BRICS

An Anticapitalist Critique

Ana Garcia, Patrick Bond, Ana Garcia, Patrick Bond

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608465347
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

he emergence of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa on a global stage has upset the dominance of the United States as the world's only superpower. But can they chart a path toward a more just global economy? This collection, which brings together leading political economists from around the world, argues that the BRICS are actually amplifying some of the worst features of international capitalism.This book aims to fill a gap in studies of the BRICS grouping of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). It provides a critical analysis of their economies, societies and geopolitical strategies within the framework of a global capitalism that is increasingly predatory, unequal and ecologically self-destructive — no more so than in the BRICS countries themselves.In unprecedented detail and with great innovation, the contributors consider theoretical traditions in political economy as applied to the BRICS, including "sub-imperialism, " the World System perspective and dynamics of territorial expansion. Only such an approach can interpret the potential for a "brics-from-below" uprising that appears likely to accompany the rise of the BRICS.Contributors: Elmar Altvater, Baruti Amisi, Patrick Bond, Omar Bonilla, Einar Braathen, Pedro Henrique Campos, Ruslan Dzarasov, Virginia Fontes, Ana Garcia, Ho-fung Hung, Richard Kamidza, Karina Kato, Claudio Katz, Mathias Luce, Farai Maguwu, Judith Marshall, Gilmar Mascarenhas, Sam Moyo, Leo Panitch, Bobby Peek, Gonzalo Pozo, Vijay Prashad, Niall Reddy, William Robinson, Susanne Soederberg, Celina Sørbøe, Achin Vanaik, Immanuel Wallerstein and Paris Yeros.

1

Introduction

Ana Garcia and Patrick Bond

This book addresses the prospects of imperial power from above, emerging powers from the middle and nascent popular counter-powers from below. The relative economic decline of the United States, Europe and Japan is often linked to the rise of an ‘emerging’ bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). But the latter regularly demand ‘a seat at the table’ in a process that some term ‘antagonistic cooperation’. That means, in practice, that in areas ranging from world finance to climate change to super-exploitative relations with the periphery and even to soccer, the bloc aims not to overturn tables at the proverbial temple, but to collaborate in holding them up. Consider some recent evidence:

• • After funding the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with US$75 billion in 2012, in the following year there were two meetings of BRICS leaders (in Durban and St. Petersburg) which pronounced growing dissatisfaction with the Bretton Woods Institutions.
• • The BRICS’ stated intention to create a New Development Bank with capital of US$50 billion, and an IMF-style Contingent Reserve Arrangement with US$100 billion, was accomplished in 2014 at the Fortaleza summit, but ultimately, given the role of neoliberal finance ministers in their conceptualisation, these were celebrated in Washington as complementary to, not competitive with, the existing multilateral financial power structure.
• • A Brazilian directs the World Trade Organisation and, based on a more aggressive policy of liberalisation, tries to break persistent blockages between the US and EU that hinder the growth of global trade.
• • Chinese and Indian economists occupy a second tier of the bureaucracies in the World Bank and IMF.
• • Climate negotiations at the global scale increasingly revolve around Washington’s managed relations with BRICS countries, first through the deal done in 2009 in Copenhagen (involving four of the five BRICS) and then the US-China emissions cuts agreed to bilaterally in 2014.
• • In other bilateral relations with South Africa and India, US President Barack Obama made substantial progress in trips, respectively, during 2013 (twice) and 2015.
• • Soccer remains the most symbolic and profitable commercial component of sports in the imperialist project, with Fifa machinery controlling the game’s World Cup in alliance with elites from host countries South Africa, Brazil and Russia from 2010 to 2018, no matter the vast social costs involved in White Elephant stadium construction and suppression of local unrest. To add insult to injury, key BRICS countries supported Blatter’s continual re-election to world soccer managerial leadership, notwithstanding vast evidence of wrongdoing during his five-term reign.

But there is also countervailing evidence:

• • Several members of the BRICS have resisted demands by Western countries to impose stricter intellectual property controls (in the case of medicines this has saved millions of lives, especially in South Africa).
• • Geopolitically, some BRICS leaders boldly challenged Washington after revelations of espionage by whistleblower Edward Snowden and before Washington’s proposed bombing of Syria in 2013. In March 2014, the BRICS implicitly supported Russia in the conflict over Crimea, for which the G7 imposed sanctions and expelled Moscow (Putin had originally been scheduled to host the G8 meeting in Sochi a few weeks later). BRICS foreign ministers even successfully threatened to withdraw from the subsequent G20 summit in Australia in late 2014, were it to have become a G19 without Russia.
• • In May 2014, Russia agreed to supply gas to China using local currencies, not the US dollar, seeking to partially reduce Russia’s dependence on sales to the European market as sanctions resulting from the Ukraine chaos loomed.
• • In early 2015, dramatic economic developments began unfolding as this book went to press, as emerging markets faced financial stress, as the Russian rouble crashed because of sanctions and the oil price collapse, and as China initiated an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, whose co-founders included the richest European countries and the Bretton Woods Institutions, leaving the Obama administration diplomatically embarrassed.

These incidents suggest the possibility that at least two of the BRICS – China and Russia – occasionally adopt ‘inter-imperial’ stances against Western powers, but in a stop-start way that is quite unpredictable. At the same time, however, the underlying BRICS project has much in common with the Western status quo regarding the stabilisation of the financial world, in generating additional capacities of ‘lender of last resort’ and in stabilising multilateral governance. BRICS still provides a sustained demand for the US dollar, despite monetary turbulence due to Federal Reserve policies; it is distressing but true that Chinese dollar purchases soared to record highs during the first half of 2014, only declin-ing slightly a year later.

Moreover, the BRICS countries promote an extractive, high-carbon economic model which threatens to amplify the catastrophic environmental and social destruction of advanced capitalism. The role of the BRICS in the de facto derailing of the Kyoto Protocol to limit climate change is revealing: Russia endorsed the Treaty in 2005 but withdrew in 2012, while in 2009 the other BRICS leaders joined Barack Obama to promote the Copenhagen Accord in behind-the-scenes negotiations. That 2009 deal rejected a mandatory limit on emissions, and at subsequent UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences of the Parties, BRICS countries (including host South Africa in 2011) were among those joining Washington as most resistant to binding emissions cuts and payment of climate debt. By 2011 in South Africa, they had agreed to whittle away the critical notion of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ for the crisis, to the detriment of the world’s poorest and lowest-emitting countries.

As for Snowden’s revelations, the surveillance of citizens seems as severe in the BRICS countries as in the anglophone West, in a style reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, reaching even into the South African parliament in February 2015, when journalists’ cellphones and Wi-Fi signals were jammed by Pretoria’s security apparatus. The BRICS’ criminalisation of social movements and the oppression of dissidents are even worse than in the G7. The economic and political domination of the BRICS’ less-developed neighbours is a growing concern, leading critics to postulate the incorporation of sub-imperialist BRICS into world capitalism, just as Ruy Mauro Marini wrote regarding the position of Brazil more than 40 years ago.

Resistance and ideological vacillation

However, as we conclude in the last pages, the contradictions that characterise all the BRICS have created incisive forms of social resistance. These include some of the largest protests and other social convulsions in the world, though some have expressed a conservative bias (Brazil) or articulated liberal ideals (India, Russia and Hong Kong). But other resistance struggles against mega-projects are manifestations of the limits to the BRICS’ pro-corporate economic growth model. Most progressive activists mistrust the rhetoric of the BRICS governments, which promise prosperity for their countries by following the current trajectory of global neoliberalism, especially in alliance with one another.

Other radical activists and Third Worldist analysts have supported the BRICS governments, though, believing that their claims of wanting to democratise the world order might do more than simply add a layer of collaborators. There is not yet a consistent approach on the left, as progressive forces in each country operate still unaware of possible concrete links with other movements in the other BRICS countries, and even in their own hinterlands which BRICS corporations are busy exploiting. The critical question for the future is whether social struggles in each of the BRICS countries will discover linkages of sol...

Table of contents

• BRICS
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1: Sub-imperial, inter-imperial or capitalist-imperial?
• Part 2: BRICS ‘develop’ Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe
• Part 3: BRICS within global capitalism