS’ allure shines very bright. Africa wants in. Latin America wants in. So does West Asia. This is hardly surprising. Much of the world regards Washington as a not very smart gangster regime. The Empire has begun to reap what it sowed.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

On the last day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, the five founding states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) welcomed six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The BRICS partnership now encompasses 47.3 percent of the world’s population, with a combined global Gross Domestic Product (by purchasing power parity, or PPP,) of 36.4 percent. In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10 percent of the world’s population, their share of the global GDP (by PPP) is 30.4 percent. In 2021, the nations that today form the expanded BRICS group were responsible for 38.3 percent of global industrial output while their G7 counterparts accounted for 30.5 percent. All available indicators, including harvest production and the total volume of metal production, show the immense power of this new grouping.  Celso Amorim, advisor to the Brazilian government and one of the architects of BRICS during his former tenure as foreign minister, said of the new development that ‘[t]he world can no longer be dictated by the G7’.

Certainly, the BRICS nations, for all their internal hierarchies and challenges, now represent a larger share of the global GDP than the G7, which continues to behave as the world’s executive body. Over forty countries expressed an interest in joining BRICS, although only twenty-three applied for membership before the South Africa meeting (including seven of the thirteen countries in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Indonesia, the world’s seventh largest country in terms of GDP (by PPP), withdrew its application to BRICS at the last moment but said it would consider joining later. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo’s comments reflect the mood of the summit: ‘We must reject trade discrimination. Industrial downstreaming must not be hindered. We must all continue to voice equal and inclusive cooperation’.

Tadesse Mesfin (Ethiopia), Pillars of Life: Waiting, 2018

BRICS does not operate independently of new regional formations that aim to build platforms outside the grip of the West, such as the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Instead, BRICS membership has the potential to enhance regionalism for those already within these regional fora. Both sets of interregional bodies are leaning into a historical tide supported by important data, analysed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research using a range of widely available and reliable global databases. The facts are clear: the Global North’s percentage of world GDP fell from 57.3 percent in 1993 to 40.6 percent in 2022, with the US’s percentage shrinking from 19.7 percent to only 15.6 percent of global GDP (by PPP) in the same period – despite its monopoly privilege. In 2022, the Global South, without China, had a GDP (by PPP) greater than that of the Global North.

The West, perhaps because of its rapid relative economic decline, is struggling to maintain its hegemony by driving a New Cold War against emergent states such as China. Perhaps the single best evidence of the racial, political, military, and economic plans of the Western powers can be summed up by a recent declaration of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU): ‘NATO and the EU play complementary, coherent and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security. We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’.

Alia Ahmad (Saudi Arabia), Hameel – Morning Rain, 2022

Why did BRICS welcome such a disparate group of countries, including two monarchies, into its fold? When asked to reflect on the character of the new full member states, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, ‘What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country. We can’t deny the geopolitical importance of Iran and other countries that will join BRICS’. This is the measure of how the founding countries made the decision to expand their alliance. At the heart of BRICS’s growth are at least three issues: control over energy supplies and pathways, control over global financial and development systems, and control over institutions for peace and security.

Houshang Pezeshknia (Iran), Khark, 1958

A larger BRICS has now created a formidable energy group. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are also members of OPEC, which, with Russia, a key member of OPEC+, now accounts for 26.3 million barrels of oil per day, just below thirty percent of global daily oil production. Egypt, which is not an OPEC member, is nonetheless one of the largest African oil producers, with an output of 567,650 barrels per day. China’s role in brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April enabled the entry of both of these oil-producing countries into BRICS. The issue here is not just the production of oil, but the establishment of new global energy pathways.

The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative has already created a web of oil and natural gas platforms around the Global South, integrated into the expansion of Khalifa Port and natural gas facilities at Fujairah and Ruwais in the UAE, alongside the development of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. There is every expectation that the expanded BRICS will begin to coordinate its energy infrastructure outside of OPEC+, including the volumes of oil and natural gas that are drawn out of the earth. Tensions between Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil volumes have simmered this year as Russia exceeded its quota to compensate for Western sanctions placed on it due to the war in Ukraine. Now these two countries will have another forum, outside of OPEC+ and with China at the table, to build a common agenda on energy. Saudi Arabia plans to sell oil to China in renminbi (RMB), undermining the structure of the petrodollar system (China’s two other main oil providers, Iraq and Russia, already receive payment in RMB).

Juan Del Prete (Argentina), The Embrace, 1937–1944

Both the discussions at the BRICS summit and its final communiqué focused on the need to strengthen a financial and development architecture for the world that is not governed by the triumvirate of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Wall Street, and the US dollar. However, BRICS does not seek to circumvent established global trade and development institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF. For instance, BRICS reaffirmed the importance of the ‘rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation at its core’ and called for ‘a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced [IMF] at its centre’. Its proposals do not fundamentally break with the IMF or WTO; rather, they offer a dual pathway forward: first, for BRICS to exert more control and direction over these organisations, of which they are members but have been suborned to a Western agenda, and second, for BRICS states to realise their aspirations to build their own parallel institutions (such as the New Development Bank, or NDB). Saudi Arabia’s massive investment fund is worth close to $1 trillion, which could partially resource the NDB.

BRICS’s agenda to improve ‘the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture’ is mostly being carried forward by the ‘use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems’. The concept of ‘local currencies’ refers to the growing practice of states using their own currencies for cross-border trade rather than relying upon the dollar. Though approximately 150 currencies in the world are considered to be legal tender, cross-border payments almost always rely on the dollar (which, as of 2021, accounts for 40 percent of flows over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, network).

Other currencies play a limited role, with the Chinese RMB comprising 2.5 percent of cross-border payments. However, the emergence of new global messaging platforms – such as China’s Cross-Border Payment Interbank System, India’s Unified Payments Interface, and Russia’s Financial Messaging System (SPFS) – as well as regional digital currency systems promise to increase the use of alternative currencies. For instance, cryptocurrency assets briefly provided a potential avenue for new trading systems before their asset valuations declined, and the expanded BRICS recently approved the establishment of a working group to study a BRICS reference currency.

Following the expansion of BRICS, the NDB said that it will also expand its members and that, as its General Strategy, 2022–2026 notes, thirty percent of all of its financing will be in local currencies. As part of its framework for a new development system, its president, Dilma Rousseff, said that the NDB will not follow the IMF policy of imposing conditions on borrowing countries. ‘We repudiate any kind of conditionality’, Rousseff said. ‘Often a loan is given upon the condition that certain policies are carried out. We don’t do that. We respect the policies of each country’.

Amir H. Fallah (Iran), I Want To Live, To Cry, To Survive, To Love, To Die, 2023

In their communiqué, the BRICS nations write about the importance of ‘comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council’. Currently, the UN Security Council has fifteen members, five of which are permanent (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). There are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America, or the most populous country in the world, India. To repair these inequities, BRICS offers its support to ‘the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, India, and South Africa to play a greater role in international affairs’. The West’s refusal to allow these countries a permanent seat at the UN Security Council has only strengthened their commitment to the BRICS process and to enhance their role in the G20.

The entry of Ethiopia and Iran into BRICS shows how these large Global South states are reacting to the West’s sanctions policy against dozens of countries, including two founding BRICS members (China and Russia). The Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter – Venezuela’s initiative from 2019 – brings together twenty UN member states that are facing the brunt of illegal US sanctions, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Many of these states attended the BRICS summit as invitees and are eager to join the expanded BRICS as full members.

We are not living in a period of revolutions. Socialists always seek to advance democratic and progressive trends. As is often the case in history, the actions of a dying empire create common ground for its victims to look for new alternatives, no matter how embryonic and contradictory they are. The diversity of support for the expansion of BRICS is an indication of the growing loss of political hegemony of imperialism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

On the last day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, the five founding states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) welcomed six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The BRICS partnership now encompasses 47.3 percent of the world’s population, with a combined global Gross Domestic Product (by purchasing power parity, or PPP,) of 36.4 percent. In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10 percent of the world’s population, their share of the global GDP (by PPP) is 30.4 percent. In 2021, the nations that today form the expanded BRICS group were responsible for 38.3 percent of global industrial output while their G7 counterparts accounted for 30.5 percent. All available indicators, including harvest production and the total volume of metal production, show the immense power of this new grouping.  Celso Amorim, advisor to the Brazilian government and one of the architects of BRICS during his former tenure as foreign minister, said of the new development that ‘[t]he world can no longer be dictated by the G7’.

Certainly, the BRICS nations, for all their internal hierarchies and challenges, now represent a larger share of the global GDP than the G7, which continues to behave as the world’s executive body. Over forty countries expressed an interest in joining BRICS, although only twenty-three applied for membership before the South Africa meeting (including seven of the thirteen countries in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Indonesia, the world’s seventh largest country in terms of GDP (by PPP), withdrew its application to BRICS at the last moment but said it would consider joining later. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo’s comments reflect the mood of the summit: ‘We must reject trade discrimination. Industrial downstreaming must not be hindered. We must all continue to voice equal and inclusive cooperation’.

Tadesse Mesfin (Ethiopia), Pillars of Life: Waiting, 2018

BRICS does not operate independently of new regional formations that aim to build platforms outside the grip of the West, such as the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Instead, BRICS membership has the potential to enhance regionalism for those already within these regional fora. Both sets of interregional bodies are leaning into a historical tide supported by important data, analysed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research using a range of widely available and reliable global databases. The facts are clear: the Global North’s percentage of world GDP fell from 57.3 percent in 1993 to 40.6 percent in 2022, with the US’s percentage shrinking from 19.7 percent to only 15.6 percent of global GDP (by PPP) in the same period – despite its monopoly privilege. In 2022, the Global South, without China, had a GDP (by PPP) greater than that of the Global North.

The West, perhaps because of its rapid relative economic decline, is struggling to maintain its hegemony by driving a New Cold War against emergent states such as China. Perhaps the single best evidence of the racial, political, military, and economic plans of the Western powers can be summed up by a recent declaration of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU): ‘NATO and the EU play complementary, coherent and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security. We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’.

Alia Ahmad (Saudi Arabia), Hameel – Morning Rain, 2022

Why did BRICS welcome such a disparate group of countries, including two monarchies, into its fold? When asked to reflect on the character of the new full member states, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, ‘What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country. We can’t deny the geopolitical importance of Iran and other countries that will join BRICS’. This is the measure of how the founding countries made the decision to expand their alliance. At the heart of BRICS’s growth are at least three issues: control over energy supplies and pathways, control over global financial and development systems, and control over institutions for peace and security.

Houshang Pezeshknia (Iran), Khark, 1958

A larger BRICS has now created a formidable energy group. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are also members of OPEC, which, with Russia, a key member of OPEC+, now accounts for 26.3 million barrels of oil per day, just below thirty percent of global daily oil production. Egypt, which is not an OPEC member, is nonetheless one of the largest African oil producers, with an output of 567,650 barrels per day. China’s role in brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April enabled the entry of both of these oil-producing countries into BRICS. The issue here is not just the production of oil, but the establishment of new global energy pathways.

The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative has already created a web of oil and natural gas platforms around the Global South, integrated into the expansion of Khalifa Port and natural gas facilities at Fujairah and Ruwais in the UAE, alongside the development of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. There is every expectation that the expanded BRICS will begin to coordinate its energy infrastructure outside of OPEC+, including the volumes of oil and natural gas that are drawn out of the earth. Tensions between Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil volumes have simmered this year as Russia exceeded its quota to compensate for Western sanctions placed on it due to the war in Ukraine. Now these two countries will have another forum, outside of OPEC+ and with China at the table, to build a common agenda on energy. Saudi Arabia plans to sell oil to China in renminbi (RMB), undermining the structure of the petrodollar system (China’s two other main oil providers, Iraq and Russia, already receive payment in RMB).

Juan Del Prete (Argentina), The Embrace, 1937–1944

Both the discussions at the BRICS summit and its final communiqué focused on the need to strengthen a financial and development architecture for the world that is not governed by the triumvirate of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Wall Street, and the US dollar. However, BRICS does not seek to circumvent established global trade and development institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF. For instance, BRICS reaffirmed the importance of the ‘rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation at its core’ and called for ‘a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced [IMF] at its centre’. Its proposals do not fundamentally break with the IMF or WTO; rather, they offer a dual pathway forward: first, for BRICS to exert more control and direction over these organisations, of which they are members but have been suborned to a Western agenda, and second, for BRICS states to realise their aspirations to build their own parallel institutions (such as the New Development Bank, or NDB). Saudi Arabia’s massive investment fund is worth close to $1 trillion, which could partially resource the NDB.

BRICS’s agenda to improve ‘the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture’ is mostly being carried forward by the ‘use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems’. The concept of ‘local currencies’ refers to the growing practice of states using their own currencies for cross-border trade rather than relying upon the dollar. Though approximately 150 currencies in the world are considered to be legal tender, cross-border payments almost always rely on the dollar (which, as of 2021, accounts for 40 percent of flows over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, network).

Other currencies play a limited role, with the Chinese RMB comprising 2.5 percent of cross-border payments. However, the emergence of new global messaging platforms – such as China’s Cross-Border Payment Interbank System, India’s Unified Payments Interface, and Russia’s Financial Messaging System (SPFS) – as well as regional digital currency systems promise to increase the use of alternative currencies. For instance, cryptocurrency assets briefly provided a potential avenue for new trading systems before their asset valuations declined, and the expanded BRICS recently approved the establishment of a working group to study a BRICS reference currency.

Following the expansion of BRICS, the NDB said that it will also expand its members and that, as its General Strategy, 2022–2026 notes, thirty percent of all of its financing will be in local currencies. As part of its framework for a new development system, its president, Dilma Rousseff, said that the NDB will not follow the IMF policy of imposing conditions on borrowing countries. ‘We repudiate any kind of conditionality’, Rousseff said. ‘Often a loan is given upon the condition that certain policies are carried out. We don’t do that. We respect the policies of each country’.

Amir H. Fallah (Iran), I Want To Live, To Cry, To Survive, To Love, To Die, 2023

In their communiqué, the BRICS nations write about the importance of ‘comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council’. Currently, the UN Security Council has fifteen members, five of which are permanent (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). There are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America, or the most populous country in the world, India. To repair these inequities, BRICS offers its support to ‘the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, India, and South Africa to play a greater role in international affairs’. The West’s refusal to allow these countries a permanent seat at the UN Security Council has only strengthened their commitment to the BRICS process and to enhance their role in the G20.

The entry of Ethiopia and Iran into BRICS shows how these large Global South states are reacting to the West’s sanctions policy against dozens of countries, including two founding BRICS members (China and Russia). The Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter – Venezuela’s initiative from 2019 – brings together twenty UN member states that are facing the brunt of illegal US sanctions, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Many of these states attended the BRICS summit as invitees and are eager to join the expanded BRICS as full members.

We are not living in a period of revolutions. Socialists always seek to advance democratic and progressive trends. As is often the case in history, the actions of a dying empire create common ground for its victims to look for new alternatives, no matter how embryonic and contradictory they are. The diversity of support for the expansion of BRICS is an indication of the growing loss of political hegemony of imperialism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) summit in Johannesburg concluded on August 24 after a major disappointment: the long-overdue challenge to U.S. dollar hegemony was stillborn due to the bloc’s conservative forces. Yet to the credit of BRICS leaders, expansion of the network was undertaken, to include Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

However, the notable intensity within the new membership of fossil-addicted economies, of tyrannies and of human rights violations – civil, socio-economic and environmental – amplifies the existing group’s dangers. Still, the other 17 countries which applied, plus another 20 that expressed interest, could make the grouping far more threatening on those counts, what with applications by the likes of Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Sudan, Turkiye and Zimbabwe.

What criteria are being adopted for expansion? There was no disclosed logic this time, but as South Africa’s summit manager Anil Sooklal claimed, “We were very clear that countries must be from the Global South, good standing in their respective regions, and thirdly they must add to the good standing of BRICS.” But ‘good standing’ apparently includes atrocities. The long war in Yemen which has pitted Iran against both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, leaving 350,000 dead civilians amidst mass starvation. Iran’s execution of solidarity protesters during the women’s rights uprising. Ethiopia’s civil war in Tigray. Saudi troops’ freshly-revealed mass murders of Ethiopians refugees crossing the Yemen border. The UAE’s refusal to extradite the Gupta brothers who decisively corrupted South Africa during the 2010s. The Argentinian electorate’s recent plurality vote for Bolsonaro-type politician Javier Melia (who aims to re-dollarize the local economy) – although a more establishment conservative may win in October.

As usual with the BRICS, when such illogic appears, it tends to reflect a talk-left walk-right scenario: radical anti-imperialist rhetoric meant to disguise profound conservativism and attacks on local working-class constituencies. For example, addressing a BRICS youth gathering in July, South Africa’s minister-in-the-presidency Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma enthused over how the BRICS would “accelerate the downfall of an unjust imperialist world order.” Replied Busisiwe Mavuso, chief executive officer of Business Leadership South Africa,

“The speech was heavy on rhetoric that presented BRICS as a competitive pole in the world against the West, rather than an alliance designed to enhance the development and cooperation of its members. Ironically, in the same speech, Dlamini-Zuma bemoaned those who prefer us shipping raw materials rather than manufactured goods to the world. She did not pause to consider that our relationships with India and China are overwhelmingly characterized by South Africa exporting raw materials and importing manufactured goods.”

Government’s radical nationalism, not unusual, was interpreted by the University of Johannesburg Chair in Africa Diplomacy, Chris Landsberg, as a manifestation of Pretoria’s “tendency to overemphasize the second coming of the Cold War, driven by an anti-imperialist alliance which is true and real, without looking at the sub-imperialist and neo-imperialist tendencies of powerful BRICS members. South Africa also wanted close relations with the West, almost on its economic terms, while emphasizing the political mistrust between Pretoria and these powers.”

Sub-imperial ambitions

Indeed sometimes, when we look more closely at summit resolutions, the BRICS bureaucrats also talk right, consistent with a sub-imperial location in the global economy, in which their leaders openly acknowledge their helplessness to make any substantive change. Before considering the implications of geo-economic frictions that dashed hopes for the BRICS waging a global currency battle, consider language in the Johannesburg II Declaration (the first having been in 2018) illustrating the BRICS’ ongoing obedience to Western neoliberal institutions, as articulated in these half-dozen resolutions:

8. We reaffirm our support for the open, transparent, fair, predictable, inclusive, equitable, non-discriminatory and rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its core…

9. We call for the need to make progress towards the achievement of a fair and market-oriented agricultural trading system…

10. We support a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced International Monetary Fund (IMF) at its center… Any adjustment in quota shares should result in increases in the quota shares of emerging markets and developing economies (EMDCs)… including in leadership positions in the Bretton Woods institutions, that reflect the role of EMDCs in the world economy…

27. We encourage multilateral financial institutions and international organizations to play a constructive role in building global consensus on economic policies and… to continue implementing the recommendations… from the G20 Independent Review Report…

29. We note that high debt levels in some countries reduce the fiscal space needed to address ongoing development challenges… One of the instruments, amongst others, to collectively address debt vulnerabilities is through the predictable, orderly, timely and coordinated implementation of the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatment, with the participation of official bilateral creditors, private creditors and Multilateral Development Banks in line with the principle of joint action and fair burden-sharing.

30. We reaffirm the importance of the G20 to continue playing the role of the premier multilateral forum in the field of international economic and financial cooperation that comprises both developed and emerging markets and developing countries where major economies jointly seek solutions to global challenges. We look forward to the successful hosting of the 18th G20 Summit in New Delhi under the Indian G20 Presidency. We note the opportunities to build sustained momentum for change by India, Brazil and South Africa presiding over the G20 from 2023 to 2025 and expressed support for continuity and collaboration in their G20 presidencies and wish them all success in their endeavours. (emphasis added)

The simple message here, is that instead of overturning the high table of Western economic power, the bloc is intent on stabilizing and relegitimizing that “rules-based order” – in spite of a glaring contradiction, namely that its underlying ideology, the Washington Consensus, has caused so much suffering in so many low-income BRICS communities. This obeisance is not unusual, because since 2008 when the G20 was founded, the BRICS have served as the West’s financial and multilateral-policy backstop. It is in such global-scale settings – and in Western+BRICS corporations’ foreign direct investments in poor countries – that imperialist and sub-imperialist interests tend to fuse.

To illustrate, the 2010s witnessed repeated commitments, in word and deed, to reforming voting power at the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs). The BWI-relegitimation exercise culminated in a 2015 quota increase into which the BRICS contributed $75 billion in recapitalization funds, the same year the yuan was included in the official basket of IMF official currencies. China’s IMF voting share increased by 37 percent that year, Brazil’s by 23 percent, India’s by 11 percent, and Russia’s by eight percent, but this rise was not mainly at the West’s expense.

The two countries that lost the most voting shares were Nigeria and Venezuela (at 41 percent each) and even South Africa fell (21 percent). China’s vote rose from 3.8 percent to 6.1 percent of the total, and the five BRICS were allowed (by Western managers) to nearly reach the 15 percent level at which veto power can be operated. But the impact of this influence was felt neither in changes to Washington Consensus policies, nor in the desired “leadership positions in the Bretton Woods institutions.” The BRICS made no effort to collectively contest the European-held IMF managing directorship when it changed hands in 2011 and 2019, not when World Bank presidents were imposed by the U.S. in 2012, 2019 and 2023. Moreover, there has been no sighting of the much-fabled $100 billion BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement alternative to the IMF. And especially in its South African portfolio, the BRICS New Development Bank has repeatedly provided corrupt borrowers with inappropriate loans.

The coming of climate sanctions, at a time of currency-reform reality check

There was, however, a degree of friction between the BRICS’ neoliberal pro-trade faction, on the one hand, and the West on the other, relating to inclement “climate sanctions” in the form of Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms which, starting in the European Union, will impose tariffs on imports with high levels of greenhouse gas energy embeddedness:

63. We oppose trade barriers including those under the pretext of tackling climate change imposed by certain developed countries and reiterate our commitment to enhancing coordination on these issues. We underline that measures taken to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss must be WTO-consistent… We express our concern at any WTO inconsistent discriminatory measure that will distort international trade, risk new trade barriers and shift burden of addressing climate change and biodiversity loss to BRICS members and developing countries.

The phrasing here represents a version of climate denialism, because there are already extreme distortions in international trade, investment and finance due to the capitalist system’s failure to internalize corporate greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and resource depletion into price calculations. Given the threat climate catastrophes and ecocide pose to the world, especially to the BRICS+ countries, the desire to retain prevailing anti-ecological distortions is “the greatest market failure the world has seen,” according to British economist Nick Stern.

And repeatedly since 2021, the host South African ruling class – both state and corporate – reiterated that coming Western climate sanctions against energy-intensive exports are the main reason the economy must decarbonize. Because of the excessive coal-fired power embedded in the country’s exported products, a tariff will be imposed by countries that have adopted higher carbon taxes – sometimes $100/tonne compared to SA’s $0.35/tonne – so as to prevent ‘carbon leakage’. Such tariffs could well be devastating to the Energy Intensive Users Groups firms – mainly Western multinational corporations logically resist decarbonization because they see less baseload and higher capital costs from solar, wind and storage.

Hence there are sometimes terribly important differences between the material interests of imperial and sub-imperial economies. Mostly, the concrete material interests broadly coincide, insofar as BRICS ambitions are still to achieve a more substantive role in multilateral corporate rule, not to upend it (as so many committed to hype and hope like to pretend). On nearly all occasions that the more insistent South voices raise international economic justices as a concern, the temptation is to support their rhetoric (even when unmatched by deeds), but climate sanctions against mega-emitters in the BRICS+ is not one of those times.

The other major friction that has regularly emerged at the BRICS meetings is over currency and monetary relations, especially since financial sanctions were imposed on Russia in March 2022 – including by the BRICS New Development Bank (in which Moscow holds an 18 percent ownership share), as confirmed by its new president Dilma Rousseff. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva argued to the other heads of state gathered in Johannesburg, “The creation of a currency for trade and investment transactions between BRICS members increases our payment options and reduces our vulnerabilities.”

And a South African presidency official, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, was especially annoyed about the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (Swift) system, because after invading Ukraine, “Russia is now excluded from Swift, though there are no UN sanctions against the Russian Federation. As BRICS members, we are entitled to look at mechanisms of trading with each other without being hindered by interests outside our own national interests and UN interests.”

But these sentiments, as well as proposals for either a BRICS gold-backed or central bank cyber-based currency, or for the Chinese renmimbi to become more convertible, were all met by a tough reality check. Rousseff only expressed the mild ambition to raise the BRICS Bank’s local-currency loan portfolio from 22 to 30 percent by 2030, in spite of the damage done by hard-currency loans. And as for BRICS state officials, according to South Africa’s ex-Marxist – now decidedly neoliberal – finance minister Enoch Godongwana, “We have no intention to displace the dollar. It’s going to be difficult for countries that are trading largely with the Western world, like South Africa, to say ‘I can displace the dollar’ because I still trade with them heavily.”

Sim Tshabalala, chief executive officer of the main international South African financier, Standard Bank, reminded the BRICS Business Council and heads of state, of

“the necessary characteristics of an international reserve currency. These include being a currency issued by a central bank with very high credibility in the implementation of monetary policy; being the currency of a state or supranational entity with an equally strong track record on fiscal policy and meeting its debts; being freely available in large quantities in many jurisdictions; and full convertibility at all times. This set of characteristics cannot be quickly wished – or agreed – into existence, but can only emerge over multiple years as a track record of impeccable credibility and very wide use is built up”

To be sure, in early 2023, the U.S. Dollar nearly lost its supposedly impeccable credibility as the Republican House of Representatives brought the country to the verge of default on public debt. But even so, the Dollar’s use in the Swift international payments systems (not including intra-Eurozone deals) was 59 percent, compared to the Euro at 14 percent, the British Pound at just under 6 percent, the Yen at 5 percent, the Canadian Dollar at nearly 3 percent, and just over 2 percent for the Chinese Renmimbi. And in addition to illiquidity in interbank transfers, local analyst Jackie Cilliers provided other reasons for pessimism:

“There is no prospect of a replacement for the dollar in the foreseeable future. Trade among BRICS countries is too small to sustain a common currency. It only makes sense to trade in national currencies (not freely convertible) if the trade balance between the countries is more or less equal. Russia, for example, recently sold lots of oil to India, dealing in rupees. But because India exports much less to Russia than it imports, Moscow now sits with rupees it cannot spend or convert – except to buy goods from India. China’s renminbi isn’t sufficiently convertible and lacks the deep capital markets, market transparency, independent central banks and supporting financial institutions of Western banks. There are also perceptions of risk associated with China’s future – the country is an autocracy that will struggle to maintain stability as economic growth diminishes. India is also bound to oppose a common currency, given its concerns about China as a regional and potential global competitor.”

The ‘sub-imperialism!’ slur – and counter-slurs

In the context of such an adverse balance of power, there remain three BRICS narratives, which might be labeled ‘hype,’ ‘hope’ and ‘helplessness.’ In some cases, even the most hopeful or hype-prone commentators will surrender to evidence of sub-imperial behavior; shortly before the Johannesburg summit, Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar – briefed mainly by Russian officials – disgustedly observed the heated controversy over whether Russia’s president would come to Johannesburg, in the wake of the International Criminal Court (ICC) finding that tens of thousands of Ukrainian children had been kidnapped, a war crime:

“This was South Africa giving way to pressure from the West on the Rome Statute of the ICC, basically saying that Vladimir Putin should be arrested if he touches down on any signatory of the ICC… You know, the fabled ‘Hybrid War’ techniques, applied forcefully over Pretoria and Johannesburg. And because they are the weakest link inside the BRICS, they had to give up.”

But for those in the first two categories, i.e., who have major political commitments to hyping BRICS or, at minimum, investing hope in the bloc’s potential, it is extremely irritating to be confronted with the argument that the bloc is actually helpless: it has thus far served not as an anti-imperialist alternative to the economic power structure of the West, but instead as a sub-imperial amplifier. This irritation logically leads to caricature-type slurs.

For example, “I really feel that the trots have become extremely dangerous with their nonsense on sub-imperialism,” controversial philanthropist Roy Singham wrote to a mutual friend last year: “They have become apologists for the US empire in its key objectives despite their pretense otherwise.” And in the same spirit, geopolitical YouTuber commentator Danny Haiphong remarked to Ben Norton in early August,

“I think there are some who are real like BRICS naysayers. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. They’re, you know, there’s a there’s a whole strand. Even people like Patrick Bond and some others who call BRICS countries sub-imperialists… They basically [repeat] the whole Cold War line of, well, neither Washington nor Beijing. Neither Washington nor the Soviet Union, oops it’s actually Russian Federation. You know, like, there is a mentality there.”

Replied Norton,

“These people, they don’t know anything about economics. They don’t know anything about developing socialism… These people are profoundly un-serious and they don’t understand the basics of imperialism. And again, they’re wrong about everything. People like Patrick Bond, they were wrong about Yugoslavia, they were wrong with the Soviet Union, they were wrong about Cuba, they’re wrong about Nicaragua, they’re wrong about Venezuela, they were wrong about the war and Libya, which they all supported. They were wrong about the war in Syria, which they all supported. And today they’re wrong about Russia and China, supposedly being imperialist. And they’re wrong about BRICS being another voice of neoliberalism…

“I mean you can see where history is moving. It’s very clear what direction the BRICS is headed in, and that explains why so many countries in the global South, including countries that have historically been Western allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that’s why they’re also interested in joining and getting involved in this. Because as the world becomes more and more multipolar and as Western imperialism is in crisis and declining, that provides so much more breathing room and space for countries in the global South to pursue new economic paths of development, including socialism, like we see in China, like we see in Vietnam, like we see in Lao, in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia.

“All of these countries are on board with this and it’s so funny because we’re told to listen to, like, you know, Patrick Bond, who’s a white guy in South Africa. Not, I mean you know, there can be white people who have good analysis of this. Right, like I’m a white guy, but like, come on, a white guy in South Africa, who’s constantly criticizing every Global South Liberation struggle, just reinforcing this kind of neo-colonial history.”

Imperialism’s invitation to join – not fight – global corporate power

What, then, is the concept of sub-imperialism all about? In the spirit of its original analyst, Brazilian dependency theorist Ruy Mauro Marini, the BRICS bloc can be understood as not only acceding to imperialism in the manner discussed above, in which a ‘deputy sheriff’ function is played for global corporate capitalism. In addition, this location also reflects what Marini termed the main sub-imperial powers’ “antagonistic cooperation” with the U.S.-EU-UK-Japan-multilaterals’ and corporates’ overarching control.

As an example, members of the G20 – including the five BRICS states plus two new BRICS+ members (Argentina and Saudi Arabia) – agreed, when the body was launched in late 2008, to coordinate bailouts of what were then crashing Western financial markets. And ever since, they have behaved – sometimes grudgingly – in harmony (aside from Russia being hit with deserved financial sanctions and asset seizures for its ongoing attempt at Ukraine’s re-colonization – hopefully to eventually be turned over for war reparations).

The roots of contemporary imperial/sub-imperial fusion are to be found in the 1990s consolidation of the neoliberal policy project. Since then the West’s control of multilateral financiers, the WTO and UNFCCC have well served not only their, but also the BRICS,’ largest corporations. Such a sub-imperial status, Marini suggested in 1972 when describing Brazil, represents “the form which dependent capitalism assumes upon reaching the stage of monopolies and finance capital.” External expansion is required to maintain profits at an acceptable level as the society stagnates, because of “capital accumulation based on the super-exploitation of the working masses – urban as well as rural – and the expression of the hegemony conquered, thanks to the crisis, by the industrial monopolies and by national and international finance capital.”

To illustrate how this appears in the BRICS host site of Johannesburg, in a posthumous 2019 book, Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin was scathing about a South Africa which, “freed from odious apartheid, is now confronted with a truly formidable challenge: how to go beyond the facade of multiracial democracy to transform society profoundly? The choices of the African National Government government have, up to now, evaded the question and, as a result, nothing has changed. South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is by the Anglo-American mining monopolies.”

Already in 2015, Amin had penned a Monthly Review essay, “Contemporary imperialism,” where he offered this metaphor about the BRICS: “The ongoing offensive of United States/Europe/Japan collective imperialism against all the peoples of the South walks on two legs: the economic leg – globalized neoliberalism forced as the exclusive possible economic policy; and the political leg – continuous interventions including preemptive wars against those who reject imperialist interventions. In response, some countries of the South, such as the BRICS, at best walk on only one leg: they reject the geopolitics of imperialism but accept economic neoliberalism.”

Five years ago, Siphamondli Zondi – one of South Africa’s leading BRICS authorities, based at the University of Johanensburg – made a similar point:

“Though some of the countries in the G20 come from the periphery of the world system being developing countries, the constant re-arrangement of global power results in them being included in the center and thus becoming quasi-insiders. They become what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a semi-periphery or what Patrick Bond refers to as sub-imperial powers. In the big scheme of geopolitics the G20 members from the South have become somewhat insiders working with the center of global power to maintain the status, working for reforms rather than fundamental transformation.”

While demanding (usually tokenistic) multilateral reforms, BRICS countries led by China have long promoted corporate power within a global corporate-enablement system they were joining – and also increasingly financing. In the process they engaged in more profitable predatory extractivism when sourcing raw materials from poor countries. Pursuing this agenda, their displacement of overaccumulated capital also entailed, as David Harvey (as early as 2003) had remarked, becoming imperialism’s “competitors on the world stage. What might be called ‘sub-imperialisms’ arose… Each developing centre of capital accumulation sought out systematic spatio-temporal fixes for its own surplus capital by defining territorial spheres of influence.”

When it came to China’s ‘going out’ as far as Latin America, Simon Rodriguez Porras and Miguel Soransfrom Venezuela’s left opposition complained that “The relationship of Chavism with Chinese sub-imperialism would acquire characteristics of true submission. Not only was participation in joint ventures given to Chinese companies, a large external debt was also acquired with China, part of it through future oil sales, to finance infrastructure works contracted with Chinese companies, and also the import of Chinese products.”

Still, Tricontinental Institute director Vijay Prashad is correct to demand “a great deal more translation into our current period to assess whether the BRICS states – with their separate tempos – are sub-imperial in Marini’s sense. They are certainly not imperialist states.” They are not yet, to be sure, largely because the Pentagon’s 800 foreign bases and nearly $900 billion in annual spending have no military competitor, even if Russia has more nuclear weapons.

But two other critical scholars, Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, in 2011 pointed out the BRICS’ separate and very diverse material realities: “The degree of participation in the Western military project is also different from one case to the next although, one might say, there is a ‘schizophrenia’ to all this, typical of ‘sub-imperialism’.” Cases of military schizophrenia include

+ Brazil’s Lula (followed by Dilma Rousseff) deploying 36,000 troops to Haiti on behalf of the U.S. and France, suppressing local dissent for 13 years starting in 2004;

+ Russia’s desire, expressed by Putin to U.S. president Bill Clinton in 2000, to join NATO – and the current crop of Wagner mercenaries’ increasingly important role in African natural-resource resource looting in the Sahel region and Central Africa, which amplifies these countries’ ongoing contributions to global value chains (the way Wagner also unsuccessfully attempted in Mozambique in 2019 on behalf of TotalEnergies);

+ India’s membership in a ‘Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’ with the U.S., Japan and Australia, against China; or

+ South Africa’s dozens of annual arms deals with NATO armies via regulator Armscor, and its 2021 army deployment to protect ‘Blood Methane’ investments by TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil in northern Mozambique against an Islamic insurgency, in a manner reminiscent of the roles – as gendarme for corporate resource extraction – that the same army played in the Central African Republic in 2013 and subsequently in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Still, the antagonistic cooperation across sectors remains fluid, because as Justin Podur argued recently in Black Agenda Report, while “each sub-imperialist is a special case, in Africa, South Africa has been analyzed as a sub-imperialist…” But neither China nor Russia “fit the sub-imperialist mold. They may exercise hegemony – or contest it – in their regions, but they do not do so under the umbrella of U.S. hegemony.” True, but while political forces remain in flux as various crises continue to unhinge prior verities, it can be argued that China has many sub-imperial tendencies of super-exploitation (through the hukou migrant labor system), collaboration with Western-dominated, neoliberal multilaterals and regional expansion. And the Chinese economy still remains beset by overaccumulated capital in need of a spatial fix.

So while Beijing is not (as Prashad notes) an ‘imperialist’ power today by most measurements including relative control of multilateral institutions, nevertheless Xi in 2017 did firmly signal his government’s desire to pick up the capitalist-expansion baton passed along at the World Economic Forum, just as corporate-neoliberal Barack Obama was replaced by protectionist-xenophobe Donald Trump. As a sign of the times in 2023, the latter’s Sinophobia has only been amplified by his successor, Joe Biden, who is intent on decoupling China from high-tech circuits of capital – in turn suggesting how a U.S. relationship with a generally-reliable sub-imperial partner could evolve into a far more serious inter-imperial rivalry, especially if Taiwan or South China Sea become sites of military competition.

The Russian case is certainly more difficult to characterize, mainly because of the rogue character of sub-imperialism as practiced by Putin. His invasion of Ukraine broke the rules of how far a regional gendarme was typically allowed to roam (though he had gotten away with it in Crimea eight years earlier), as did his default on foreign debt in June 2022. On the latter point, though, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov firmly expressed a desire to repay debt: “The current situation has nothing whatsoever in common with the situation in 1998, when Russia did not have enough means to cover its debts. Now there is money and there is also the readiness to pay.” In May 2023 Siluanov attempted to restore creditworthiness through Eurobond debt repayments in spite of Western sanctions.

And as Putin would regularly point out, the imperial powers also went rogue in late February 2022 by quickly stealing $650 billion of Russian central bank and oligarch funds carelessly left in Western banks (in violation of rudimentary property rights) and by cutting Russia out of the interbank payment system. Moreover, earlier rogue-imperial behavior included the unnecessary eastward expansion of NATO against promises made by early-1990s Western leaders to Russian counterparts, as well as Washington’s failure to abide by the Minsk Accord when all other parties were willing.

The double burden of imperialism and sub-imperialism

One of the world’s leading social-democratic economists, Branko Milanovic, blogged one of the most BRICS-hopeful remarks about the Johannesburg summit:

“The fact that an increasing number of countries want to join BRICS cannot be ignored or taken lightly. BRICS’ refusing to participate in new global trade, proxy or actual wars may make such wars less likely. And BRICS’ economic clout may help reduce some of the glaring economic imbalances between the rich, middle-income, and poor nations across the world.”

These three sentences could easily have been reversed, with a bit more probing. The fact that an increasing number of countries want to join BRICS can be ignored and taken lightly, given that the bloc has not accomplished anything substantive over the past 15 years (especially when it comes to geopolitics). And as the Johannesburg meeting confirmed, they’re simply not in a position to advance even rudimentary de-dollarization (aside from a trivially-small increase in contradiction-riddled local-currency finance and trade).

Moreover, BRICS’ continuing participation in new global trade, proxy or actual wars have made such wars much more likely, given that:

1) the world’s “deglobalization” process (lower trade/GDP than at peak in 2008) has been most decisive for nearly all of the BRICS+ economies, in part because of China’s core role in global capitalism’s overproduction crisis;

2) India is putting up even more protectionist barriers to Chinese investment and trade, closely following the Trump-Biden model;

3) the BRICS New Development Bank is still committed to imposition of financial sanctions against Russia; and

4) BRICS+ countries continue to feed the world’s most dangerous proxy wars and direct wars, what with Iran supplying Russia with murderous drones, South Africa selling weapons to NATO countries and recently buying AK47s from Russia for use by Pretoria’s troops against the northern Mozambique insurgency; and Brazil supplying (apparently fragile) Embraer jets to the Wagner Group; etc etc. etc.

And BRICS’ economic clout is already amplifying the most glaring economic imbalances between and within the rich, middle-income, and poor nations across the world, given especially China’s role in the global division of labor, which ensures its firms’ neo-colonial minerals extraction from Africa inadequately compensates the continent’s citizenry, and that climate damage gets worse and worse.

In this context, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg was neither the mild progress towards multipolarity desired by global reformers, nor the “mega-game-changing” moment that Escobar had hoped for. It is a much more humble time for all concerned, even if to be sure the period is far more portentous for the BRICS than in mid-2022 at the bloc’s nadir. But given the balance of forces, all the signposts point in an ominous direction. In Open Veins of Latin America, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano described how, against Paraguay, the ruling elites of Brazil and Argentina “took turns since 1870 enjoying the fruits of the plunder. But they have their own crosses to bear from the imperialist power of the moment. Paraguay has the double burden of imperialism and sub-imperialism.”

And so do the rest of us: as Galeano remarked, “Sub-imperialism has a thousand faces.” The BRICS’ two-faced approach – when confronted by imperialism’s political and economic legs, as Amin put it – will continue to baffle many who believe the  sub-imperialist leaders when they are talking left, and are blinded to seeing them when walking right.

Nearly all the BRICS exhibit features of extremism and super-exploitation, so it is perfectly appropriate that the summit host site was Johannesburg, led by one of the world’s most criminal corporate elites (bested recently in PwC’s ‘Economic Crime and Fraud Survey’ only by businesses from Mumbai and Shanghai) and the world’s most unequal city, within the world’s most unequal country. The only hope remains the expansion of vibrant social movements that have emerged in a thousand struggles within and around the BRICS+ countries in recent years, including but not limited to from Brazil’s landless, to Russian anti-war activists, to India’s diverse people’s movements, to China’s prolific social-justice protesters along with Uyghers, Tibetans and Hong Kong democrats facing repression, to South Africa’s still-militant workers, shack-dwellers, public-health advocates and students.

A few of these were on display at brics-from-below protests in Sandton and central Durban on August 23, including Ukraine solidarity, human rights (including Kashmiris and Muslims in India), and especially climate change and anti-extractivism. The Mining Affected Communities United in Action network, for instance, demanded that the BRICS should “break out of the imperialist super-exploitation models of wealth extraction, and prioritize the social and economic distribution of the mineral wealth within the framework of a Just Transition.”

And then stir in new BRICS+ inspirations: Argentina’s anti-debt and anti-gas activists, Egyptian human rights advocates and Iranian women. And in the next expansion round, perhaps we will meet Algerian progressives who revived the Arab Spring in 2019, Bolivia’s radical indigenous and environmental communities, Honduran progressives, Kazakh anti-authoritarians whose early-2022 protests were brutally suppressed with South African weaponry, Nigeria’s prolific environmentalists and social movements, Palestinian activists sick of Fatah’s conciliation to Israeli apartheid, Senegalese democrats, and many more… all desiring a world without exploitation, oppressions and planetary suicide. Those opposed to imperial and sub-imperial power also have a thousand angry faces, and must now gain muscles to match.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Bond.

Meeting amid the gleaming glass towers of Johannesburg’s business district, the mostly billionaire heads of state had no clear agenda other than perhaps a major expansion of BRICS membership aimed at increasing its influence on the world capitalist marketplace.   China’s President Xi Jinping mysteriously skipped the opening session, but appeared earlier in the day at an official state visit with South African’s apartheid era trade union leader, now multi-billionaire president, Cyril Ramaphosa. Casting himself as an international statesman and his country as the voice of Africa, Ramaphosa, today on the Board of Directors of the leading US corporations that exploit South Africa’s wealth, invited more than 30 African heads of state to attend the BRICS summit.

But China’s commerce minister, Wang Wentao, did read Xi’s prepared speech, insisting that “BRICS is not an exercise of taking sides, not of creating bloc confrontation. Rather, it is an endeavor to expand the architecture of peace and development.”

The five BRICS nations comprise 40 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its economy, but to date, since its 2010 formation, its accomplishments on a world scale have been negligible.

BRICS did create the New Development Bank based in Shanghai, with collective contributions of some $100 billion in its Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) from its members, to be made available for loans to poorer countries. But the terms and conditions for these loans were negotiated by BRICS with World Bank and IMF officials so as not to undermine the latter international financial institution. All BRICS nations partake in these institutions and largely abide by its rules. BRICS nations that want to access more than 30 percent of their borrowing quota from the CRA, for example, must first sign up to a usually onerous IMF structural adjustment program.   The IMF’s routine discrimination against poor countries’ sovereignty and its imposition of neoliberal austerity and privatization measures are rarely challenged by BRICS.

No prospect of challenging US dollar domination

Similarly, the prospect of BRICS moving to establish an alternative currency to the US dollar for world trade has not proceeded beyond idle chatter, with the finance ministers of all BRICS nations, usually the direct representatives of the nations’ ruling class billionaire elite, openly rejecting this option. (See Patrick Bond’s “The BRICS Johannesburg Summit’s Hype, Hope and Helplessness.”)

Indeed, BRICS emerged as a combination of some of the world’s leading capitalist-imperialist and sub-imperialist powers. Brazil and South Africa, in the latter category, are their continent’s leading economic powers, consistently using their financial and productive capacities to extract surplus value and otherwise dominate their regions. Any notion that the five BRICS nations constitute a progressive alternative to US imperialism is pure fantasy. Need we note that yesterday’s Brazil, before its recent election, was headed by the neo-fascist Jair Bolsinaro, while today’s India is headed by the neo-fascist, Narendra Modi?

Trump admirer Bolsinaro, presided over Brazil’s ongoing deforestation of the Amazon rain forest, the frequent slaughter and dispossession of its indigenous people and the routine imprisonment of its opposition leaders. Modi routinely attacks and disenfranchises  India’s Moslem minority, persecutes its women as inferiors and damns Kashmiri people to ceaseless encroachments on its historic constitutional rights and territory.

Expansion of BRICS

A key issues to be discussed at the BRICS summit is which applicant to include in an expanded BRICS, that is, a BRICS+ club that would allegedly have the potential to more effectively act as an alternate to the US-dominated world order. The debates over this question revolve not around any conception of a radical or socialist or progressive program for this loose association of capitalist nations, but rather which of the potential new members will align with this or that economic priority of the current five, that is, who will control BRICS’s future to ensure the profits of one or another of the leading players.

The full list of first-round 24 candidates submitted by Ramaphosa to be considered for admission is instructive. It includes Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, State of Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Egypt and Argentina are among those considered to be at the top of the list.

BRICS’s Oil Monarchs, Oligarchs and Dictators

With the exception of revolutionary Cuba, this diverse association of capitalist nations are headed by an assortment of the super rich capitalist elites or pro-capitalist leaders and parties. They include billionaire oil monarchs, oligarchs and dictators as well social democratic reformers heading nations, as in Latin America, beleaguered by US imperialism. Even within the framework of capitalist-imperialist politics, the potential new members have conflicting interests, alliances and priorities, making any serious common ground impossible. But again, a socialist-oriented or “progressive” BRICS, is an oxymoron if there ever was one!

While Brazil, India and South Africa have been criticized by the US for not sufficiently condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all want to remain on good terms with the US and Europe, as well as with China and Russia. Modi’s India, at war with China over disputed borders, was feted by President Biden last month to a rare White House state dinner.

The “State of Palestine” is included along with Israel’s near Middle East partner, Egypt, headed by the US-backed coup mass murderer, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Ukraine War

There is no agreement among the potential newcomers on Russia’s role in the US-instigated war in Ukraine, although most of the African nations abstained on the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was not present in Johannesburg, but delivered a recorded video message over the convention center’s giant screen. A spurious warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, which by treaty South Africa holds membership in, designating Putin as a war criminal, required his arrest had he attended. This led South Africa’s Ramaphosa to suggest that Putin appear only virtually, although Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was present.

While not taking sides on the Ukraine War, Ramaphosa called for the resumption of the grain deal negotiated between Ukraine and Russia and for the return to Ukraine of children allegedly stolen by Russia and taken to Ukraine. Both of Ramaphosa’s charges were blatant lies.

Origins of the War in Ukraine

The 2014 US-instigated fascist-led Ukraine coup, backed by the US, coupled with the Ukrainian coup government army’s immediate move to obliterate the broad opposition to the coup in Ukraine’s east and south, over time led some 700,000 ethnic Russians and others to flee to Russia for their lives. These refugees inevitably included ethnic Russian children whose parents had been slaughtered by Ukraine’s coup government.

Some 14,000, mostly ethnic Russians, were murdered by the Ukrainian Army, whose forces were frequently led by the fascist Azov battalion and related US-backed pro-Nazis armed forces.   With the February 2014 storming of the Ukrainian Rada (Parliament) and the physical exclusion of the majority parties, the openly fascist parties, Svoboda (“Freedom”) and the Right Sector, were formally and forcibly integrated into the Ukrainian coup government, ceding to themselves several top posts. [See: Socialist Action’s  March 18, 2022 website article, “Ukraine: U.S. Out Now! Our Antiwar Credo”].

Putin’s video speech aimed at defending Russia from the charge of abandoning the recent grain deal that initially allowed shipments of grain and other foodstuffs from Ukrainian ports to Africa and other regions. It was abandoned by Russia, however, as the US-backed Ukrainian forces violated several key aspects of the agreement. But Putin stated, “Our country has the capacity to replace Ukrainian grain both commercially and as free aid to needy countries, especially as our harvest is expected to be perfect this year.”

Brazil’s Lula Talks Left, But…

Brazil’s new coalition-capitalist government, headed by President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva (Lula), joined the parade of “left” posturing BRICS leaders who took the stage at Johannesburg, stating, “We cannot accept the greedy neo-colonialism that imposes trade barriers and discriminatory measures under the guise of protecting the environment.” He neglected to explain why Brazil under his watch sent troops to Haiti to enforce US imperial policies and the US-backed UN invasion. . Needless to say, the leaders of China and the Middle East oil monarchies present – along with the US, the world’s greatest polluters – as well as those from fossil fuel rich African nations present at Johannesburg, had zero intention of leading a fight to literally save the world from the impending and irreversible consequences of fossil fuel induced catastrophes attendant to global warming.

China’s brokered deal with Iran and Saudi Arabia

Among the nations considered for BRICS admission are Iran and Saudi Arabia, previously arch enemies during the US/NATO/Gulf State monarchy ten-year and still ongoing war against Syria, a war that murdered 500,000 Syrians. That war saw Saudi Arabian and US-organized, financed and trained jihadist mercenaries occupy almost 80 percent of Syria. The invaders openly aimed at Syria’s dismemberment. Then Secretary of State John Kerry effectively presided over the Saudi-sponsored 2015 Riyadh conference that envisioned the partition of Syria between the various and diverse US-backed forces.

Syria, facing imminent collapse at that moment, with imperialism’s “coalition of the willing” financed and trained forces poised to take its capital city of Damascus, exercised its right to self-determination and called on Russia for help. That assistance, plus Iran’s military support accounts for Syria’s very existence today. (See Socialist Action pamphlet, “Syria: Anatomy of Another US Imperialist War,” By Jeff Mackler and Michael Schreiber.”)

Today, China is credited with brokering a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, both members of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), a textbook example of a cartel-like formation whose members cooperate to reduce worldwide competition and maintain high oil prices.

Other OPEC members under consideration for BRICS membership are Algeria, Venezuela, United Arab Emirates, Nigeria and Kuwait. No doubt Saudi Arabia and Iran’s previous fierce antagonisms, including being on opposite sides of a monstrous US imperialist war against Syria (where US troops still occupy and preside over Syria’s major oil reserves in the northeast), are capable of establishing new “bonds of friendship” should they join BRICS!

That Saudi Arabia continues its near-genocidal war against Yemen and that its Crown Prince leader Mohammed bin Salman approved the internationally-condemned execution and “bone-saw” dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, were not under discussion at Johannesburg!  

BRICS COVID Era Failures

BRICS incapacity to resolve difference during the three-year COVID pandemic was also not on the agenda. Brazil’s Bolsonaro at that time refused to waive the patent rights over key vaccines, thus blocking critical access of the Global South and beyond to life-saving medicines. World Trade Organization (WTO) proposals calling for the waiver of these patent rights were vetoed, mainly by European countries, including Germany and England on behalf of their largely monopolized pharmaceutical industries. But Prime Ministers Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson no doubt appreciated Bolsonaro’s rejecting repeated appeals by BRICS’s Modi and Ramaphosa, who spoke for more than 100 countries in demanding that vital pharmaceutical products be considered “global public goods.”!

South African socialist and climate activist Patrick Bond’s article cited above accurately summarizes BRICS relations with the US-dominated largely unipolar world order. He writes: “The BRICS’ reticence to fight imperialism’s core basis of financial power should have come as no surprise, because in case after case, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – starting in 2009 at the Copenhagen summit where Barack Obama joined Lula, Wen Jiabao, Manhoman Singh and Jacob Zuma for a status quo-oriented deal that they then imposed on everyone else – the BRICS spent the 2010s playing into and not rebelling against, the so-called Washington-Brussels-London-Tokyo ‘unipolar’ order.” (Emphasis in italics in original.)

Need we conclude that the “private profit rights” of the superrich invariably trump the social needs of the earth’s people? This core capitalist principle is undeniable for BRICS’s fossil fuel magnates, for whom the continued, if not expanded extraction, production and distribution of deadly fossil fuels is central to the well-being of the capitalist systems they preside over.

BRICS history, past and present portends no significant advances for humanity. But tragically, there is little agreement among leftists today on this assessment. Counterposing BRICS as a “lesser evil” or even a progressive alternative to the US-dominated international economic order is often justified with the same US election time “lesser evil” arguments that aim at supporting the capitalist Democrats Party wing of US imperialism’s billionaire and trillionaire elite rather than the Republican’s dominant ruling class forces.

Socialist Alternative to BRICS and Capitalism

Socialist Action’s alternative to capitalist politics is based on the historic lessons of Marxism, pioneered, among others, by Karl Marx, his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels and the historic 1917 Russian Revolution leaders, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Today’s revolutionary socialists in their tradition, participate in all social movements with the basic proposition that all the evident evils in capitalist society, increasingly recognized by the world’s people, are no accidents to be remedied by the election of this or that capitalist party or candidate. Rather, they are inherent is the very nature of the capitalist system, based on the private ownership of the basic means of production and their organization and deployment to maximize private profit rather than the meeting social needs of the vast majority.

Racism, sexism, poverty, endless wars, environmental destruction, LGBTQI+ discrimination, anti-immigrant persecution, attacks on social services, healthcare, public education, affirmative action, abortion rights, student debt cancellation, etc., are the inherent stock-in-trade of a capitalist system perpetually in crisis that must seek resolution at the expense of working people. In our view, any real solutions to these crises rests solely in the hands of capitalism’s victims, the vast working class majority and their allies, organized democratically and independently of all capitalist parties.

Education and action via fighting for mass united front type protests on the key issues of the day that demonstrate in fact that working people are society’s real majority and motor force, are our priorities. Independently and democratically organized working people in struggle account for every major social gain in history, as opposed to the largess of capitalist parties. Subordinating our movements in any form to the periodically “elected” representatives of the rigged billionaire-dominated electoral system and its parties or candidates, or to international capitalist formations like BRICS, is a path to disaster.

Critical Lessons of Marxism

The rebel Karl Marx, exiled from his native Germany to England for most of his political life, founded the first worldwide organization aimed at challenging capitalist rule in 1864, the International Working Men’s Association, sometimes called the First International (1864–1876). It excluded capitalists.

Marx’s international party championed every revolutionary struggle against feudal autocracy and capitalist oppression in his day, including the Irish freedom struggle and the Abraham Lincoln-led civil war against Southern slavery. Indeed, Marx was perhaps the most prolific international anti-slavery writer of his time, while his party organized a European boycott against “King Cotton,” among the chief export products of the Southern Confederacy’s slave economy.

Marx’s collaborator, Engels, founded the Socialist International (Second International) in 1879 that won the allegiance of fighting trade union and socialists around the world, while building mass independent working class parties that championed workers’ interests as never before. Again, all capitalists were excluded.

Lenin and Trotsky, co-leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, founded the Communist International (Third International) in 1919. Their 1917 revolution inspired the world’s working class in ending Czarist and capitalist rule in the world’s largest country. It instantly initiated the most massive land reform in world history, granting free Russia’s vast capitalist and feudal estates to Russia’s poor peasantry, some 90 percent of the population. It immediately decreed the right to self-determination and freedom, including the right of succession, of Russia’s Czarist-era conquered and oppressed nations. It instantly established a new government based on the institutionalized rule of workers, peasant and soldiers (soviets, or workers councils). Its unprecedented breath of revolutionary social reforms encompassed full democratic rights for women, including the right to abortion and divorce. It championed LGBTQI rights, free public education, health care and a universal focus on raising the cultural level of the masses in every field of human endeavor. Art, literature, music, theater and literature flourished as never before in history. Again, all capitalists were excluded from the new government!

All these exclusions were based on the historically established fact that the capitalist system of minority rule cannot be reformed. It must be abolished by the independent and consciously organized massive mobilizations of its working class victims led by a massive and deeply rooted revolutionary party whose program and membership embodies the lessons of all previous anti-capitalist struggles.

The first three international were in time defeated, as we recount in our previous article on the Biden administration’s delegation to capitalist China. (See socialistaction.org). The defeats all resulted from a combination of imperialist-imposed isolation and intervention that in time took its toll on important sections of the original revolutionary leadership and the masses themselves.

With the coming to leadership of Joseph Stalin and his bureaucratic machine in the mid-1920’s and the related expulsion and murder of the original 1917 Revolution leaders, the exiled Leon Trotsky assembled the remaining core of revolutionary socialist individuals and groups to form the Fourth International (FI) in 1938. Socialist Action today collaborates with the FI in a fraternal manner only due to US reactionary legislation that prohibits formal affiliation. But Socialist Action maintains a critical attitude to the current course of the FI, whose leadership, under the immense pressures in these difficult times, as is the case for the entire left, is moving toward abandoning its historic revolutionary perspectives. We will return to this and related critical issues in a future article.

All the international socialist formations of the past were born of revolutionary upheavals around the world, where working people united and successfully mobilized in massive numbers – in the millions and tens of millions – to challenge and bring down the oppressive governments of the minority ruling elite of their era. All aimed at inspiring the world’s workers and all the oppressed that they could and must rule in their own name! In accord with the inspiring lyrics of the working class anthem, “The Internationale,” they sang in harmony, “‘Tis the final conflict. Let each stand in their place. The International Party Shall Be the Human Race.”

Capitalist-Imperialist BRICS or a BRICS+ can never be a component of the inevitable coming world freedom struggles. A new revolutionary socialist mass party of today’s best fighters, a party deeply involved in every struggle fighting for a better world is on the order of the day. It is a prerequisite to ending capitalist rule and ushering in the socialist future.

Join us!

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeff Mackler.

There is a reported apparent rift within cabinet between Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Defence Minister Andrew Little over Aotearoa New Zealand’s position in the widening conflict between the United States and China.

While at its core it is over relative economic power, the conflict is manifested by China’s increased presence in the Pacific Ocean, including military, and over Taiwan. Both countries have long Pacific coastlines.

However, the United States has a far greater and longstanding economic and military presence (including nuclear weapons in South Korea) in the Pacific.

• READ MORE: Other China-US geopolitics reports

Despite this disparity, the focus is on China as being the threat. Minister Mahuta supports continuing the longstanding more independent position of successive Labour and National-led governments.

This goes back to the adoption of the nuclear-free policy and consequential ending of New Zealand’s military alliance with the United States in the mid-1980s.

On the other hand, Minister Little’s public utterances veer towards a gradual shift away from this independent position and towards a stronger military alignment with the United States.

This is not a conflict between socialist and capitalist countries. For various reasons I struggle with the suggestion that China is a socialist nation in spite of the fact that it (and others) say it is and that it is governed by a party calling itself communist. But that is a debate for another occasion.

Core and peripheral countries
This conflict is often seen as between the two strongest global economic powers. However, it is not as simple as that.

Whereas the United States is an imperialist country, China is not. I have discussed this previously in Political Bytes (31 January 2022): Behind the ‘war’ against China.

In coming to this conclusion I drew upon work by Minqi Li, professor of economics at the University of Utah, who focussed on whether China is an imperialist country or not.

He is not soft on China, acknowledging that it  ” . . . has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa, and other raw material exporters”.

But his concern is to make an objective assessment of China’s global economic power. He does this by distinguishing between core, semi-periphery, and periphery countries:

“The ‘core countries’ specialise in quasi-monopolistic, high-profit production processes. This leaves ‘peripheral countries’ to specialise in highly competitive, low-profit production processes.”

This results in an “…unequal exchange and concentration of world wealth in the core.”

Minqi Li describes  China’s economy as:

“. . . the world’s largest when measured by purchasing power parity. Its rapid expansion is reshapes the global geopolitical map leading western mainstream media to begin defining China as a new imperialist power.”

Consequently he concludes that China is placed as a semi-peripheral county which predominately takes “. . . surplus value from developed economies and giving it to developing economies.”

In my January 2022 blog, I concluded that:

“Where does this leave the ‘core countries’, predominately in North America and Europe? They don’t want to wind back capitalism in China. They want to constrain it to ensure that while it continues to be an attractive market for them, China does not destablise them by progressing to a ‘core country’.”

Why the widening conflict now?
Nevertheless, while neither socialist nor imperialist, China does see the state playing a much greater role in the country’s economy, including increasing its international influence. This may well explain at least some of its success.

So why the widening conflict now? Why did it not occur between the late 1970s, when China opened up to market forces, and in the 1990s and 2000s as its world economic power increased? Marxist economist and blogger Michael Roberts has provided an interesting insight: The ‘New Washington Consensus’.

Roberts describes what became known as the “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s. It was a set of economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the “standard” reform package promoted for economically struggling developing countries.

The name is because these prescriptions were developed by Washington DC-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the United States Treasury.

The prescriptions were based on so-called free market policies such as trade and finance liberalisation and privatisation of state assets. They also entailed fiscal and monetary policies intended to minimise fiscal deficits and public spending.

But now, with the rise of China as a rival economic global power globally and the failure of the neoliberal economic model to deliver economic growth and reduce inequality among nations and within nations, the world has changed.

What World Bank data reveals
Roberts draws upon World Bank data to highlight the striking nature of this global change. He uses a “Shares in World Economy” table based on percentages of gross domestic production from 1980 to 2020.

Whereas the United States was largely unchanged (25.2 percent to 24.7 percent), over the same 40 years, China leapt from 1.7 percent to 17.3 percent. China’s growth is extraordinary. But the data also provides further insights.

Economic blocs are also compared. The G7 countries declined from 62.5 percent to 47.2 percent while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also fell — from 78 percent to 61.7 percent.

Interestingly while experiencing a minor decline, the United States increased its share within these two blocs — from 40.3 percent to 52.3 percent in G7 and from 32.3 percent to 40 percent in OECD. This suggests that while both the G7 and OECD have seen their economic power decline, the power of the United States has increased within the blocs.

Roberts use of this data also makes another pertinent observation. Rather than a bloc there is a grouping of “developing nations” which includes China. Over the 40 year period its percentage increased from 21.5 percent to 36.4 percent.

But when China is excluded from the data there is a small decline from 19.9 percent to 19.1 percent. In other words, the sizeable percentage of growth of developing countries is solely due to China, the other developing countries have had a small fall.

In this context Roberts describes a “New Washington Consensus” aimed at sustaining the “. . . hegemony of US capital and its junior allies with a new approach”.

In his words:

“But what is this new consensus? Free trade and capital flows and no government intervention is to be replaced with an ‘industrial strategy’ where governments intervene to subsidise and tax capitalist companies so that national objectives are met.

“There will be more trade and capital controls, more public investment and more taxation of the rich. Underneath these themes is that, in 2020s and beyond, it will be every nation for itself — no global pacts, but regional and bilateral agreements; no free movement, but nationally controlled capital and labour.

“And around that, new military alliances to impose this new consensus.”

Understanding BRICS
This is the context that makes the widening hostility of the United States towards China highly relevant. There is now an emerging potential counterweight of “developing countries” to the United States’ overlapping hegemons of G7 and the OECD.

This is BRICS. Each letter is from the first in the names of its current (and founding) members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Around 40 countries have expressed interest in joining this new trade bloc.

These countries broadly correspond with the semi-periphery countries of Minqi Li and the developing countries of Roberts. Predominantly they are from Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Central and South America.

Geoffrey Miller of the Democracy Project has recently published (August 21) an interesting column discussing whether New Zealand should develop a relationship with BRICS: Should New Zealand build bridges with BRICS?

Journalist Julian Borger, writing for The Guardian (August 22), highlights the significant commonalities and differences of the BRICS nations at its recent trade summit: Critical BRICS trade summit in South Africa.

Al Jazeera (August 24)has updated the trade summit with the decision to invite Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join BRICS next January: The significance of BRICS adding six new members .

Which way New Zealand?
This is the context in which the apparent rift between Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Defence Minister Andrew Little should be seen.

It is to be hoped that that whatever government comes into office after October’s election, it does not allow the widening conflict between the United States and China to water down Aotearoa’s independent position.

The dynamics of the G7/OECD and BRICS relationship are ongoing and uncertainty characterises how they might play out. It may mean a gradual changing of domination or equalisation of economic power.

After all, the longstanding British Empire was replaced by a different kind of United States empire. It is also possible that the existing United States hegemony continues albeit weakened.

Regardless, it is important politically and economically for New Zealand to have trading relations with both G7 and developing countries (including the expanding BRICS).

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post BRICS Expansion: Remember the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Horace G. Campbell.

Background

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are holding arguably one of their most important Summits from 22 to 24 August 2023 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Several new countries – up to 40 it is said, including Iran – would like to join the bloc and were invited to attend the South African Summit.

Iran applied for BRICS membership already in 2022. Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi has also been invited to Johannesburg to take part in the summit. BRICS is a consensus-based organization. Every five members must agree on the principle of expansion and criteria for new members.

South Africa’s president has officially opened the 15th annual summit of BRICS, a bloc of five major emerging economies in Johannesburg.

Cyril Ramaphosa made the inaugural address and welcomed the bloc’s members and other world leaders attending the 3-day summit. He called for more cooperation among members, adding that the bloc would continue discussions on practical use of local currencies to facilitate trade and investment flows.

Chinese and Brazilian presidents, the Indian Prime Minister, the Russian Foreign minister as well as leaders and representatives from some 50 other countries are in attendance.

On Tuesday, the Russian president addressed a business forum of the BRICS grouping. Vladimir Putin highlighted the accelerating momentum of de-dollarization.

In a virtual address, Vladimir Putin also criticized the sanctions policy of western states, saying such practice is seriously affecting the international economic situation. He said the unlawful freezing of assets of sovereign states constitutes a violation of free trade and economic cooperation rules. The Brazilian president addressed the same forum as well. He voiced support for economic cooperation among the bloc’s members.

BRICS is expected to consider granting new memberships during its three-day summit, as over 40 countries have expressed interest in joining it.

PressTV:  The Summit is expected to focus on several key topics, including criteria for BRICS- membership, de-dollarization, a BRICS common currency, challenging global economic hegemony and more. Can you please comment?

Peter Koenig:  Let me start by saying it is high time that the BRICS meet not only to talk about the criteria and rules for the about 20 to 40 new member candidates – including Iran – who want to join this Club of Eastern / Global South economies, but also about other crucial matters – like de-dollarization, a BRICS trading currency, and where to keep their reserves… for sure not in New York, London, or Paris.

Some western countries would not mind joining. They may not dare express their interest, for fear of being castigated by the self-styled masters of the West. But there are several western countries interested. Some of them important ones.

Some of them, even scholars of Klaus Schwab’s academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL), those that are literally at the head of most, if not all, EU countries.  Some have become tired of their role, having to follow a dictate that does maybe often no longer respond to their own values.

On more than one occasion, Klaus Schwab has boasted how proud he is that the WEF was able to infiltrate “his” YGLs into governments throughout the world.

Well, some of these YGLs may see through the scam and are eager to exit. And some do. But no mention of names would be appropriate here.

Rules of BRICS membership

So, it is THE opportunity for the original BRICS to lay out their rules, modify them, if necessary, so that others can join, but PLEASE, do not water down the BRICS concept, just so that everybody fits into scheme.

Mind you, for many the East is the future. And rightly so. This is true for the world. Many see the BRICS and ultimately the dream of entering the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the SCO as the salvation from the West, from sanctions, from the dollar impositions, from debt enslavement, from trading restrictions… from outright theft of their currency reserves in foreign countries.

And they are right.

As a byline to the all too frequent western theft of reserve funds and gold…

Think about NOT PLACING your reserves into foreign countries, especially not the west.

Why did Russia and Venezuela not keep their gold at home?

But is this the purpose of the BRICS – providing shelter from the last onslaught of the west, led by the United States and her vassals – the Europeans?

And is it right that some of the BRICS leaders are constantly vacillating between the US and the BRICS solid core – China and Russia.  Mr. Modi, for example, seems to be leaning towards whatever camp – West or East – he feels gives him more advantages.

Is this what the BRICS, a solid and potentially expanded BRICS, wants and needs?

Rules for BRICS Membership are Essential

Mr. Putin is, of course, right – condemning sanctioning and freezing assets of “non-behaving” countries is a crime in the realm of international justice, which, as we all know, has been replaced by the globalist’s “rules of order” which are being changed as they are needed to fulfill the globalists’ conditions to rule.

But what to do about it?

De-Dollarization

This is a term high up on the agenda of the BRICS meeting.

But how to do it? Many BRICS countries still depend on the US-dollar as the bulk of their reserve currency, the main trade currency —

De-Dollarization for many is not happening overnight.  A common strategy is needed.

Trading in local currencies and creating a Common BRICS Trading Currency

To begin with and to avoid the dollar, trading among BRICS members (and even outside BRICS) with local currencies, instead of dollars. This is relatively easy; for example, China and Argentina have done it for a long time.

In the short-to-medium term what might help and may become a necessity is having a common BRICS Trading Currency.

But beware.  This does not mean having a common BRICS currency as the European Union does with the Euro  which is a disaster as most serious economists know.

You cannot have a common currency for a group of politically and geographically diverse countries that do not have a common Constitution and claim instead their financial, economic, and political sovereignty.

Those who created the EU and the Euro – who were not Europeans – knew that exactly.

But what the BRICS should aim at during this meeting is agreeing on a common trading currency and the format of this trading currency while every BRICS member country maintains her own sovereign local currency

One option might be the creation of a virtual currency which is a composite of the weighted average of each member’s own currency, weighted by her economic strength and other parameters that eventually leads to something representing the currency that all members are part of and could use as a trading instrument and even reserve currency.

It would be following in a certain way the principle behind the IMF’s SDR – Special Drawing Rights.

But by NO Means would it be the SDR.

It might be called a BRICS Trading Currency or BTC.

And mind you, a BRICS Trading Currency would not be cast in stone. It might be adjusted as economies of members change and evolve.

Summary

If these few concepts:

• Rules for BRICS membership and possibly a preselection;
• Timelines to achieve these rules for interested countries;
• De-Dollarization; i.e., trading in local currencies and agreeing on a virtual common trading currency
could be agreed upon during the Johannesburg BRICS Summit, a great step towards an expanded and unified BRICS may be achieved.

Note: Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis (Clarity Press, November 1, 2020).  Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Press TV.

Background

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are holding arguably one of their most important Summits from 22 to 24 August 2023 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Several new countries – up to 40 it is said, including Iran – would like to join the bloc and were invited to attend the South African Summit.

Iran applied for BRICS membership already in 2022. Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi has also been invited to Johannesburg to take part in the summit. BRICS is a consensus-based organization. Every five members must agree on the principle of expansion and criteria for new members.

South Africa’s president has officially opened the 15th annual summit of BRICS, a bloc of five major emerging economies in Johannesburg.

Cyril Ramaphosa made the inaugural address and welcomed the bloc’s members and other world leaders attending the 3-day summit. He called for more cooperation among members, adding that the bloc would continue discussions on practical use of local currencies to facilitate trade and investment flows.

Chinese and Brazilian presidents, the Indian Prime Minister, the Russian Foreign minister as well as leaders and representatives from some 50 other countries are in attendance.

On Tuesday, the Russian president addressed a business forum of the BRICS grouping. Vladimir Putin highlighted the accelerating momentum of de-dollarization.

In a virtual address, Vladimir Putin also criticized the sanctions policy of western states, saying such practice is seriously affecting the international economic situation. He said the unlawful freezing of assets of sovereign states constitutes a violation of free trade and economic cooperation rules. The Brazilian president addressed the same forum as well. He voiced support for economic cooperation among the bloc’s members.

BRICS is expected to consider granting new memberships during its three-day summit, as over 40 countries have expressed interest in joining it.

PressTV:  The Summit is expected to focus on several key topics, including criteria for BRICS- membership, de-dollarization, a BRICS common currency, challenging global economic hegemony and more. Can you please comment?

Peter Koenig:  Let me start by saying it is high time that the BRICS meet not only to talk about the criteria and rules for the about 20 to 40 new member candidates – including Iran – who want to join this Club of Eastern / Global South economies, but also about other crucial matters – like de-dollarization, a BRICS trading currency, and where to keep their reserves… for sure not in New York, London, or Paris.

Some western countries would not mind joining. They may not dare express their interest, for fear of being castigated by the self-styled masters of the West. But there are several western countries interested. Some of them important ones.

Some of them, even scholars of Klaus Schwab’s academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL), those that are literally at the head of most, if not all, EU countries.  Some have become tired of their role, having to follow a dictate that does maybe often no longer respond to their own values.

On more than one occasion, Klaus Schwab has boasted how proud he is that the WEF was able to infiltrate “his” YGLs into governments throughout the world.

Well, some of these YGLs may see through the scam and are eager to exit. And some do. But no mention of names would be appropriate here.

Rules of BRICS membership

So, it is THE opportunity for the original BRICS to lay out their rules, modify them, if necessary, so that others can join, but PLEASE, do not water down the BRICS concept, just so that everybody fits into scheme.

Mind you, for many the East is the future. And rightly so. This is true for the world. Many see the BRICS and ultimately the dream of entering the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the SCO as the salvation from the West, from sanctions, from the dollar impositions, from debt enslavement, from trading restrictions… from outright theft of their currency reserves in foreign countries.

And they are right.

As a byline to the all too frequent western theft of reserve funds and gold…

Think about NOT PLACING your reserves into foreign countries, especially not the west.

Why did Russia and Venezuela not keep their gold at home?

But is this the purpose of the BRICS – providing shelter from the last onslaught of the west, led by the United States and her vassals – the Europeans?

And is it right that some of the BRICS leaders are constantly vacillating between the US and the BRICS solid core – China and Russia.  Mr. Modi, for example, seems to be leaning towards whatever camp – West or East – he feels gives him more advantages.

Is this what the BRICS, a solid and potentially expanded BRICS, wants and needs?

Rules for BRICS Membership are Essential

Mr. Putin is, of course, right – condemning sanctioning and freezing assets of “non-behaving” countries is a crime in the realm of international justice, which, as we all know, has been replaced by the globalist’s “rules of order” which are being changed as they are needed to fulfill the globalists’ conditions to rule.

But what to do about it?

De-Dollarization

This is a term high up on the agenda of the BRICS meeting.

But how to do it? Many BRICS countries still depend on the US-dollar as the bulk of their reserve currency, the main trade currency —

De-Dollarization for many is not happening overnight.  A common strategy is needed.

Trading in local currencies and creating a Common BRICS Trading Currency

To begin with and to avoid the dollar, trading among BRICS members (and even outside BRICS) with local currencies, instead of dollars. This is relatively easy; for example, China and Argentina have done it for a long time.

In the short-to-medium term what might help and may become a necessity is having a common BRICS Trading Currency.

But beware.  This does not mean having a common BRICS currency as the European Union does with the Euro  which is a disaster as most serious economists know.

You cannot have a common currency for a group of politically and geographically diverse countries that do not have a common Constitution and claim instead their financial, economic, and political sovereignty.

Those who created the EU and the Euro – who were not Europeans – knew that exactly.

But what the BRICS should aim at during this meeting is agreeing on a common trading currency and the format of this trading currency while every BRICS member country maintains her own sovereign local currency

One option might be the creation of a virtual currency which is a composite of the weighted average of each member’s own currency, weighted by her economic strength and other parameters that eventually leads to something representing the currency that all members are part of and could use as a trading instrument and even reserve currency.

It would be following in a certain way the principle behind the IMF’s SDR – Special Drawing Rights.

But by NO Means would it be the SDR.

It might be called a BRICS Trading Currency or BTC.

And mind you, a BRICS Trading Currency would not be cast in stone. It might be adjusted as economies of members change and evolve.

Summary

If these few concepts:

• Rules for BRICS membership and possibly a preselection;
• Timelines to achieve these rules for interested countries;
• De-Dollarization; i.e., trading in local currencies and agreeing on a virtual common trading currency
could be agreed upon during the Johannesburg BRICS Summit, a great step towards an expanded and unified BRICS may be achieved.

Note: Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis (Clarity Press, November 1, 2020).  Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Press TV.

Britain's Sky News, The Guardian and Hong Kong's English-language South China Morning Post all reported Xi as absent from Tuesday's session of the BRICS Business Forum 2023 in Johannesburg.

According to the summit schedule, Xi was expected to attend the forum and deliver remarks alongside other leaders on Tuesday, according to The Guardian, while the South China Morning Post said he had "failed to show up" at the forum.

The forum groups Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – an expanding club of emerging economies that China hopes will challenge the U.S.-led economic order.

BRICS nations account for more than 40 percent of the world’s population, and in March, they surpassed the G-7 nations in terms of economic output, and looks set to expand, with around 23 nations eager to join, including Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Senegal. 

While a foreign ministry spokesman declined to comment when asked face-to-face by reporters, his colleague appeared to claim Xi had delivered his speech in person, according to her account on X, formerly Twitter.

"President Xi Jinping delivered an address at the closing ceremony of the #BRICS Business Forum 2023," spokeswoman Hua Chunying's official account said on Wednesday.

"President Xi said changes in the world, in our times and in history are unfolding in ways like never before, bringing human society to a critical juncture."

But replies under her tweet took issue with the claim.

"Xi Jinping wasn’t there making a speech. His foreign minister [sic] delivered it for him," @AnthonyTNguyen3 replied to Hua's tweet, while @DJ_PaulTUK added: "No he didn't. He made no speech of any kind. #fakenews"

"But he (Xi Jinping) wasn't there,” objected @GalaxisElnoeke. “Someone else read the speech.”

Conspicuously absent

Xi was one of the first leaders to touch down in South Africa for the BRICS Business Forum, to be met at the airport by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday.

His current trip is only his second international trip this year, after visiting Moscow in March. 

But he was conspicuously absent from the dais on Tuesday, sparking speculation that he might be unwell.

Xi's closing speech was given top billing by Chinese state media, who printed the text of the address in full, but who also failed to mention that Xi hadn't delivered it in person.

Asked at a regular news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday why Xi hadn't attended the closing session, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin read out some quotes from Xi's speech.

Asked for further details, Wang said, "I have already answered your question."

In a thinly-veiled reference to the United States, Xi's speech hit out at a "country, obsessed with maintaining its hegemony" that has "gone out of its way to cripple [emerging economies]."

"Developing countries mostly emerged from the historical mire of colonialism. We have gone through untold hardships, made huge sacrifices, gained national independence, and constantly explored a development path that suits our own national conditions," the speech said.

"However, some countries are not reconciled to losing their hegemony, and wantonly contain and suppress emerging market countries and developing countries," it said.

More important matters to deal with?

In an article titled "Where is Xi Jinping?" the Indian news site Wion commented that "it was surprising that Xi did not turn up for the event."

"So far, no reason has been provided for Xi’s absence, and the stoic silence from the officials has left much room for speculation," the report said.

Independent political scholar Chen Daoyin said speculation ranged from Xi's state of health, to concerns that he could have had more urgent matters to deal with.

"My guess is that he had more important matters to deal with than the speech to this forum, which had to be dealt with by him in person, so he couldn't do it," Chen said, citing Taiwanese media reports that a Chinese submarine had sunk.

"If that were true, it would be a very serious incident, because he is the chairman of the Central Military Commission," he said.

Soong Kuo-cheng, a researcher in international relations at Taiwan's National Chengchi University said it was unusual, and natural to suppose that something was going on behind the scenes, given the Chinese government's tendency to prefer highly choreographed events like the BRICS forum.

"In the closed-door political world of the Chinese Communist Party, anything out of the ordinary means that something else is going on," Soong said.

"[This is something that] once announced, will have an impact on the prestige of the party, country, and an international political impact," he said. "It could be something they can't control, and could involve the health status of sensitive political figures."

"Their usual approach is, don't answer, don't comment, don't explain."

Nosmot Gbadamosi wrote in Foreign Policy’s weekly Africa Brief on Wednesday that China is keen to see rapid expansion of the group, as it would solidify Beijing’s sphere of influence.

"Many African leaders view the dollar’s dominance over the global financial system as impeding their nations’ economic growth,” she wrote, “particularly after U.S. interest rate hikes and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine strengthened the dollar against almost all major currencies and raised the cost of importing goods priced in dollars.”

Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.

As a two-day BRICS summit gets underway in South Africa, we speak with author and analyst Vijay Prashad about whether the bloc — which comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — can meaningfully challenge U.S. and Western domination in world affairs by building an alternative forum for countries of the Global South. BRICS countries represent 40% of the world’s population and a quarter of the world’s economy, and the group is now considering a possible expansion to more than 20 other countries. ”BRICS is an instrument to push forward their political views, which they feel are not taken seriously,” says Prashad, director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Prashad explains the history of BRICS and its New Development Bank and responds to criticism that BRICS falsely portrays itself as an anti-imperialist project. The BRICS countries “are not a socialist bloc,” says Prashad, but they “don’t want to do what the West tells them — they’re driving their own agenda.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

BRICS — the five-country bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — is holding a monumental summit in Johannesburg this week where the group will discuss a number of major issues, including expanding membership and how to improve financial cooperation. Over 40 countries have expressed interest in joining BRICS, and 23 countries have formally applied to join the bloc, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Indonesia, Egypt and Ethiopia. The summit is a “very unstable situation,” as member countries vary greatly on priorities and many potential candidates for membership are “mostly tyrannies, carbon-addicted economies,” says Patrick Bond, director of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. “Some of these machinations are hegemonic projects to stop dissent at home and actually call for a unity that does not benefit the masses,” says South African activist and scholar Trevor Ngwane, who criticizes BRICS as “projecting a false hope to the masses” for posing as an alternative to U.S. and Western imperialism.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post The BRICS Johannesburg Summit’s Hype, Hope and Helplessness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Bond.

The post BRICS: Brick by Brick appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nilantha Ilangamuwa.

In 2003, high officials from Brazil, India, and South Africa met in Mexico to discuss their mutual interests in the trade of pharmaceutical drugs. India was and is one of the world’s largest producers of various drugs, including those used to treat HIV-AIDS; Brazil and South Africa were both in need of affordable drugs for patients infected with HIV as well as a host of other treatable ailments. But these three countries were barred from easily trading with each other because of strict intellectual property laws established by the World Trade Organisation. Just a few months prior to their meeting, the three countries formed a grouping, known as IBSA, to discuss and clarify intellectual property and trade issues, but also to confront countries of the Global North for their asymmetrical demand that the poorer nations end their agricultural subsidies. The notion of South-South cooperation framed these discussions.

Interest in South-South cooperation dates back to the 1940s, when the United Nations Economic and Social Council established its first technical aid programme to assist trade between the new post-colonial states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Six decades later, just as IBSA was formed, this spirit was commemorated by the United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation on 19 December 2004. At this time, the UN also created the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation (ten years later, in 2013, this institution was renamed as the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation), which built upon the 1988 agreement on the Global System of Trade Preferences Among Developing Countries. As of 2023, this pact includes 42 member states from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, that are collectively home to four billion people and have a combined market of $16 trillion (roughly 20% of global merchandise imports). It is important to register that this longstanding agenda to increase trade between Southern countries forms the pre-history of the BRICS, set up in 2009 and presently made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

Madhvi Parekh and Karishma Swali (India), Kali I, 2021–22

The entire BRICS project is centred around the question of whether countries at the nether end of the neo-colonial system can break out of that system through mutual trade and cooperation, or whether the larger countries (including those in the BRICS) will inevitably enjoy asymmetries of power and scale against smaller countries and therefore reproduce inequalities rather than transcend them. Our latest dossier, on Marxist dependency theory, calls into question any capitalist project in the South that believes it can somehow break free from the neo-colonial system by importing debt and exporting cheap commodities. Despite the limitations of the BRICS project, it is clear that the increase in South-South trade and the development of Southern institutions (for development financing, for instance) challenges the neo-colonial system even if it does not immediately transcend it. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been closely following the developments and contradictions of the BRICS project from its inception and continue to do so.

Later this month, the fifteenth BRICS summit will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 22–24 August. This meeting comes as two of the group’s members, Russia and China, are facing a New Cold War with the United States and its allies, while the other members face immense pressure to be drawn into this conflict. Below, you will find briefing no. 9, published in collaboration with No Cold War, which offers a brief but necessary primer of the upcoming BRICS summit. You can read the briefing below.

The upcoming fifteenth BRICS Summit (22–24 August) in Johannesburg, South Africa, has the potential to make history. The heads of state of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa will gather for their first face-to-face meeting since the 2019 summit in Brasilia, Brazil. The meeting will take place eighteen months since the beginning of military conflict in Ukraine, which has not only raised tensions between the US-led Western powers and Russia to a level unseen since the Cold War but also sharpened differences between the Global North and South.

There are growing cracks in the unipolar international order imposed by Washington and Brussels on the rest of the world through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the international financial system, the control of information flows (in both traditional and social media networks), and the indiscriminate use of unilateral sanctions against an increasing number of countries. As United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently put it, ‘the post-Cold War period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order’.

In this global context, three of the most important debates to monitor at the Johannesburg summit are: (1) the possible expansion of BRICS membership, (2) the expansion of the membership of its New Development Bank (NDB), and (3) the NDB’s role in creating alternatives to the use of the US dollar. According to Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador to BRICS, twenty-two countries have formally applied to join the group (including Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Algeria, Mexico, and Indonesia) and a further two dozen have expressed interest. Even with numerous challenges to overcome, the BRICS are now seen as a major driving force of the world economy and of economic developments across the Global South in particular.

Lygia Clark (Brazil), O Violoncelista (‘The Violoncellist’), 1951

The BRICS Today

In the middle of the last decade, the BRICS experienced a number of problems. With the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India (2014) and the coup against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil (2016), two of the group’s member countries became headed by right-wing governments more favourable to Washington. Both India and Brazil retreated in their participation in the group. The de facto absence of Brazil, which from the outset had been one of the key driving forces behind the BRICS, represented a significant loss for the consolidation of the group. These developments undermined and hampered the progress of the NDB and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), established in 2015 – which represented the greatest institutional achievement of the BRICS to date. Although the NDB has made some progress it has fallen short of its original objectives. To date, the bank has approved some $32.8 billion in financing (in fact, less than that has been issued), while the CRA – which has $100 billion in funds to assist countries that have a shortage of US dollars in their international reserves and are facing short-term balance of payments or liquidity pressures – has never been activated.

However, developments in recent years have reinvigorated the BRICS project. The decisions of Moscow and Beijing to respond to escalations of aggression in the New Cold War by Washington and Brussels; the return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency of Brazil in 2022 and the consequent appointment of Dilma Rousseff to the presidency of the NDB; and the relative estrangement, to varying degrees, of India and South Africa from the Western powers have resulted in a ‘perfect storm’ that seems to have rebuilt a sense of political unity in the BRICS (despite unresolved tensions between India and China). Added to this is the growing weight of the BRICS in the global economy and strengthened economic interaction between its members. In 2020, the global share of the BRICS’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in purchasing power parity terms – 31.5 percent – overtook that of the Group of Seven (G7) – 30.7 percent – and this gap is expected to grow. Bilateral trade among BRICS countries has also grown robustly: Brazil and China are breaking records every year, reaching $150 billion in 2022; Russian exports to India tripled from April to December 2022, year-on-year, expanding to $32.8 billion; while trade between China and Russia jumped from $147 billion in 2021 to $190 billion in 2022, an increase of nearly 30 percent.

Ayanda Mabulu (South Africa), Power, 2020

What’s at Stake in Johannesburg?

Faced with this dynamic international situation and growing requests for expansion, the BRICS face a number of important questions:

In addition to providing concrete responses to interested applicants, expansion has the potential to increase the political and economic weight of the BRICS and, eventually, strengthen other regional platforms that its members belong to. But expansion also requires having to decide on the specific form that membership should take and may increase the complexity of consensus building, with a risk of slowing the progress of decision making and initiatives. How should these matters be dealt with?

How can the NDB’s financing capacity be increased, as well as its coordination with other development banks of the Global South and other multilateral banks? And, above all, how can the NDB, in partnership with the BRICS’ network of think tanks, promote the formulation of a new development policy for the Global South?

Since the BRICS member countries have solid international reserves (with South Africa having a little less), it’s unlikely that they will need to use the CRA. Instead, this fund could provide countries in need with an alternative to the political blackmail of the International Monetary Fund, which requires developing countries to enact devastating austerity measures in exchange for loans.

BRICS is reported to be discussing the creation of a reserve currency that would enable trade and investment without the use of the US dollar. If this were established, it could be one more step in efforts to create alternatives to the dollar, but questions remain. How could the stability of such a reserve currency be ensured? How could it be articulated with newly created trade mechanisms which do not use the dollar, such as bilateral China-Russia, China-Brazil, Russia-India, and other arrangements?

How can cooperation and technology transfer support the re-industrialisation of countries like Brazil and South Africa, especially in strategic sectors such as biotech, information technology, artificial intelligence, and renewable energies, while also fighting poverty and inequality, and achieving other basic demands of the peoples of the South?

Leaders representing 71 countries of the Global South have been invited to attend the meeting in Johannesburg. Xi, Putin, Lula, Modi, Ramaphosa, and Dilma have a lot of work to do, to answer these questions and make progress on the urgent matters in global development.

Peter Gorban (USSR), Field Camp. The Izvestiya., 1960

Our institute continues to track these developments, neither with the belief that the BRICS project offers global salvation, nor with the cynicism that dismisses it as nothing new. History is moved, not by purity, but by the world’s contradictions.

As these major countries of the South meet in Johannesburg, they will confront the vast inequities in South Africa. These fissures are the grist for the poems of Vonani Bila, whose voice rises out of Shirley Village (Limpopo) and reminds us of the long walk ahead, through the BRICS project and beyond:

When the sun recedes
into the Soutpansberg,
Giyani Block puts on a
black adder coat;
a mirror of death and despair.

Doctors and nurses stand on their feet.
They shall not rest when the workers’ strike
ignites its furious flame.
They’re on tiptoe, looking up,
wrestling the faceless, tailless monster.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Kurt Nahar (Suriname), Untitled 2369, 2008.

On 20 July, the United Nations (UN) released a document called A New Agenda for Peace. In the opening section of the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made some remarks that bear close reflection:

We are now at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order. While its contours remain to be defined, leaders around the world have referred to multipolarity as one of its defining traits. In this moment of transition, power dynamics have become increasingly fragmented as new poles of influence emerge, new economic blocs form and axes of contestation are redefined. There is greater competition among major powers and a loss of trust between the Global North and South. A number of States increasingly seek to enhance their strategic independence, while trying to manoeuvre across existing dividing lines. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the war in Ukraine have hastened this process.

We are, he says, in a moment of transition. The world is moving away from the post-Cold War era, in which the United States and its close allies, Europe and Japan, (collectively known as the Triad) exerted their unipolar power over the rest of the world, to a new period that some refer to as ‘multipolarity’. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine accelerated developments that were already in motion before 2020. The gradual attrition of the Western bloc has led to contestation between the Triad and newly emerging powers. This contestation is most fierce in the Global South, where trust of the Global North is the weakest it has been in a generation. The poorer nations, in the current moment, are not looking to yoke themselves to either the fragile West or the emergent new powers but are seeking ‘strategic independence’. This assessment is largely correct, and the report is of great interest, but it is also weakened by its lack of specificity.

Gladwyn K. Bush or Miss Lassie (Cayman Islands), The History of the Cayman Islands, n.d.

Not once in the report does the UN refer to any specific country, nor does it seek to properly identify the emergent powers. Since it does not provide a specific assessment of the current situation, the UN ends up providing the kind of vague solutions that have become commonplace and are meaningless (such as increasing trust and building solidarity). There is one specific proposal of great meaning, dealing with the arms trade, to which I shall return at the end of this newsletter. But apart from showing concern over the ballooning weapons industry, the UN report attempts to erect a kind of moral scaffolding over the hard realities that it cannot directly confront.

What then are the specific reasons for the monumental global shifts identified by the United Nations? Firstly, there has been a serious deterioration of the relative power of the United States and its closest allies. The capitalist class in the West has been on a long-term tax strike, unwilling to pay either its individual or corporate taxes (in 2019, nearly 40 percent of multinational profits were moved to tax havens). Their search for quick profits and evasion of tax authorities has led to a long-term decrease in investment in the West, which has hollowed out its infrastructure and its productive base. The transformation of Western social democrats, from champions of social welfare to neoliberal champions of austerity, has opened the door for the growth of despair and desolation, the emotional palate of the hard right. The Triad’s inability to smoothly govern the global neo-colonial system has led to a ‘loss of trust’ in the Global South towards the United States and its allies.

S. Sudjojono (Indonesia), Di Dalam Kampung (‘In the Village’), 1950.

Secondly, it was astounding to countries such as China, India, and Indonesia to be asked by the G20 to provide liquidity to the Global North’s desiccated banking system in 2007–08. The confidence of these developing countries in the West decreased, while their own sense of themselves increased. It was this change in circumstances that led to the formation of the BRICS bloc in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – the ‘locomotives of the South’, as was theorised by the South Commission in the 1980s and later deepened in their little-read 1991 report. China’s growth by itself was astounding, but, as the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted in 2022, what was fundamental was that China was able to achieve structural transformation (namely, to move from low-productivity to high-productivity economic activities). This structural transformation could provide lessons for the rest of the Global South, lessons far more practical than those offered by the debt-austerity programme of the International Monetary Fund.

Neither the BRICS project nor China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are military threats; both are essentially South-South commercial developments (along the grain of the agenda of the UN Office for South-South Cooperation). However, the West is unable to economically compete with either of these initiatives, and so it has adopted a fierce political and military response. In 2018, the United States declared an end to the War on Terror and clearly articulated in its National Defence Strategy that its main problems were the rise of China and Russia. Then-US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis spoke about the need to prevent the rise of ‘near-peer rivals’, explicitly pointing to China and Russia, and suggested that the entire panoply of US power be used to bring them to their knees. Not only does the United States have a vast network of roughly 800 overseas military bases – hundreds of which encircle Eurasia – it also has military allies from Germany to Japan that provide the US with forward positions against both Russia and China. For many years, the naval fleets of the US and its allies have conducted aggressive ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises which encroach upon the territorial integrity of both Russia (in the Arctic, mainly) and China (in the South China Sea). In addition, provocative manoeuvres such as the 2014 US intervention in Ukraine and massive 2015 US arms deal with Taiwan, further threatened Russia and China. In 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which followed the 2002 abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), a move which upset the apple cart of nuclear arms control and meant that the US contemplated the use of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ against both Russia and China.

Enrico Baj (Italy), Al fuoco, al fuoco (‘Fire! Fire!’), 1964.

The United Nations is correct in its assessment that the unipolar moment is now over, and that the world is moving towards a new, more complex reality. While the neo-colonial structure of the world system remains largely intact, there are emerging shifts in the balance of forces with the rise of the BRICS and China, and these forces are attempting to create international institutions that challenge the established order. The danger to the world arises not from the possibility of global power becoming more fragmented and widely dispersed, but because the West refuses to come to terms with these major changes. The UN report notes that ‘military expenditures globally set a new record in 2022, reaching $2.24 trillion’, although the UN does not acknowledge that three-quarters of this money is spent by the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Countries that want to exert their ‘strategic independence’ – the UN’s phrase – are confronted with the following choice: either join in the West’s militarisation of the world or face annihilation by its superior arsenal.

A New Agenda for Peace is designed as part of a process that will culminate at a UN Summit for the Future to be held in September 2024. As part of this process, the UN is gathering proposals from civil society, such as this one from Aotearoa Lawyers for Peace, Basel Peace Office, Move the Nuclear Weapons Money campaign, UNFOLD ZERO, Western States Legal Foundation, and the World Future Council, who call on the summit to adopt a declaration that:

Reaffirms the obligation under Article 26 of the UN Charter to establish a plan for arms control and disarmament with the least diversion of resources for economic and social development;

Calls on the UN Security Council, UN General Assembly and other relevant UN bodies to take action with respect to Article 26; and

Calls on all States to implement this obligation through ratification of bilateral and multilateral arms control agreements, coupled with progressive and systematic reductions of military budgets and commensurate increases in financing for the sustainable development goals, climate protection and other national contributions to the UN and its specialised agencies.

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of our comrade Subhash Munda (age 34), a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who was shot dead in Daladli Chowk (Ranchi, Jharkhand) on 26 July. Subhash, a fourth generation communist, was a leader of the Adivasi (indigenous-tribal) community and was killed for his fight against the land mafia. There are not enough resources in the world to satisfy the greed of the land mafias and the capitalists. But there are enough resources to fulfil human needs, as Subhash Munda knew and for which he fought.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by RT.

Orientation

How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic,  spiral-like  or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of China, Russia and Iran?

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a historical economic system that arose in Europe in the 15^th century.  Over a 600-year period its leading hegemons were first the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. In the 17^th century these city-states were superseded by the Netherlands. The British overtook the Dutch in the 18^th century and the United States crowded out the British well before World War I. Capitalism is characterized by a law-enforced right of private property (as opposed to state or community ownership) in the areas of:

• raw materials (land)
• means of production (tools and methods of harnessing energy)
• labor (who uses the tools and the methods of harnessing energy to work on raw materials)
• commodities (finished products and services)
• money which is transformed into capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives
• power settings in which decisions about the economy are made (political settings). These include The National Association of Manufacturers and The Business Round Table. Internationally the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum and the G7 are examples.

The purpose of capitalism is to make a profit which is unlimited in scope, protected by law, and if necessary, by the military. According to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein capitalists derive their profits by two processes:

• broadening its reach, colonizing the periphery counties for its natural resources, inducing it to produce a single cash crop while paying wages far below wages of the workers in the core countries.
• deepening its reach into core countries through increased commodification of previously uncommodified land and labor, automation, withdrawal of investment in military and finance capital

Trends in capitalism

Trends within capitalism over a 600-year period include:

• a tendency towards a concentration of capital
• a tendency to expand around the globe through transnational corporations
• a movement from scattered territories to larger territorial control
• phases in investing in merchant, agricultural (slavery), industrial, military and finance capital which become cycles
• these become Kondratieff waves of expansion and contraction which occur every 55 years.
• the end of a cycle is characterized by bifurcation points, crisis which occur at shorter and shorter intervals
• crises points fuel increasing anti-systemic opposition
• capitalist crises which accumulate to produce both the possibility of abundance, shorter work week and an accumulation of crisis of unresolved problems of previous cycles including ecological devastation
• greater variety of resources

Where are we headed?

I begin my article by comparing world-systems theory to modernization theory across seven categories.  Next, I compare the characteristics of the three zones in world-systems theory – core, periphery and semi-periphery. While we can imagine capitalism over a 600-year period as a movie, we also want to take “snapshots” of the world-system on four separate occasions. Probably the most important part of the article is in describing Giovanni Arrighi’s cycles and spirals of capitalism over the last 600 years up to the close of the 20^th century. In the last section in the piece I identify all the revolutionary changes that are happening to the 21^st century world-system. The battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists will be framed from a world-systems perspective.

What is World-systems Theory?

In the 1950s, political science and international relations was dominated by an anti-communist “modernization theory”. In the 1960s the conservativism of modernization theory was first challenged by something called “dependency theory” led by Andre Gunder Frank and later by the “world-systems theory” of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-system theories were socialist but they were critical of the state socialism of Russia, China and Cuba. They argued that those countries were state capitalist. They strove to apply Marx’s theory of capitalism to the whole world as opposed to just single nation states as many Marx did. They challenged Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism as being too linear. In their perspective, imperialism is part of the end of each of the four cycles and was common for the Italians, the Dutch, the English and now the Yankees.

World-systems theory was criticized by more traditional Marxists like Robert Brenner because he felt they did not emphasize enough the class struggle within nation states. World-systems theory seemed to be more interested in the political economy of the dynamics of three zones (core countries, peripheral countries and the semi-peripheral countries) rather than the class struggle within each zone.  I’ll discuss these zones in detail shortly.

Modernization Theory vs World-systems theory

Are nation-states primarily independent or interdependent?

For modernization theory, nation states are independent and internally driven. The responsibility for their past, present and future direction is strictly determined by their foreign policy. In world-systems theory, nation-states are subordinate to an international system of capitalism and have only relative control over their foreign policy.

Therefore, modernization theorists would look at poor countries in the world (what world-systems theory might call the periphery) and say their poverty was due to a failure to build modern institutions such as science or capitalism. They are dismissed as irrational tribalists marred by superstition. World-systems theorists would say countries on the world periphery are poor because they have been colonized and exploited by the core countries. Because nation-states are understood to be autonomous, capitalists are thought to be loyal patriotic servants of their nation-states. For world-systems theorists, capitalists are the most unpatriotic class of all. They are committed to making profits anywhere in the world. They will feign patriotism when they need foot soldiers to fight wars against other capitalist countries but otherwise they have no loyalties.

What is the relationship between politics and economics?

For modernization theorists’, politics and economics are separate. As you can well see, throughout the 1950s and even after modernization theory was criticized in the 1960s in political science classes, economics was never a serious part of a discussion. It would be like saying political meetings in Congress are strictly determined by the political ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. Money has no part in it. At the same time, the teachers of economics courses act like capitalist economics has no political dimension. This would be like saying the economic decisions of transnational corporations would not be influenced by political turmoil or a revolution in a periphery country in which they had large investments. Speaking internationally, for modernization theory, all wars are about political ideology.

For world-systems theorists, there is only political economy. All economics is political and all political acts have economic aspects to it. For world-systems theory, wars have mostly to do with battles over natural resources. They also can be political but when a socialist country gains power in a war the trade relations become more unfavorable for capitalists.

How is social evolution understood?

Modernization theories imagine social evolution as progress. They say there is something inherently progressive about Western societies that older civilizations such as China and India lack. The wealth produced by capitalist societies is distributed somewhat unevenly because some people work harder than others. All roads in social evolution lead to the West with the pinnacle being Western Europe and the United States. Progress is linear, and modernization theory imagines that tribal societies are just dying to be modernized, blaming themselves for their situation. Modernization theory fails to account for complex societies’ disintegration and going backward (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies) or Jared Diamond (Why Societies Collapse). Even when socialist societies are industrialized they are not considered modern because state control over the economy and one-party rule lack democracy.

World-systems theory argue that progress in the history of human society has been uneven. They are willing to admit that the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers is admirable. They are well aware that an increase in the productive forces through technology, in fact, leads to more work for the lower classes rather than less. While world-systems theory acknowledges the benefits of science and some of the wealth produced by capitalism, it also points out the exploitation and misery it produces for working-class people as a result of class stratification.

Rate and type of change

Generally speaking, modernization theory understands the rate of social change to be gradual, evolutionary and relatively harmonious across social classes. For world-systems theory, like all Marxist theories, political and economic change is sudden, discontinuous, filled with conflict and driven by class struggle. For modernization theory instabilities are temporary and part of “business cycles” which settle back down into equilibrium and homeostasis. For world system theory, capitalist crisis is no static equilibrium model. Capitalism today will turn into a terminal crisis from which it will not recover. Whether it is the tendency of the rate or profit to fall, profit squeeze theory or under-consumption theory, the days of capitalism are numbered.

While for modernization theory all roads start and end in Western Europe and the United States, for world-systems theorists, modernization may have begun in Europe, but it by no means is it likely to stay there. As we can see today, the world-system is shifting operations to China, the new center of the world-economy.

Attitudes towards socialism

As I mentioned before, modernization theorists are anti-communist. The only socialism for modernization theorists is Stalinism. Even when socialist societies industrialize, modernization theorists deny they are a modern system, because they lack bourgeois rights and a two-party system. They see socialist societies as some kind of throwback to Karl Wittfogel’s Orientation Despotism. While world-systems theorists essentially call themselves socialist, they criticize Stalinism as state capitalist, and Cuba and China as bureaucratic states. They look more favorably to Nordic evolutionary socialism, especially Sweden in the 20^th century up to around 1980.

Modernization theory understands capitalism and socialism as two separate systems. It imagines the rebellions of the 1960s as rebellions against socialist regimentation. It has been difficult for them to explain why an entire generation would rebel against the fleshpots of capitalist modernization in Western Europe and the United States. On the other hand, world-systems theorists understand that the existing socialist countries, including the state socialist countries, are part of a broad anti-systemic movement against capitalism which includes the various Leninist parties, social democrats and anarchists.

For modernization theorists’ socialism has been tried and failed. Case closed. They would support Fukuyama’s claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, history is over and capitalism has won. “Not so fast” say world-systems theorists. Capitalism is 500 years old and has only achieved economic and political dominance in the 19^th century. Socialism is about 170 years old. It is too soon to tell whether socialism is a realistic alternative.

Place and misplace of foreign aid

For modernization theorists aid to poor or peripheral countries may be driven by a combination of self-interest at worst, and at best creating win-win situations. Foreign aid is given in the hopes that with the help of the West poor countries will industrialize, shed their backward ways and become competitive partners. For world- systems theorists the relation between core and peripheral countries is not neutral but imperialistic. Rich countries exploit poor countries for their land and labor and turn them into one crop-producing colonies. As Andre Gunder Frank quipped, the core countries underdeveloped the peripheral countries. Furthermore, world capitalist banks like the World Bank or the IMF do not give loans that will enable peripheral countries to build scientific institutions along with engineers. One reason is because scientists and engineers may discover new resources that might undermine the resources of core countries such as oil. This is one reason why fundamentalist religious institutions always seem to grow in peripheral countries because they are of no threat to capitalism. The CIA always finds money for them.

Theoreticians

As I’ve said, modernization theorists were most prevalent in the 1950s. They included Walt Rostow and Lucian Pye. Daniel Lerner specialized in telling the story of how tribal societies got on the road to modernization. Samuel Huntington is more contemporary with works like The Clash of Civilizations along with Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History.

Early world-systems theorists were Oliver Cox who looked at race and caste from an international perspective. Immanuel Wallerstein provided a foundation for world-systems theories, drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall extended a world-systems perspective all the way back to tribal societies. Giovanni Arrighi took a deep look at the history of capitalism (to be covered shortly) and Samir Amin has been a kind of watchdog always trying to keep world-systems theory from being too Eurocentric. Beverly Silver made a study of workers movements from a world-systems perspective. Lastly Christopher Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell located the history of workers’ movements over a 600-year period of capitalism, not as isolated in nation-states (as traditional Marxists have done) but as part of the dark side of the cycles and spirals of capitalism.

Characteristics of the Three Zones

In world-systems theory, there are three regions of the world — the core, the periphery and the semi periphery. In the 20^th century the core countries were the wealthy countries of Yankeedom, Western Europe and Japan. The Scandinavian countries are cases of successful state-capitalism. Most of the periphery countries were the heavily colonialized states of Africa. In the semi-periphery were Russia, China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Economics and politics

Contrary to what Marx predicted, there are no countries in the core of the world- system that are socialist. In the semi-periphery there has arisen both capitalist and state socialist societies. Most of the periphery countries are operating with a combination of tribal or state redistributive system combined with exploited low wage workers at the beck-and-call of imperialists in the core.  In terms of political power, core countries have developed their own bourgeois representative systems without any political pressure outside the core. Peripheral countries have the least political power. Many of the core countries have installed dictatorships there in the hopes of controlling peripheral economies. Home-grown leaders of peripheral countries are often anti-imperialist revolutionaries agitating to overthrow imperialism in their country.

Countries in the semi-periphery have a moderate degree of autonomous political power but their elections are closely watched by the deep state in core societies because they have more technological self-rule and could get out of control. In state socialist countries, political power is highly concentrated at the top. Socialist societies cannot afford to have many political parties. Those smaller parties are subject to manipulation by the deep state within core countries which works to overthrow socialism. Because peripheral countries have been exploited by imperialism they are poor. World capitalist banks offer loans at interest rates so high that it is rare for peripheral countries to get out of debt. The loans received from these banks are only for raw materials and for cash crop agriculture. No loans are made for education or building infrastructures.

Energy bases, commodities and wages

The energy bases of core countries are electronic-industrial. The semi-periphery countries are industrial-agricultural while in the periphery they are mostly agricultural or horticulture in the sub-Sahara Africa. The technology in the core countries draws on inanimate sources of energy and machine-based. In the periphery, work is labor intensive using mostly animal and wind power. In the semi-periphery capitalists implement hand-me-down machines from core countries. As might be expected, wages are highest in core countries because unions have been institutionalized. In the periphery, because there is very little industry, there are no unions and it is here where wages are lowest. Typically, workers might work part-time in industry, also working in garment industry, as water carriers, day laborers with some cash crop planting. In the semi-periphery there is some unionization and in state-socialist societies wages might be good.

Commodities and economic policy: free trade vs protective tariffs

Because of their colonial relations with the periphery core counties import raw materials cheaply and export manufactured goods, which are more expensive. In peripheral countries, they export raw materials, mostly cash crops and import goods from the West at higher prices, keeping them in a dependent relationship.

The economic policy of the core countries is “free trade” which, of course, is not free but gives them a license to go wherever they want, exploiting land and labor where there is little or no resistance. Countries in the semi-periphery, when driven by their population or the vision of their leaders, may adopt protective tariffs in the hopes of protecting the growth of their home industries. On the periphery, the economic policy is forced free trade with colonialists. Often one of the major efforts in peripheral liberation movements is to elect leaders who follow protective tariffs to attempt to build up home industries. Semi-periphery countries are somewhat dependent on core countries but they in turn also exploit the periphery to a less extent. These semi-periphery countries use their surplus to invest more in their domestic economy. They export peripheral-like goods to the core and export core goods to the periphery.

Class, race, ethnic and regional conflicts

For most of the 20^th century in the core countries the conflicts between groups were class conflicts and in the United States, race conflicts. However, regional conflicts still smolder in Yankeedom between North and South. In Europe regional loyalties smolder in Spain, Northern Ireland, Belgium among others. The semi-periphery has similar class and regional problems. The periphery is torn apart between tribal loyalties and loyalties to the newly formed states which were once part of national liberation movements.

Role of the military

Lastly, we turn to the role of the military. After two world wars over colonies, core states have agreed not to attack each other and the military is rarely involved in its domestic politics. The military of core countries is mostly employed in attempting to control the political life in the semi-periphery and the periphery. The military in semi-periphery countries is more volatile because core countries are concerned about the domestic policies there since these countries have the resource base – the science and engineers – to undermine the resource base of the core. The military in the semi-periphery gets involved, either as right-wing dictators or to bring in a left-wing military leader such as Hugo Chavez. The most direct military involvement is in the periphery because colonialists want to maintain control of the cheap land and labor they exploit. The military also tries to impose order in clashes within the domestic population between tribes, ethnic groups and state loyalists.

Snapshots of the History of the World-system

In his book An Introduction to the World-system perspective, Thomas Shannon introduces four “snapshots” (maps) of the world-system:

• world-system from 1450-1620 (merchant capital)
• world-system in 1763 (agricultural, slave capitalism)
• world-system in 1900 (industrialization)
• the contemporary world system in 20^th century (finance capital, electronics)

What might be confusing is that the world-system, though it has the “world’ in it, does not mean it is a global society. For most of the history of world-system, the core, periphery and semi periphery only covered part of the globe. The fact is in the world system of 1450-1620 most of the world system was concentrated in Europe – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. The periphery consisted of the Scandinavian countries and central and South America. The United States was not even in the world-system while Russia, China and India were part of agricultural empires.

In the 1763 snapshot, the core countries are Great Britain and  France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal slipping into minor core status. The semi-periphery then consisted of the North Italian city-states and Prussia. Thanks to colonialization by the British, the United States and West Africa were now on the periphery of the world system. Poland and Russia were now in the periphery. China and India were still outside the world system.

By 1900 Great Britain and France remained as core countries but they were now joined by late developing Germany and the United States.  By 1900 most of the globe was now in the world-system, with Russia moving to the semi-periphery and China now on the periphery. This was the age of colonialism as all of Africa, China and South America were on the world capitalist periphery.

By the 20^th century the world-system was rocked by two world wars which hollowed out Europe and reduced them to minor core status. The rise of Japan in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century catapulted it into core status. The first three quarters of the 20^th century were the time of Yankeedom. The 20^th century saw the emergence of the first socialist states in Russia, China and Cuba. Russia maintained its semi-peripheral status while Cuba and China continued to be poor and in the periphery of the world-system.

Capitalist Cycles and Their Leading Hegemons

In 1994 Giovanni Arrighi wrote a great book with a bad title, The Long 20^th Century.

The heart of the book is the tracing of the history of capitalism through four cycles. Instead of looking at capitalism as a linear line moving from merchant capitalism to agricultural capitalism, to industrial, to finance capitalism and imperialism, Arrighi analyzed capitalism as a series of four cycles which played themselves out through leading hegemons throughout Europe. Through each cycle there were mercantile, agricultural, industrial and financial phases, but they weren’t all of the same weight.

Italian city-states

For example, the first place the cycles occurred were in the city-states of Genoa and Venice between 1450 and 1640. They made profits based on merchant capital through trading. Being city states, they didn’t make much profit on agriculture and what industry existed was small. However, when their profits were made on finance and wars, that was the end of their power. As we shall see throughout all hegemon rulers, when profits are made on war and finance they are on their way out.

Dutch sea trade

After the Italian wars and the discovery of new trade routes West, the Italian city-states lost their core status. Dutch sea power arose in the 17^th century. Again, the Dutch profits were based on merchant trade but trade on a much larger scale than the Italians. They were led by East Indian and West Indian monopoly companies. There were at least five reasons the Dutch superseded Genoa and Venice.

• scale of operation – the Dutch had greater commercial and financial networks
• financial base of the Dutch monopoly companies are less vulnerable to competing trade countries
• Dutch interest clashed more dramatically with central authorities of medieval world. This drove them to be more independent from religion
• Dutch war-making was superior
• the Dutch had greater state-making capacity

The end of the line for the Dutch was also when money houses became a greater source of profit than trade. Dutch hegemony ended in wars with the English beginning in 1781. England was also a great sea power at this time and were also better colonizers than the Dutch.

The sun never sets on the British empire

The secret to British hegemony in the 19^th century was the industrial revolution. Here profits were made rebuilding cities with railroads and textile factories. While Britain made profits on trade (merchant capital), while it derived profits from cash crops and slavery (agricultural capital), what made it distinct was the industrial revolution and the harnessing of coal and steam. For Britain the end came towards the end of the 19^th century when it shifted its wealth from industry to finance, The British empire was with the wars over colonies with Germany, Italy and Japan.

The American century 1870-1970

The United States made profits off its sea power and its planters made profits on agricultural slavery working with the British. But its greatest profits derived from industry. By the second half of the 19^th century the United States became an industrial powerhouse, competing directly with the British. Besides coal, the oil Barons made a fortune on the railroads in this ascendent phase of capitalism. In the two world wars that followed, the United States became the only core country standing. After World War II it was the sole core power. Between 1948-1970 it peaked.

However, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries capitalist countries were racked by depressions in 1837, 1873 and 1896 and then the Great Depression of 1929-1939. Capitalists in the United States noticed that it was investment in military arms that got the US capitalist economy out of the depression more than Roosevelt’s programs. After World War II, the defense industry became an ongoing investment even in peace-time. Then it began to sell arms around the world to fight communism.

Lastly, investing in finance capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives – gave quicker turn-around profits than investing in industry. Once Japan and Germany had recovered from World War II, the United States faced real competition. Instead of investing in infrastructures, it invested in finance capital. Instead of investing in its workers, it pulled industries out of the United States and relocated in peripheral countries where land and labor were cheap. This was the beginning of the end. So began a 50-year decline.

Trends in the History of Capitalism

From investing in the physical economy to investment in finance

In describing these trends as a whole, Arrighi takes some liberties with Marx’s C-M-C; M-C-M formula. He says that in the ascendant phase of capitalism the M-C moment of capitalism is pronounced. That means that money is invested in commodities, trade, production and expansion. Money is invested in solid material. When a hegemon’s days are numbered C-M commodities are invested in money, the capitalist economy is contracting and capital is invested in finance capital, profits made on stocks and bonds can easily be moved around (liquidity).

Shortening of cycles

The four cycles Arrighi analyzes are not evenly distributed in time across the hegemons. The pace of rise and fall speeds up. The rise and fall of the Italian city-states was 220 years; the United Dutch provinces lasted 180 years; the British heyday lasted 130 years and the United States 100 years from 1873-1973. Meanwhile the cycles do not just end and resume again without accumulating consequences.

Some twentieth century trends

• artificial intelligence which has the potential to shorten the work week
• the opportunity to live longer – thanks to science
• the chance to colonize space
• an increase in rebellion over the centuries including the rise of socialism in the second half of the 19^th century among workers and peasants
• the impact of ecology with increasing pollution and severe weather
• the deterioration of health due to genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs.

Revolution in the World-system in the 21^st Century

Rise of an alliance between semi-periphery countries

When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990 it looked as if, despite its declining power, Yankeedom would continue to be the hegemon into the 21^st century. But a funny thing happened in the first two decades of the 20^th century. One was the rise of nationalism in Russia under Putin. The other was the emergence of a powerhouse economy in China. This was predicted  by Arrighi in his later book Adam Smith in Beijing and Andre Gunder Frank’s book ReORIENT.

From a world-systems perspective, the rise of a semi-peripheral country like China is no surprise, as world-systems theory has always argued that the semi-periphery countries have the most revolutionary potential. This is because they are wealthy enough to support scientists and engineers who potentially can produce an economic policy separate from the core countries. What seems unprecedented is the alliance of two semi-peripheral countries (Russia and China) with a deep alliance which cuts across military and economic cooperation.

In fact, the rise of BRICS as a challenge to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is noteworthy because virtually every country in BRICS is a semi-peripheral country. The multipolar world is composed of semi-peripheral countries unified by the New Silk Road. Furthermore, if China continues to grow the way it has been, in the next twenty years it will become the first core country since the beginnings of capitalism not located in the West. Secondly, under the leadership of the Communist Party and state-owned enterprises, China clearly has a socialist end in mind. It would be the first time a core country in the world-system was socialist. Third, China has not pressured Russia, Iran or any country in the multipolar orbit to become socialist. So whatever political and economic tensions might develop in the multipolar world, it is not likely to be the old capitalism vs socialism battle.

The United States and Europe

In the new multipolar world-system, the United States will sink to the status of a semi-peripheral country because its capitalists will not invest in rebuilding its abandoned infrastructure. It is likely to live on as a home of finance capitalists giving loans to other decimated capitalists countries or in supplying military arms to countries which have not joined in the multipolar world. These lost countries could be in South or Central America or in Middle Eastern countries which are not part of the Belt Road initiative.

Europe has been vassal of the United States for 80 years. Up until the last couple of years, Germany was the only European country which was an industrial powerhouse. But this has changed since the US has insisted that Europe abide by its sanctions of Russia. There is not a single European county with the exception of Hungary that has stood up to the United States. As the United States continues its decent from core to semi-periphery, Europe will follow with England being the weakest country. Once it slowly dawns on the European rulers that Yankeedom will not save them, they may attempt to make back-room deals with Russia and China in terms of natural gas and other sources of energy. It might be that in the next 50 years the old European core countries may regain their balance and occupy a semi-peripheral status in the new multipolar system.

The Middle East and South America

To the extent that China can diplomatically integrate Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Middle Eastern countries with oil, they will remain in the semi-periphery of the world’s new multipolar system. Expect Israel to degenerate as Mordor will be less able to help them and they will be surrounded by hostile Arab states with scores to settle. In South America Argentina and Chile will join Brazil in the semi-periphery. Venezuela will finally be spared from Mordor’s intervention and be protected by China as a fellow socialist society.

Global South

The refusal of African states to do the bidding of Mordor against Russia speaks volumes for the end of their hopes to ever get a fair deal from the United States or its financial institutions. There has been an openness to project proposals from China and Russia for building railroads and schools. Some African states like Nigeria or Sudan might, over the course of a generation, build their countries up to a semi-periphery status the way Libya was when Gaddafi was in power.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Background

Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976.  He describes his formative years like this:

I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War – of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.

Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.

Sullivan made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.

Mentored by Hillary

Sullivan became a key adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, travelling with her to 112 countries.

The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the US Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the US ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly over-ruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive US support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”

Two years later the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.”  When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the US, Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found  to be false.

When the Libyan government was overthrown in Fall 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. US Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.

Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state.  Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.”  Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by Wikileaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”

Biden’s adviser during the 2014 Ukraine Coup

After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan  became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).

In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly recorded conversation where Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of  police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.

Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of  Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisima Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisima to be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.

In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the US has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.

Sullivan helped create Russiagate

 Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which  promoted Russiagate.  The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of  Putin.  Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.

Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”

 Sullivan’s misinformation

 Jake Sullivan is a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by Frontline television program about US foreign policy and especially US-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya…. He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission…. Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.”  Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”

Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline destruction

The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for US liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down.  Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.

Seymour Hersh reported details of  How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted

I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.

Ellerman-Kingombe may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the US military and NATO command.

Since then, the Swedish investigation of Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the US has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to lack of support from the US and US allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked,

How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?

 Economic Plans devoid of reality

 Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class” which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing. However the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.”  Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly US Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.

US exceptionalism 2.0

In December 2018 Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney.  He also criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump.  Sullivan advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21^st Century.”

Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.”  He believes “The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”

Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically. It is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to US bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are ignoring US requests.  The trend  toward a multipolar world is escalating. Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend but reality and history are working against him.  Over the past four or five decades, the US has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military industrial complex.

Instead of reforming and rebuilding the US, the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.

Conclusion

Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were very  influential.

Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc.  Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the US induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.

On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the US intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the US has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the US and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.

The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running US foreign policy today:  Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan.  Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.

The Democratic Party constantly emphasizes “democracy” yet there is no debate or discussion over US foreign policy. What kind of “democracy” is this where crucial matters of life and death are not discussed?

Robert F Kennedy Jr is now running in the Democratic Party primary. He has a well informed and critical perspective on US foreign policy including the never ending wars, the intelligence agencies and the conflict in Ukraine.

Jake Sullivan is a skilled debater. Why doesn’t he debate Democratic Party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr over US foreign policy and national security?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

• US calls China “aggressive”
• Suez Canal investments
• Multinational pharmaceuticals in China
• History of bicycles in China

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

Part I Who are Some Western Supporters of Multipolarists?

Orientation

Most of us realize there is a major tectonic shift in the world economy from West to East. The multipolar nations are basing their economies on investing in developing the productive forces of science and technology and to better human life. The Belt and Road Initiative is a good example. The West, on the other hand, has made its profits on finance capital and military capitalism. The US defense industry arms the whole world. This economy is in steep decline.

In addition, politically in Mordor (The United States), there is no New Deal liberal party, let alone any significant socialist party. The political ideology of the Anglo-American Empire is centrism. If the forces of The Enlightenment are the West – New Deal liberals and socialists – and wanted to join the movement towards a multipolar world what would its guiding principles look like? Where on the political spectrum would it locate itself?

Since Lyndon LaRouche is someone instrumental in developing an economic policy for multipolarists Russia and India, he might have something to teach the West. To become Western multipolarists, to become Promethean city builders, we must recognize that finance and military capitalists are our enemy. At the same time, we must realize that finance capitalists of the Anglo-American Empire combined with the CIA have shaped a fake opposition to itself in the New Left. Among other things, this article will expose the ways the New Left has served finance capital and the Rockefellers.

My claims for this two-part article are that:

1. In order to join with Multipolarists of the East, forces to the left of the Democratic Party must reorganize their worldview along the lines of The Enlightenment and become city-builders.
2. Lyndon LaRouche and some of the sympathetic organizations such as Rising Tide Foundation are good representations of what a multipolar policy world would look like in the West
3. The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalism is centrism and it must be opposed.
4. The forces of Promethean City Builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum and create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.
5. For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left to oppose the continuation and development of the Enlightenment, the American system and a communist movement.

Part I of this article deals with the first two claims and Part II addresses the last three.

The Western World is Cracking Up

Internationally

If your analytical vision penetrates beyond the surface – the sanctions, the build-up of military bases and the vast financial profits made – the Anglo-American empire is fracturing. Its finance capitalists have nothing to offer the world that can compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It promises the world nothing but weapons to fight wars. As China’s diplomats mediate between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Mordor’splans for dividing West Asia are fracturing. As more and more countries line up to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa’s the alternative to the IMF), and the World Bank, Mordor’s allies dwindle. Meanwhile its European “coalition of the willing”, vassals for 80 years, are starting to stir. While some rulers quietly accept the leadership of Mordor, other countries, formerly the heart of the almost defunct European Union, are poking their heads above ground – as in France’s Macron statement in Beijing – and making noises about European autonomy. However, these rulers are also being pushed by the anti-war and anti-NATO elements on both left and right to stop wasting their resources on Ukraine.

Domestically

As Yankeedom engages in several wars at once internationally, domestically it is falling apart. The federal state stands helpless as regions of the country face ecological disasters and extreme cold, heat and tornadoes. Its trains cannot stay on the tracks and its roads and bridges rot from neglect. In a recent survey released by the US army, recruiters say most eligible young men and women cannot pass the physical because they are either overweight or have drug problems. The public education system is so beleaguered that a high school degree is no longer required to teach high school. Rather than invest in the physical or human infrastructures, finance capitalists cannibalize those infrastructures while they make profits on derivatives and stock options which produce no real social goods. As many of you know, there is none better than political economist Michael Hudson at pointing this out. A recent survey indicated that half the American population thinks there will be a civil war and/or secession in two years.

Tectonic Plates Shift Eastward

Like tectonic shifts, the real-world economy is shifting eastward towards China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent, India. South American counties are lining up to join the multipolar world, including Argentina and Brazil. In Africa, leaders are trading with the Chinese who are building railroads. Recently Russia has forgiven billions of dollars in debt. Even Mexico, along with 30 other countries, right under the nose of Mordor has applied to BRICS. What are the differences between the Anglo -American empire and the multipolar world of the East? See my table below:

Table A  The international World Divide

The Place of Lyndon LaRouche in the Multipolar World

Tribute to LaRouche by Russian economist Sergei Glazyev

In a recent article, the major Russian economist Sergei Glazyev sent a message of appreciation to the Schiller Institute on what would have been the 100th birthday of Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche anticipated a disastrous end if finance capital policies continued. Further, he helped Russia to turn around after it was decimated by the neoliberal policies of Boris Yeltsin. I am emphasizing in the quotes below what I think is most important about Glazyev’s tribute:

Already 30 years ago, and perhaps even earlier, Lyndon LaRouche drew attention to the fact that the inflation of financial bubbles, including derivatives bubbles, and the creation of financial pyramid schemes would inevitably bring about the collapse of the world financial system. And he proposed to adopt timely measures to avert that collapse.

Back then he proposed that, instead of pumping up financial bubbles, the world reserve currency emitter-countries, together with their partners and other countries, should invest in building global infrastructure, which would reduce the cost of trade, increase the efficiency of international economic ties, and, overall, contribute to raising connectivity worldwide. [This is precisely China’s and Russia’s policy.] So, he viewed the process of globalization as a process of expanding cooperation among countries, rather than attempts by some countries to exploit others.

As for the liberal globalization that today is leading to the collapse of the world financial system, LaRouche criticized it. He proposed a different model of globalization, based on the principles of physical economy in The Truth of Man and Nature. In particular, the famous project, which he and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, put forward for international discussion – the so-called Eurasian Land Bridge. This is a splendid and interesting project, which now, after many years, has begun to be implemented through the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, which we support through linking it with the Eurasian Economic Union.

LaRouche’s voice was heard very well. We remember him. In practically all the major countries in the world today that are developing successfully – above all India and China – there are partisans of LaRouche. They have used his thoughts and ideas for creating economic miracles. It is the principles of Physical Economy championed by LaRouche that today underlie the Chinese economic miracles and are there in the foundations of India’s economic development policy. The supporters of LaRouche in those countries exist in a fruitful, very positive and constructive influence on economic policy-shaping in these leading nations of the new world economic paradigm.

LaRouche is hard to pigeonhole politically (stopped 6-7-23)

I have been around leftist movements for over 50 years. During that time, I have watched the socialist left call LaRouche a paranoid fascist and his organization a cult. It has never been easy to think or speak about him in a dialectical manner not only because the anticommunist left demonizes him, but because his followers are often uncritical of him, at least in public. Trying to find a biography of him that is objective is about as easy as looking for an objective biography of the occultist, Gurdjieff. The choices seem to be either as a cynic or true believer. Yet today some of those who have been influenced by LaRouche such as Rising Tide Foundation, have some valuable things to say. As I mentioned, LaRouche’s ideas connect nicely with the new international political configuration that is happening of creating a multipolar world. Lastly, his influence is felt in the left-right strategic alliances that are occurring in Germany and just beginning in the United States. (In the Antiwar rally 2/19/23 and in friendly debates among LaRoucheans, communists and right libertarians.)

Shifts, turns and reversals

Some of you know that LaRouche started out as a Marxist. Under the pen name of Lyn Marcus, he wrote an extraordinary book called Dialectical Economics, which I read twice and on which I took extensive notes. Since I was never an insider of the LaRouche movement, I am unable to track the changes in his political direction in depth in the early 1980s. I know he abandoned Marxism and developed what seemed to me an idealist theory of history, championing Plato. In the 1980s and 1990s he sometimes aligned himself with right-wing movements although it is difficult to see how his own economic system was, as is claimed by leftists, to be fascist.

Defender of western civilization and the Enlightenment

Why do the anarchists and social democrats hate LaRouche? First because he was an unapologetic defender of Western civilization while much of the left became skeptical of these values. Secondly, LaRouche believed that the pattern of social evolution can be claimed to have been progress at a time when the anarchists were championing hunter and gathering societies. Thirdly, the LaRouche movement stood for The Enlightenment against the Romanticism of the New left. He was opposed to most everything the New Left stood for – identity politics, experimental sex, rock music, zero growth and Malthusian population control. With some qualifications, I agree with his criticisms.

Developing the productive forces and moving from necessity to freedom

What LaRouche and his followers are for in at least one aspect is Marxism. They want to develop the productive forces. They strive for a life which shrinks the relationship between freedom and necessity. This means less necessary work and more time for creative thinking and implementation on the productive technologies, including nuclear power. For them, in Marxist terms, the productive forces are industrial capital. The enemy of industrial capitalism is finance capital or slave capitalism which is based on the premise of people learning to do with less (austerity).

Defending the nation-state

Today Laroucheans align themselves the forces of the nation-state building against the forces of globalization, which is supranationalism on the one hand and subnational regionalism on the other. Liberal globalism subordinates nation-states to the free trade dogma of the Anglo-American empire. Any nation-state that elects a leader who wants to develop an autonomous national economic policy will automatically be labelled a tyrannical strong man, and “abuser of human rights”, the new hobby-horse defamatory claim.

Criticisms of LaRouche from a Marxist perspective

Historical struggle is presented as a dualistic process

When LaRouche talks about history, he refers to two forces, the British system and the American system. It seems that the British empire is painted as negative all the way down the line, including assassinations and horrible international machinations to control the world. It would be more dialectical if there were some productive activities the British did to show complexity. That doesn’t mean the British Empire is not guilty of atrocities. It’s also a matter of knowledge that all ruling classes are guilty of this, not just the British. On the other hand, those who support the American system are presented as having no faults. This kind of extreme dualism is one of the reasons I lost interest in LaRouche over the years.

There doesn’t seem to be room for unintended consequences in history

History is presented as if there are no untended consequences. I have not found instances where the clashes between of industrial and finance capital ever produces  any historical results which were not planned. History seems to be the result of the victory of either of these two forces. There is nothing left over or in between. There are no messes. I do not find any instances in which the clash of these two forces resulted in circumstances that were not planned by either. I don’t think either of the protagonists are so powerful that either’s victor simply imposed their will on history. Marx said  humans make history but not as they pleased.

Where is the working class?

LaRouche is very good at locating the class struggles within the ruling classes in both Britain and the United States. However, there have been well over two hundred years of working class struggles in the US between workers and capitalists in cities and farmers and bankers in rural areas. As a Marxist I believe the working class produces most of the wealth of society.  Not mentioning the working class leaves out the overwhelming majority of the population. LaRouche’s analysis would be much richer if the horizontal struggle between the major political actors at the top (American system and British system) were joined by a vertical depiction of the relationship between these elites and the working classes of each country.

How does the existence of almost 200 years of the socialist movement fit into the evolution of the American system?

By roughly the 1870s, socialism and its leaders were serious competitors against both the English supporters of the South and the industrial capitalists of the North. This movement involved thousands of people, yet there is no mention of them. There is no stance taken for or against Marx or Engels or any of their American followers. This is a glaring historical omission.

Is there a capitalist system?

It is very clear that LaRouche advocated for industrial capitalism which means the real economy over finance capitalism. But this contrast is not rooted in the history of capitalism. Marx described how capitalism evolved from barter to the first money forms to the famous emergence money being invested in commodities in order to make more money. LaRouche seems to be arguing for a reversal of the historical movement of capitalism from industrial to financial and then back to industrial. But how would that process be rooted in the already existing history of capitalism in social evolution?  A renaissance in the flowering of the real economy seems to be the result of volunteerism on the part of LaRouche and his followers. It is not grounded in the history of capitalism.

Is there a crisis in capitalism?

Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any theory of a capitalist crisis. On page 15 of Michael Roberts’ book The Long Depression, he identifies both Marxist and non-Marxist theories of crisis. On the Marxist side, there is everything from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to Rosa Luxemburg’s and David Harvey’s theory of underconsumption. When LaRouche wrote his book Dialectical Economics in the late 1970s he had a theory of capitalist crisis somewhat like Rosa Luxemburg’s theory. But my understanding is that when LaRouche left Marxism, he left his theory buried in that book.

Defense of Platonism and Christianity

According to George Johnson in Architects of Fear from Wikipedia:

According to George Johnson, LaRouche saw history as a battle between Platonists, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians, who rely on empirical data. Johnson characterizes LaRouche’s views as follows: the Platonists include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche believed that many of the world’s ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed, LaRouche argued, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new Dark Age in which the world will be ruled by oligarchs. what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook.

Lastly, LaRouche unapologetically accepts Platonic Christianity as an evolutionary advance from the polytheism and animism of pre-Christian times. He ignores the entire history of the misery Protestant and Catholic rulers have visited on their own populations with original sin, hatred of the body and fear of hell for starters. Neither does it seem to matter to LaRouche that both Protestants and Catholics persecuted thousands of pagans throughout history.

From LaRouche to the Rising Tide Foundation and the American System

Thanks to the Greanville Post I learned of the work of Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung and their Rising Tide Foundation. Influenced by LaRouche, they have excellent lectures, not only on geopolitics but also the arts and the history of science. Matthew Ehret has written a four-volume history of the United States and Cynthia Chung has written a great book called The Empire On Which the Black Sun Never Set. I’d like to share with you some highlights from Volume I of his book.

Clash of the two America’s – the Unfinished Symphony

History of industrial capitalism vs slave and finance capital in the United States

In Volume I of the Unfinished Symphony, Matthew Ehret divides the ruling factions in the United States into two groups: those who supported the British Empire and those who sided with the American system. Contrary to what most of us think, the British Empire was never really kicked out of the United States after the Revolutionary War. The US South continued to be involved with the British slave trade and many resisted fighting in the Revolutionary War.

The British Empire was dead-set against the United States becoming an industrial competitor to Great Britain. They wanted to maintain the US as a dependent country producing commercial agriculture (mostly cotton) for their textile mills. In their efforts to keep the United States under their thumb, the British were against the US establishing tariffs and protecting their industry to build canals and railroads. The British supported “free trade” and opposed Hamilton’s call for a national bank which invested in infrastructure projects. The British also supported the decentralization of banks. Doing the bidding of the British (whether consciously or not) Andrew Jackson cut out infrastructural projects and supported the spread of multiple species of currency which undermined longstanding economic projects.

The leading Americans who stood up for industrialization were Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln. The forces of slave capital and finance capital supported the development of Wall Street, the City of London and later, the Bank of Manhattan. The British supported the South’s plea for states’ rights since that weakened the federal governments’ quest to centralize power which was necessary to build a strong nation-state.

As might be expected, the major theoretician of the British system of laissez-faire (let the markets rule) capitalism was Adam Smith. The economists of the American system were Franz List and Harry C. Carey. Believe it or not, there were some Americans who did not look East to Europe for a political vision. Rather, they looked to Russia and China as civilizations worth emulating. They included Charles Sumner, William Seward, William Gilpin and Asa Whitney. They toyed with building a trans-Siberian railroad. Seward purchased Alaska in the hopes of linking it to Russia via a railroad while William Gilpin wanted to build a world land bridge uniting the whole world. He was influenced by the great Alexander von Humboldt. The British deep state forces were embedded in the US Canadian United Empire Loyalists; Eastern establishment families and in Virginian slave-owning aristocrats, including Albert Pike who later was involved with the Ku Klux Klan.

In the case of Russia, the friendly outreach of Gilpin was rewarded. Most people do not know that during the Civil War, Czarist Russia came to the aid of forces of the Union when the British attempted to invade during the Civil War. The Russian Navy blocked the British land invasion on both the East and the West coasts of the United States.

Table B summarizes the relation of the American system against the British empire.

                             Table B American System vs the British Empire

Why are we discussing Rising Tide Foundation? Because it provides a necessary correction to the leftist trashing of all the Founding Fathers and shows there was a very progressive side to some of them. It also describes an American system which is consistent with the multipolar vision of China, Russia and the countries with BRICS.

Conclusion

I began this article using a contrast between the declining Anglo-American empire of the West and the rising Multipolar world of the East. Secondly, I identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone instrumental in developing an economic policy for Russia and India. Yet LaRouche also championed Western values of the Enlightenment, the importance of developing the productive forces of society and defending the nation-state against globalization. LaRouche argued that his ideas about developing the productive forces in Russia and India were also alive and kicking in the United States in what he called “the American system”. I then offered six reservations to his orientation from a Marxist perspective.

Finally, I brought in the work of the Rising Tide foundation and of Matthew Ehret in a book called The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I: The Unfinished Sympathy. I presented how Matthew’s work demonstrated that there was a progressive tendency among the Founding Fathers and how the American system in the United States is connected to  a multipolar world in the East.

But where do LaRouche and Rising Tide stand on the linear political spectrum? Leftists have called LaRouche a fascist. I commented briefly that this was a ridiculous characterization. Yet who are the allies of the so-called American system, and where are they on the political spectrum? Finally, what is the relationship between LaRouche and the New Left on the political spectrum? We will learn their values are diametrically opposed because the New Left itself was shaped by the arch enemies of LaRouche and Rising Tide – finance capitalists, the Rockefellers and the CIA. We will see in Part II that the linear political spectrum itself is the problem.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Since Kennedy wrote those words, we have seen the end of the Cold War, the peaceful emergence of China as a leading world power, and the rise of a formidable Global South. But the United States has indeed failed to “adjust sensibly to the newer world order,” using military force and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter in a failed quest for longer lasting global hegemony.

Kennedy observed that military power follows economic power. Rising economic powers develop military power to consolidate and protect their expanding economic interests. But once a great power’s economic prowess is waning, the use of military force to try to prolong its day in the sun leads only to unwinnable conflicts, as European colonial powers quickly learned after the Second World War, and as Americans are learning today.

While U.S. leaders have been losing wars and trying to cling to international power, a new multipolar world has been emerging. Despite the recent tragedy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the agony of yet another endless war, the tectonic plates of history are shifting into new alignments that offer hope for the future of humanity. Here are several developments worth watching:

De-dollarizing global trade

For decades, the U.S. dollar was the undisputed king of global currencies. But China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and other nations are taking steps to conduct more trade in their own currencies, or in Chinese yuan.

Illegal, unilateral U.S. sanctions against dozens of countries around the world have raised fears that holding large dollar reserves leaves countries vulnerable to U.S. financial coercion. Many countries have already been gradually diversifying their foreign currency reserves, from 70% globally held in dollars in 1999 to 65% in 2016 to only 58% by 2022.

Since no other country has the benefit of the “ecosystem” that has developed around the dollar over the past century, diversification is a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has helped speed the transition. On April 17, 2023, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that U.S. sanctions against Russia risk undermining the role of the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency.

And in a Fox News interview, right-wing Republican Senator Marco Rubio lamented that, within five years, the United States may no longer be able to use the dollar to bully other countries because “there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

BRICS’s GDP leapfrogs G7s

When calculated based on Purchasing Power Parity, the GDP of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is now higher than that of the G7 (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan). The BRICS countries, which account for over 40% of total world population, generate 31.5% of the world’s economic output, compared with 30.7% for the G7, and BRICS’s growing share of global output is expected to further outpace the G7’s in coming years.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested some of its huge foreign exchange surplus in a new transport infrastructure across Eurasia to more quickly import raw materials and export manufactured goods, and to build growing trade relations with many countries.

Now the growth of the Global South will be boosted by the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank, under its new president Dilma Rousseff, the former president of Brazil. 

Rousseff helped to set up the BRICS Bank in 2015 as an alternative source of development funding, after the Western-led World Bank and IMF had trapped poor countries in recurring debt, austerity and privatization programs for decades. By contrast, the NDB is focused on eliminating poverty and building infrastructure to support “a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable future for the planet.” The NDB is well-capitalized, with $100 billion to fund its projects, more than the World Bank’s current $82 billion portfolio.

Movement towards “strategic autonomy” for Europe

On the surface, the Ukraine war has brought the United States and Europe geostrategically closer together than ever, but this may not be the case for long. After French President Macron’s recent visit to China, he told reporters on his plane that Europe should not let the United States drag it into war with China, that Europe is not a “vassal” of the United States, and that it must assert its “strategic autonomy” on the world stage. Cries of horror greeted Macron from both sides of the Atlantic when the interview was published. 

But European Council President Charles Michel, the former prime minister of Belgium, quickly came to Macron’s side, insisting that the European Union cannot “blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States.” Michel confirmed in an interview that Macron’s views reflect a growing point of view among EU leaders, and that “quite a few really think like Emmanuel Macron.” 

The rise of progressive governments in Latin America

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, which has served as a cover for U.S. domination of Latin America and the Caribbean. But nowadays, countries of the region are refusing to march in lockstep with U.S. demands. The entire region rejects the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and Biden’s exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from his 2022 Summit of the Americas persuaded many other leaders to stay away or only send junior officials, and largely doomed the gathering. 

With the spectacular victories and popularity of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Ignacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, progressive governments now have tremendous clout. They are strengthening the regional body CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) as an alternative to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States. 

To reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, South America’s two largest economies, Argentina and Brazil, have announced plans to create a common currency that could later be adopted by other members of Mercosur — South America’s major trade bloc. While U.S. influence is waning, China’s is mushrooming, with trade increasing from $18 billion in 2002 to nearly $449 billion in 2021. China is now the top trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and Brazil has raised the possibility of a free-trade deal between China and Mercosur.

Peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia 

One of the false premises of U.S. foreign policy is that regional rivalries in areas like the Middle East are set in stone, and the United States must therefore form alliances with so-called “moderate” (pro-Western) forces against more “radical” (independent) ones. This has served as a pretext for America to jump into bed with dictators like the Shah of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and a succession of military governments in Egypt.

Now China, with help from Iraq, has achieved what the United States never even tried. Instead of driving Iran and Saudi Arabia to poison the whole region with wars fueled by bigotry and ethnic hatred, as the United States did, China and Iraq brought them together to restore diplomatic relations in the interest of peace and prosperity. 

Healing this divide has raised hopes for lasting peace in several countries where the two rivals have been involved, including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and as far away as West Africa. It also puts China on the map as a mediator on the world stage, with Chinese officials now offering to mediate between Ukraine and Russia, as well as between Israel and Palestine.

Saudi Arabia and Syria have restored diplomatic relations, and the Saudi and Syrian foreign ministers have visited each others’ capitals for the first time since Saudi Arabia and its Western allies backed al-Qaeda-linked groups to try to overthrow President Assad in 2011. 

At a meeting in Jordan on May 1, the foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia agreed to help Syria restore its territorial integrity, and that Turkish and U.S. occupying forces must leave. Syria may also be invited to an Arab League summit on May 19th, for the first time since 2011.

Chinese diplomacy to restore relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is credited with opening the door to these other diplomatic moves in the Middle East and the Arab world. Saudi Arabia helped evacuate Iranians from Sudan and, despite their past support for the military rulers who are destroying Sudan, the Saudis are helping to mediate peace talks, along with the UN, the Arab League, the African Union and other countries. 

Multipolar diplomatic alternatives to U.S. war-making

The proposal by President Lula of Brazil for a “peace club” of nations to help negotiate peace in Ukraine is an example of the new diplomacy emerging in the multipolar world. There is clearly a geostrategic element to these moves, to show the world that other nations can actually bring peace and prosperity to countries and regions where the United States has brought only war, chaos and instability.

While the United States rattles its saber around Taiwan and portrays China as a threat to the world, China and its friends are trying to show that they can provide a different kind of leadership. As a Global South country that has lifted its own people out of poverty, China offers its experience and partnership to help others do the same, a very different approach from the paternalistic and coercive neocolonial model of U.S. and Western power that has kept so many countries trapped in poverty and debt for decades.

This is the fruition of the multipolar world that China and others have been calling for. China is responding astutely to what the world needs most, which is peace, and demonstrating practically how it can help. This will surely win China many friends, and make it more difficult for U.S. politicians to sell their view of China as a threat.

Now that the “newer world order” that Paul Kennedy referred to is taking shape, economist Jeffrey Sachs has grave misgivings about the U.S. ability to adjust. As he recently warned, “Unless U.S. foreign policy is changed to recognize the need for a multipolar world, it will lead to more wars, and possibly to World War III.” With countries across the globe building new networks of trade, development and diplomacy, independent of Washington and Wall Street, the United States may well have no choice but to finally “adjust sensibly” to the new order.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

This period that we live in is arguably shaped by three elements: two moribund (the implosion of the USSR and the centrality of US imperialism) and one vital (the promise of multipolarity). The camp associated with the US is consolidating at the same time that a countervailing multipolar tendency is emerging. Major changes are reshaping the world order, I contend, but the outcome is not yet clear.

While factors such as the status of US dollar dominance are important, the deeper issue is the condition of the popular classes and the strength of their institutions, which need to be the measure for determining which way the geopolitical winds are blowing.

Moribund symptoms of the interregnum

The first symptom is the implosion of the Soviet Union and with it the dissolution of the socialist bloc. Although occurring over 30 years ago, the long-term consequences may not be sufficiently appreciated in current leftist analyses. Contributing to this oversight is an underlying anti-communist bias which, contrary to all historical evidence, associates capitalism with democracy and self-actualization.

China has emerged as a world power and even as a possible contender to US hegemony. But China has also become thoroughly integrated into the international capitalist market. In the absence of a socialist bloc, countries striving for socialist development – e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Belarus, People’s Republic of Korea, Eritrea, Laos, etc. – must also struggle in this market. There they are vulnerable to economic warfare designed to overthrow their political leadership.

Chinese initiatives such as the Belt and Road offer trade and a vital life support to countries like Cuba. But the Chinese initiatives do not rise to the level of the socialist solidarity of the former USSR, which enabled countries like resource-poor Cuba in that former time to achieve first world standards in, for example, health care and education.

The second symptom is the US as the sole imperialist superpower. No other nation comes close to its military, economic, political, and even cultural domination. Understanding the centrality of US imperialism, I contend, is essential to comprehending the interregnum.

Yes, we live in what Lenin called the age of imperialism and all powers have some elements of imperialism. But the contemporary political terrain is not primarily characterized as one of multiple rival imperialisms comparable to the run-up to World War I. Then, Lenin argued, the workers of the world had no stake in which imperial power prevailed.

Today, for instance, the working class has a stake if the proxy war in Ukraine leads to the dissolution of Russia. Surely the west would make the Russian working class pay for the sins of its “oligarchs.” As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented, “everything that is happening in and around Ukraine is part of the unfolding fight for the future international order.”

Promise of a multipolar world

The third symptom of the interregnum is the promise – but not yet the reality – of a multipolar world. This hopeful trend portends new openings in an evolving historical dynamic.

A majority of the world’s population has remained neutral in the Ukraine conflict, despite strong US/western pressure. A host of non-western-aligned economies are making tentative steps to transacting commerce in currencies other than dollars, pounds, yens, or euros. A so-called Pink Tide in Latin America has replaced a number of conservative regimes. China is emerging not only as an economic power, but diplomatically has helped broker closer relations between traditional adversaries Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as floated a peace proposal for Ukraine.

All these favorable developments foreshadow a change in the geopolitical climate. The vision of a multipolar world informs the progressive impulse for a better world.

Such a world is possible only if the centrality of US imperialism is replaced by a new order. Such a reordering is a necessary pre-condition for a better world. Currently a realignment is being led by major counter-hegemonic powers such as China and Russia and more regional powers such as Brazil and Iran (and before its dismembering by Libya in Africa).

Multipolarity is not the ultimate goal, but it is an intermediary step in the struggle against imperialism. More than just a reshuffling of the deck of world power relationships is needed.

War with China

Overarching the interregnum is the specter of US preparations for a war with China, perhaps as soon as the turn of this decade. The quasi-governmental RAND Corporation prepared the strategic planning document, “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable,” commissioned by the US Army. Released in 2016, such a confrontation does not appear so unthinkable today.

Even some mainstream sources recognize that the Ukraine conflict is but a prelude to war with China.

The US juggernaut is lurching to war. Once pivoted to Asia, it does not appear to be equipped with a steering wheel, let alone brakes. Opposition to such a confrontation is virtually absent at the elite level. Both parties of capital compete with each other over which can be more Sinophobic. The Democrats, in particular, used to have dissenting voices, but now have embraced neo-conservatism. They exhibit an imperialist unity that is the envy of the Tea Party Republicans.

Meanwhile, a mass peace movement is AWOL. Oddly, the libertarian right is sounding more like peaceniks than some putative liberals who are shrieking “Slava Ukraini.”

War with China is not inevitable; China could be blackmailed into accommodation. The US, meanwhile, is crazy enough to precipitate a nuclear apocalypse. Remember that just two days after Hiroshima came the capricious genocide of Nagasaki.

Changes in US imperialism

While the core nature of US imperialism endures, the tactics appear to be altering in the following three instances.

First is the termination of the Pax Americana project. At one time the US exercised its hegemonic role to impose stability and order, such as working to install absolute monarchies in the Arabian peninsula. No longer is the “rules based order” orderly.

Today the hegemon is forever stirring up the pot, promoting chaos. Witness the plight of Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya. Washington has been promoting jihadism in the Muslim world.  As Brookings reported, the US “enabled Al Qaeda.”

The country in the Western Hemisphere which has most “benefited” from US beneficence is Haiti. After two US-led coups and a disastrous US-led military occupation, there isn’t even a functioning government that could be Washington’s puppet.

International nuclear peace agreements are being systematically dismantled as the US leads a deranged race to “modernize” nuclear arsenals. AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines are being deployed in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile Biden bellicosely proclaims, “America is back,” making one nostalgic for Reagan.

The relatively recent (2006-2008) military penetration of Africa by the US AFRICOM unified combat command, with military relations in 53 of the 54 countries on the continent, has already contributed to major instabilities, especially in the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region.

Second, the US has imposed sanctions on over 40 countries, some one-third of humanity. These unilateral coercive measures are in effect a self-imposed boycott and are illegal under international law. Gone is the gunboat diplomacy to open countries to so-called “free trade.” Instead, the battleships are being deployed to close markets and prevent trade such as the US’s pirating Iranian fuelers enroute to Venezuela.

And third, US dollar (USD) dominance is under siege with the country that prints the banknotes complicitous in the attack. It is Washington that expelled Russia from the dollar-dominated SWIFT network, forcing Moscow to explore alternatives.

The way that international finance operates in times of uncertainty is for investment to gravitate to the world’s reserve currency, which is currently the USD. Although dollar dominance does not currently have a contender, the USD share of global central bank reserves has eroded from roughly 70% to under 60% in the last two decades.

Ever since Nixon took the USD off of the gold standard in 1971, and even before, the Chicken Littles have been declaring the demise of the mighty greenback. Yet the dollar still is involved in 90% of all foreign exchange transactions and nearly two-thirds of the issuance of securities. Even a third of the trade of the two countries most in the crosshairs of US imperialism – China and Russia – is denominated in currencies other than their own. Currently only 2% of world trade is denominated in Chinese renminbi.

The would-be BRICS alliance

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are a loose amalgam but far from a unified alliance.

Lula de Silva, the newly elected president of Brazil, issued a joint statement with US President Biden condemning the invasion of Ukraine by BRICS partner Russia and voted with the US on most UN General Assembly resolutions on the conflict. Brazil also participated as an observer in recent 30-nation US-Thailand war games.

However, Brazil continues to resist western pressure to directly supply Ukraine with arms. Weapons sales account for 5% of the Brazilian economy with the US being the largest customer. And 72% of the UN Security Council (by population) backed Russia’s call for a UN investigation of the Nord Stream bombing, with Brazil voting for the resolution along the Russia and China.

Although BRICS partner India has ignored US/western demands to boycott fuel from its BRICS partner Russia, India has nonetheless joined the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad. This US-led anti-China military alliance, known as the “Asian NATO,” is hardly a harbinger of declining US influence in the Global South.

Consolidation of NATO

NATO is much more than an alliance. It is an imperial army under US command, whose constituents have relinquished sovereignty for integration.

Just a few years ago French President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO “braindead,” while key ally Germany was moving in the direction of reducing its investment in NATO. That refreshing breeze has reversed direction and has assumed gale force proportions.

Rather than languishing, NATO has in fact consolidated. Now its partners have upped their military expenditures, sacrificing domestic development, as they increase their purchase of military equipment from the US. Particularly ominous is the inclusion of traditionally neutral Sweden and Finland on or near the borders of Russia.

Meanwhile, Japan is emerging as the third largest military after China. The former Axis power is an immediate neighbor of China and part of the US strategy to militarily encircle China.

The larger Atlanticist project

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the empire’s Praetorian guard, is the military component of a larger project of US world domination in concert with its western European subalterns and Japan. While the outcome of the Ukraine conflict is to-be-determined, its immediate effect has been the successful economic severing by the US of western Europe from the rest of Eurasia.

Berlin could have moved toward closer economic cooperation with Moscow, which would have vastly benefited both economies. Instead, the opposite has been accomplished by US intervention with Germany cutting itself off from Russia in favor of buying far more costly fuels from across the Atlantic Ocean.

Based on the cui bono test (who benefits) and Seymour Hersh’s report, the US can be credited with bombing the Nord Stream pipelines and has done so with impunity. This does not suggest a hegemon in terminal decline.

Notably, however, countervailing movements toward unity among the excluded majority of humanity in the Global South are also occurring. Witness revitalized regional alliances such as CELAC, the BRICS’s New Development Bank as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Group of 77, the Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, etc. Likewise, greater military cooperation is being implemented by China, Russia, Iran, and some others. These counter-hegemonic efforts hold great promise, but to date have nowhere nearly achieved the levels of integration as the US-led initiatives.

How do we know when a new world order has emerged?

It is important not to confuse aspirations with reality. It is still too early to celebrate the achievement of a multipolar world, though the signs are auspicious.

For sure, the international geopolitical scene has become more volatile, unstable, and disorderly. But that is not the same as advances for the popular classes, which should be our metric. For example, the US defeat in Afghanistan was not the same as a people’s victory.

A further admonition is in order. Due to the failure of neoliberalism – the current form of capitalism – a populist right has emerged in reaction. The new far-right prime minister of Italy has expressed sentiments favorable to Mussolini. Modi in India represents a reactionary fundamentalist Hindi current. Bukele in El Salvador, after trampling civil liberties in a crackdown on gangs, enjoys astronomical 90% approval ratings.

The ever more manifest bankruptcy of the liberal/social democratic model does not guarantee a progressive outcome.

Finally, for those of us who still consider themselves to be socialist, we should not abandon the goal of socialist revolution. Yet there has been no major socialist revolution in the last half century, and no new socialist revolutions are on the horizon. A further sobering reality is that all existing polities, which have been striving for socialism, are struggling for survival, retrenching, and being forced to adopt neoliberal remedies.

The possible exception is China, although it has been experiencing a slowing of economic growth and a slight deterioration of working-class living standards. Nor has China been immune from adopting neoliberal measures. Yet, overall, China holds great promise as the center of a counter-hegemonic tendency.

And even more significant are the internal contradictions of a decadent capitalism, which have not fully matured but which foretell a changing world order. But before the left can write the obit on capitalism, recall the system’s ability to paper over contradictions with military Keynesianism, quantitative easing, and most recently with the post-COVID rebound.

We will know that a new multipolar order has emerged when the material conditions of the people of Haiti, Afghanistan, Syria, Cuba, etc. begin to improve rather than continuing on the current trajectory of ever increasing immiseration. Likewise, institutions of working class power, such as unions and leftist parties, will be ascendant in leading the transformation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

Photograph Source: Sintegrity – CC BY-SA 4.0

Who would have expected that the BRICS nations could rise as the potential rival of the G7 countries, the World Bank and the IMF combined? But that once seemingly distant possibility now has real prospects which could change the political equilibrium of world politics.

BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It was supposedly coined by the Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs in 2001, as a reference to the world’s emerging economies. It was then known as BRIC, with the ‘S’ added later, when South Africa formally joined the group in 2010.

BRIC’s first official summit took place in 2009. Then, the discussion seemed largely abstract. However, not until 2014 did BRICS begin taking serious steps towards greater integration, when the nascent alliance, now including South Africa, launched the New Development Bank with seed money of $50 billion. This decision meant that the group was now ready to take its first practical steps in challenging the dominance of the West over international monetary institutions, namely the World Bank and the IMF.

The geopolitical global conflict, thus shifts, resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war, however, proved to be the driving force behind the massive expansion underway at BRICS, especially as financially powerful countries began showing interest in the initiative. They include Argentina, UAE, Mexico, Algeria and, particularly, Saudi Arabia.

Recent financial reports suggest that BRICS is already the world’s largest gross domestic product (GDP) bloc in the world, as it currently contributes 31.5% to the global GDP, ahead of the G7, which contributes 30.7%.

One of the greatest opportunities, and challenges, facing BRICS now is its ability to expand its membership base while maintaining its current growth. The issue of helping new members maintain economic and political independence is particularly vital.

The IMF and World Bank are notorious for stipulating their monetary support of countries, especially in the Global South, on political conditions. This position is often justified under the guise of human rights and democracy, though is entirely related to privatization and opening markets for foreign investors – read western corporations.

As BRICS strengthens, it will have the potential to help poorer countries without pushing a self-serving political agenda, or indirectly manipulating and controlling local economies.

As inflation is hitting many western countries, resulting in slower economic growth and causing social unrest, nations in the Global South are using this as an opportunity to develop their own economic alternative. This means that groups like BRICS will cease being exclusively economic institutions. The struggle is now very political.

For decades, the US’s greatest weapon has been its dollar which, with time, ceased being a normal currency per se, to become an actual commodity. Wars have been fought to ensure countries, like Iraq and Libya, remain committed to the dollar. Following the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Baghdad returned to selling its oil in US dollars. This struggle over the dominance of the dollar was also painfully felt in Venezuela which has the world’s largest oil reserve, yet was reduced to abject poverty for attempting to challenge the supremacy of Washington its currency.

Though it will take time, the process of lessening the reliance on US dollars is now in full swing.

On March 30, Brazil and China announced a trade agreement that would allow them to use the two countries’ national currencies, the yuan and the reais, respectively. This step shall prove consequential, for it will encourage other South American countries to follow suit. But that move was neither the first, nor will it be the last of its kind.

One of the main decisions by finance ministers and central bank governors of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) following their March 30-31 meeting in Indonesia is to reduce their reliance on the US dollar. They agree to “reinforce financial resilience … through the use of local currency to support cross-border trade and investment in the ASEAN region.” This too is a game-changer.

The BRICS countries, in particular, are leading the charge and are set to serve as the facilitator of rearranging the world’s economic and financial map.

While the West is busy trying to keep its own economies afloat, it remains wary of the changes underway in the Global South. Washington and other western capitals are worried. They ought to be.

Following a meeting between US President Joe Biden and 40 African leaders at the White House last December, it was clear that African countries were not interested in taking sides in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Consequently, US Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Africa on March 26 to meet African leaders, with the sole purpose of pushing them away from China and Russia. That effort is likely to fail.

A perfect illustration of Africa’s refusal to abandon its neutrality is the press conference between Harris and President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, on March 28. “There may be an obsession in America about Chinese activity on the continent, but there is no such obsession here,” Akufo-Addo told reporters.

To argue that BRICS is a purely economic group is to ignore a large part of the story. The timing of BRICS’ expansion, the stern political discourse of its members, potential members and allies, the repeated visits by top Russian and Chinese diplomats to Africa and other regions in the Global South, etc., indicate that BRICS has become the South’s new platform for geopolitics, economy and diplomacy.

The more successful BRICS will become, the weaker western hegemony over the South will grow. Though some western politicians and media insist on downplaying BRICS’ role in shaping the new world order, the change seems to be real and irreversible.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

Despite desperate attempts by the Western media that bothered to report on the conference, the relationship between Russia and China remains very strong, and is, in fact, strengthening by the day. The Americans issued the expected threats that China was risking its position by its continued relationship with Russia, but those threats were ignored by the Chinese who refuse to be intimidated by United States’ threats.

The American position is not assisted by its frankly two-faced approach to Taiwan. On the one hand it professes to follow the one China policy which acknowledges that Taiwan is a legitimate part of China, but on the other hand by its words and actions treats Taiwan as a separate country. The Chinese do not bother to hide their frustration at this two-faced approach. By their every action, including sending fighter jets into Taiwan’s airspace, the Chinese are making it increasingly clear that their patience with double standards pursued by the Americans is wearing very thin.

The United States, and its Australian ally, continue its provocative policy of sending their warships into the South China Sea. The ostensible reason for this is to preserve freedom of navigation although neither country can point to a single instance of civilian ships being impeded in any way at any time. The actions are clearly provocative.  Why Australia allows itself to be used in this way remains a mystery. China takes 40% of Australia’s exports and has been its largest trading partner for a number of decades. Its vital interests lie in maintaining a good relationship with China. The frankly provocative actions of successive Australian governments are not conducive to maintaining that relationship. The Chinese provided a clue as to their attitude when they froze the import of several Australian products worth billions of dollars. The new Labor government seems slow to grasp the message that has clearly been sent.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting also sent a number of other clear messages to the world. These included the warm reception given to the Saudi and Turkish delegations. The Turkish case is particularly interesting. Turkey has been a dialogue partner of the SCO for a number of years, but last Saturday the Turkish President Recep Erdogan announced that Turkey was planning to apply for full membership of the SCO in the immediate future.

Membership of the SCO, while clearly of benefit to Turkey, is hardly compatible with its membership of NATO for whom the existence of the SCO represents a challenge. Quite how the Turks plan to maintain their membership of both organisations remains a mystery. Although the SCO has no military component, it is difficult to see how the Turks can maintain membership of both organisations. This is especially true given the hostility shown by NATO to Russia in particular and barely concealed dislike of China and all its activities.

It is not just the SCO which poses a fundamental challenge to the West’s continuing position in the world. A far greater threat to the West’s role in the world is posed by the similarly Chinese inspired Belt and Road Initiative. This organisation now has more than 140 members with representation throughout the world including South America which the Americans have traditionally seen as an integral part of their sphere of influence. Indeed, the Americans have in the past not hesitated to interfere in internal South American politics in the interests of maintaining their hegemony in the region. China’s role in South America poses a fundamental threat to the United States view of “their” region.

The United States monopoly was decisively broken by Brazil’s membership of the BRICS group of nations. Very recently both Iran and Argentina filed official applications to become members of BRICS and Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt have also begun the process of joining. Those latter three countries have a combined population of around 220 million people. The Saudis were the world’s largest exporters of crude oil in 2020 and hold around 15% of the world’s oil reserves. Turkey, among other claims, is also the world’s seventh largest exporter of cotton, a critical material in a range of products.

The five original members of BRICS have a combined population of over 3 billion people, which is just over 40% of the world’s population. They account for more than one quarter of the worlds GDP. A neat counterpoint to the BRICS was provided by Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova when she stated, last June, that “while the White House was thinking about what else to turn off in the world, ban or spoil, Argentina and Iran applied to join the BRICS.”

The Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi confirmed his country’s support for Argentina membership of BRICS, and his ministry stated that Argentina’s entry would “strengthen and broaden its voice in defence of the interests of the developing world.”

What we are witnessing is a major reorientation of the world in which the BRICS, SCO and BRI represent the vanguard of change. The old western countries have lost their previous pre-eminent role to this trio of groupings that represent a new way of doing things. The United States does not like the changes that are occurring and will fight tooth and nail to try and preserve its traditional position.

The bulk of the world’s nations have had enough of this old system in which they were ruthlessly exploited. A new world order has emerged and. frankly, is to be welcomed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by James O'Neill.

The post The Rise of BRICS: The Economic Giant that is Taking on the West appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

As was the case since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, the West attempted to display unity, though it has become repeatedly obvious that no such unity exists. While France, Germany and Italy are paying a heavy price for the energy crisis resulting from the war, Britain’s Boris Johnson is adding fuel to the fire in the hope of making his country relevant on the global stage following the humiliation of Brexit. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is exploiting the war to restore Washington’s credibility and leadership over NATO – especially following the disastrous term of Donald Trump, which nearly broke up the historic alliance.

Even the fact that several African countries are becoming vulnerable to famines  – as a result of the disruption of food supplies originating from the Black Sea and the subsequent rising prices – did not seem to perturb the leaders of some of the richest countries in the world. They still insist on not interfering in the global food market, though the skyrocketing prices have already pushed tens of millions of people below the poverty line.

Though the West had little reserve of credibility to begin with, Western leaders’ current obsession with maintaining thousands of sanctions on Russia, further NATO expansion, dumping yet more ‘lethal weapons’ in Ukraine and sustaining their global hegemony at any cost, have all pushed their credibility standing to a new low.

From the start of the Ukraine war, the West championed the same ‘moral’ dilemma as that raised by George W. Bush at the start of his so-called ‘war on terror’. “You are either with us or with the terrorist,” he declared in October 2009. But the ongoing Russia-NATO conflict cannot be reduced to simple and self-serving cliches. One can, indeed, want an end to the war, and still oppose US-western unilateralism. The reason that American diktats worked in the past, however, is that, unlike the current geopolitical atmosphere, a few dared oppose Washington’s policies.

Times have changed. Russia, China, India, along with many other countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America are navigating all available spaces to counter the suffocating western dominance. These countries have made it clear that they will not take part in isolating Russia in the service of NATO’s expansionist agenda. To the contrary, they have taken many steps to develop alternatives to the west-dominated global economy, and particularly to the US dollar which, for five decades, has served the role of a commodity, not a currency, per se. The latter has been Washington’s most effective weapon, associated with many US-orchestrated crises, sanctions and, as in the case of Iraq and Venezuela, among others, mass hunger.

China and others understand that the current conflict is not about Ukraine vs Russia, but about something far more consequential. If Washington and Europe emerge victorious, and if Moscow is pushed back behind the proverbial ‘iron curtain’, Beijing would have no other options but to make painful concessions to the re-emerging west. This, in turn, would place a cap on China’s global economic growth, and would weaken its case regarding the One China policy.

China is not wrong. Almost immediately following NATO’s limitless military support of Ukraine and the subsequent economic war on Russia, Washington and its allies began threatening China over Taiwan. Many provocative statements, along with military maneuvers and high-level visits by US politicians to Taipei, were meant to underscore US dominance in the Pacific.

Two main reasons drove the West to further invest in the current confrontational approach against China, at a time where, arguably, it would have been more beneficial to exercise a degree of diplomacy and compromise. First, the West’s fear that Beijing could misinterpret its action as weakness and a form of appeasement; and, second, because the West’s historic relationship with China has always been predicated on intimidation, if not outright humiliation. From the Portuguese occupation of Macau in the 16th century, to the British Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, to Trump’s trade war on China, the West has always viewed China as a subject, not a partner.

This is precisely why Beijing did not join the chorus of western condemnations of Russia. Though the actual war in Ukraine is of no direct benefit to China, the geopolitical outcomes of the war could be critical to the future of China as a global power.

While NATO remains insistent on expansion so as to illustrate its durability and unity, it is the alternative world order led by Russia and China that is worthy of serious attention. According to the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Beijing and Moscow are working to further develop the BRICS club of major emerging economies to serve as a counterweight to the G7. The German paper is correct. BRICS’ latest summit on June 23 was designed as a message to the G7 that the West is no longer in the driving seat, and that Russia, China and the Global South are preparing for a long fight against Western dominance.

In his speech at the BRICS summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed the creation of an “international reserve currency based on the basket of currencies of our countries”. The fact that the ruble alone has managed to survive, in fact flourish, under recent Western sanctions, gives hope that BRICS currencies combined can manage to eventually sideline the US dollar as the world dominant currency.

Reportedly, it was Chinese President Xi Jinping who requested that the date of the BRICS summit be changed from July 4 to June 23, so that it would not appear to be a response to the G7 summit in Germany. This further underscores how the BRICS are beginning to see themselves as a direct competitor to the G7. The fact that Argentina and Iran are applying for BRICS membership also illustrates that the economic alliance is morphing into a political, in fact geopolitical, entity.

The global fight ahead is perhaps the most consequential since World War II. While NATO will continue to fight for relevance, Russia, China, and others will invest in various economic, political and even military infrastructures, in the hope of creating a permanent and sustainable counterbalance to Western dominance. The outcome of this conflict is likely to shape the future of humanity.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

Under normal circumstances inflation occurs when too many monetary units (US-dollars, Euros, Chinese Yuan) chase too few goods. But we are not living in normal times. To the contrary. We are living in an increasingly divided world, not only in political terms – West vs. East / Global North vs. Global South – but also in monetary terms.

The gradual but ever faster faltering of the US-dollar hegemony, followed by related so-called hard currencies, like the Euro, the British Pound, the Japanese Yen, as well as the Australian and Canadian dollars – is giving eastern currencies, especially the Chinese Yuan and to some extent also the Russian Ruble a thrive towards stability.

Why is that? For a number of reasons. First, the Chinese Yuan and the Russian Ruble, as well as many other eastern currencies, are backed by their economies and in both cases also by gold. For that reason alone, they have an inherent stability that western fiat currencies – which are based on nothing – do not have.

A new and coming eastern currency stability mechanism may soon be a basket of some twenty commodities that are widely and universally used, in addition to the strength of the local economy.

This idea is not new, but has recently been reintroduced by Russia’s Sergei Glazyev.  As of 2021, he is the Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union. Sergei Glazyev is also President Putin’s economic advisor.

It is a clear distinction from western fiat currencies which are based on no solid substance, other than debt creation. In other words, western dollar-based currencies, beginning with the US-dollar itself, are unsustainable pyramid schemes which sooner or later are bound to implode, or at best, gradually collapse.

What we are witnessing today is a steady decay of western currencies which are currently been artificially propped up by manipulation of interest rates, as well as artificially caused inflation, based on artificially created shortages of food, energy and other commodities. The pretext used for such shortages – totally false indeed – is the Russian-Ukraine war.

Such shortages, especially food shortages and resulting mass famine, had been planned for over ten years and were already reflected in the 2010 Rockefeller Report. They are being carried out now.

In today’s (western) world, inflation and monetary (in)stability are manufactured or manipulated. They are being used like “cold war” weapons by the west internally, initiated by the US, to play western currencies against each other and to assure dollar hegemony will continue. To the extent possible and especially through the east-west trade-related interdependency, mostly through the powerhouse China, the west is hoping to also destabilize the economies of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) members, especially China.

China’s western currency reserves amounted in May 2022 to some US$ 3.12 trillion equivalent, at least two thirds of which are in US-dollar denominated assets. Given the Chinese, US, as well as western economies’ trading interrelation, dedollarization remains a challenge for China.

The Federal Reserve – FED

Despite forecasters’ expectations of a half-a basic point increase, under the pretext of fighting inflation, the FED announced on June 15 the largest interest rate hike in 28 years, namely an increase of three-quarters of a percentage point — the biggest hike since 1994. That follows a quarter-point increase in March and a half-point jump in May. On July 5, 2022, the FED’s base rate was between 1.5% and 1.75%.

This, the FED said, was a move towards regaining control over soaring consumer prices.

However, consumer prices were up 8.6% from a year ago. In other words, the FED pretends to fight an 8.6% annual inflation with an interest rate hike of less than 2%. This is unrealistic.

The real reason for these sudden interest rate increases is to be sought elsewhere. Namely, the gradual but steady loss of the US-dollar’s value in the global monetary market. This has to do with a number of factors, among them the steadily faltering trust in the US economy, but predominantly with Washington’s dollar-based worldwide “sanctioning” of countries that do not conform to US policies, but instead want to preserve their political and economic sovereignty.

Increasing interest rates is expected to draw investors to dollar denominated assets, at least temporarily; thereby “postponing” the collapse of the US-dollar hegemony.

The global flow of US-dollars accounts today for between 50% and 60% of all trading currencies in the world. With this quantitative supremacy, plus interest rates increases, the US-dollar may be able to extend her currency domination provisionally – but the fall of the dollar and dollar-related and dependent currencies will undoubtedly follow.

The result of this FED interest hike can already be seen, in as much as the exchange rate US dollar and Euro is almost 1:1, and the dollar is moving in the same direction vis-à-vis the British Pound.

The inflation-driven price increases reflect not only rising costs for gasoline and groceries, but also for rent and airfares and a wide range of services.

Overall, however, the FEDs interest hike, even at a record-level over the past almost 30 years,  does not stop or even brake inflation – which is expected to soon enter the two-digit dimension. The gap between base-interest and inflation is too wide. But it may bring temporarily more stability to the US-dollar.

What is China doing for their currency’s – the Yuan’s – stability?

In addition to having already a real economy-based currency, and the prospect of moving towards commodity-based and backed currency, the State Council of China issued at the end of May 2022 a policy package, including 33 measures covering fiscal and financial policies, as well as policies on investment, consumption, food and energy security, industrial and supply chains, and people’s livelihoods. These are some highlights of the package:

— In finance, China will further enhance value-added tax credit refund policies and quicken its fiscal spending schedule. Local government special bonds issuance and utilization will be accelerated with a service extension. Government financing guarantee policies will be activated and social security premiums deferral and employment support policies will be enhanced;

— In terms of monetary and financial policies, China encourages delayed repayment of capital and interests on loans for small and medium-sized enterprises, self-employed individuals, truck drivers, and personal housing and consumption loans affected by COVID-19. Inclusive loans to micro and small businesses will be expanded. Real lending rates will be stable with a slight decline, and improvements will be made to the financing efficiency of capital markets;

— In stabilizing investment and promoting consumption, China will accelerate some approved water conservancy projects and speed up investment on transportation infrastructure, continue to build urban underground pipelines, stabilize and expand private investment, promote the healthy and standardized development of the platform economy, and stimulate purchases of cars and home appliances;

— Regarding food and energy security, policies on grains profit guarantee for farmers will be intensified. Quality coal will be produced while ensuring safety, environment-friendliness and efficient utilization. In addition, some major [alternative] energy projects will be launched;

— To stabilize industrial and supply chains, China will reduce utility costs for market entities, gradually reduce and exempt their rent, and help ease the burden on sectors and companies severely affected by the pandemic. Enterprises’ work resumption and smooth transportation and logistics policies will be optimized. More support will be provided to logistics hubs and enterprises. Major foreign-funded projects will be prioritized to attract foreign investments; and

— As for policies concerning people’s livelihoods, China will implement support policies for housing provident funds, bolster the employment and entrepreneurship of rural migrant population and rural labor, and enhance social security guarantee measures.

From a Uni-Polar to a Multi-Polar World

The future points clearly away from a western-dominated unipolar world or One World Order (OWO) to a multi-polar world, that may be based on some strong economic “hubs”, while preserving individual countries’ sovereignty.

The above policies are to strengthen and stabilize in the long-term the Chinese economy – which will be further enhanced by trade and political association with other related regional economies, like those of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the SCO, as well as further down the road the BRICS+ countries.

Among the particular socioeconomic achievements that will keep China’s and associated currencies and financial systems stable and apart from the western shortage and inflation-driven economies, is the ASEAN-plus Five world’s largest and most comprehensive free-trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

The RCEP is a free trade agreement among the Asia-Pacific ASEAN nations of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The trade deal also includes five non-ASEAN signatories, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and China.

The RCEP is the world’s largest free trade agreement. It was negotiated during eight years and entered into effect on 1 January 2022. According to a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study, it represents 30.5% of the world’s GDP. The only other blocs coming close to that are the US-Mexico-Canada agreement – NAFTA (28%) and the EU (17.9%).

The RCEP is expected to expand quickly, as the 15 countries will likely generate world-embracing dynamics, while at the same time remaining self-contained as a sovereign bloc, meaning trading within and protected from western influences.

The bloc’s trading currencies will be predominantly the Yuan (a digital yuan primarily for international trade is expected to be rolled out possibly as early as later this year or early 2023), but also local currencies – but not the US-dollar and other western currencies under the dollar hegemony.

Another element for enhancing eastern financial stability, is the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Earlier this year, Iran applied for BRICS membership. Iran is already a member of the SCO.

At present, the BRICS represent 40 percent of world population, 25 percent of the global economy, 18 percent of world trade. The BRICS are the fastest growing bloc of countries, contributing some 50% to world economic growth.

Finally – but not least – is the interrelated Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initiated by President Xi Jinping in 2013. The BRI is also called the New Silk Road, inspired by the concept of the Silk Road established during the Han Dynasty over 2,000 years ago – an ancient network of trade routes that connected China to the Mediterranean via Eurasia for centuries.

In March 2022, the number of countries that have joined the BRI by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China is 146, plus 32 international organizations. The countries of the BRI are spread across all continents: 43 countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The BRI has several trading routes, including maritime routes, connecting countries with transport and other infrastructure links, as well as joint ventures for energy exploitation or industrial production processes, cultural and educational exchanges, and many more country and regional links. It is “Globalization” with Chinese characteristics, where individual autonomies are respected.

This initiative goes hand in hand with another one, the Global Development Initiative (GDI), announced by President Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly in 2021.

GDI complements BRI as a support and cooperation mechanism for large international financial and development bodies, such as the South-South Cooperation Fund, the International Development Association (IDA is part of the World Bank Group), the Asian Development Fund (ADF), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

This eastern, China-based network of mutually enhancing financial institutions, trade agreements, economic policy think tanks – and much more – shield against western attempts to interfere with and destabilize these eastern bloc financial, economic and monetary mechanisms.

These networks also represent a stronghold for a sound future for an eastern-led socioeconomic development framework – a solid base for a common future in PEACE for mankind.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.