A VIEW FROM SOUTH AFRICA

BRICS 2023 ANALYSIS AND PROTESTS



12th BRICS TRADE UNION FORUM (BTUF) DECLARATION









Pro and anti-BRICS marchers flex muscles in front of Indian Consulate in Durban

Sihle Mavuso (IOL News) 26 August 2023

While global leaders are gathering at Sandton in Johannesburg for the ongoing BRICS Summit, some 500 kilometres away in Durban, two groups are flexing their muscles over the global formation of some of the largest economies in the world.

One group was against having the BRICS Summit, calling it a "club of the corrupt", while the other group said the formation is needed and South Africa is already reaping benefits by being part of it.

The anti-BRICS marchers were gathered under the banner of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, led by Desmond D'sa.
Read More

More on the 2023 BRICS Summit protests

Activists angry after BRICS Summit protest moved to venue far from gathering of leaders

Gaby Ndongo (Daily Maverick) 23 August 2023

Law enforcement agencies gave permission for a protest against the BRICS Summit — but at a venue nearly 4km from the gathering.

Lesya Karpenko, the Gauteng representative of the Ukrainian Association of South Africa (Uaza), was informed on Tuesday that their protest against the BRICS Summit could go ahead at Innisfree Park in Johannesburg, which, she said, defeated the purpose as the park was about 4km from where the summit was being held.

“We were put here, at the park … not to spoil the picture that Russia is welcome here [in South Africa],” Karpenko said, standing near law enforcement officers from the SAPS and the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department who were observing the protest.
Read More

BRICS 2018 Analysis and protests


Trevor Ngwane interview on the Break the BRICS Coalition

On Thursday 26 July 2018 different formations calling themselves "Break the BRICS Coalition" marched to the Sandton Convention Centre the venue of the 10th BRICS Summit. The march was a protest against what the coalition calls the capitalist nature of the BRICS states, their anti-working class behaviour, and their environmentally destructive policies. Its intention was to put forward their demands for world to see.








What are the BRICS?
Patrick Bond

Together as a bloc, the five BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – control a quarter of the earth’s land mass but 42% of its population. The BRICS are relatively inward-looking economies; although they host 46% of the global workforce, they are responsible for just 14% of world trade and 19% of world Gross Domestic Product (although this rises to 27% if measured in purchasing power parity terms – in which per capita GDP is also low, with only Russia enjoying an income higher than the world average of ($11,800).

The bloc was, however, initially named and celebrated – as BRIC, without South Africa until Beijing invited Pretoria to join in 2010 – by Goldman Sachs Assets Management chair Jim O’Neill in 2001. The first formal BRIC gathering was in 2006 when foreign ministers met at the United Nations, followed by heads-of-state summits at Yekaterinburg hosted by Vladimir Putin in 2009, by Lula da Silva at Brasilia in 2010, Wen Jia Bao at Sanya in 2011, Manmohan Singh at New Delhi in 2012, Jacob Zuma at Durban in 2013, Dilma Rousseff at Fortaleza in 2014, Putin at Ufa in 2015, Narendra Modi at Goa in 2016, Xi Jinping at Xiamen in 2017, and Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg in 2018.

There is extensive ceremonial pageantry and back-slapping at these events, although they usually last just two days. Parallel conferences of business leaders typically have access to the state officials, unlike other official civil society BRICS events, which are kept on the sidelines and are usually held weeks before.

(There is also usually an ‘uncivil society’ summit held by leftwing critics simultaneous with the BRICS leaders’ summit, e.g. in Durban in 2013, Fortaleza in 2014, Goa in 2016, Hong Kong in 2017 and Johannesburg in 2018 – under the ‘brics from below’ or People’s BRICS rubric, which in Johannesburg will be expressed as a “Break the BRICS” protest.)

Beyond state and business summitry, there have also been regular meetings of BRICS trade unions, since Moscow in 2012, but in the form of a parallel summit starting with Durban in 2013. The ‘Civil BRICS’ of civil society groups began meeting in Moscow in 2015, sponsored by the Putin regime (along with Oxfam) and hence carrying so little credibility that the main Brazilian development network (Rebrip) formally boycotted the inaugural Civil BRICS.

Dozens of other BRICS-related events occur in between on different schedules, including meetings of ministers responsible for economies, security, agriculture, health and municipal government, as well as think tanks and interested academics. These have had a degree of official support, in large part because they generally refrain from offering tough criticism. As a result, the ‘academic’ analysis is causing substantial controversy in South Africa, as shown below.

BRICS Think Tank chairperson, Ari Sitas, adds to the world-shaping narrative a series of admirable scholarly and professional projects to improve BRICS societies. But how much of Sitas’ narrative is a pipe-dream?

And in view of mounting evidence of intellectual weaknesses, how much can a think tank leader even as sharp as Sitas avoid the accusation that his institution is reduced to the classic scam: people paid to think by the people who control the tanks?

When that assessment was put to Sitas by Radio Islam (31 May 2018), he rebutted that it was:

a vacuous radicalism that is being articulated and is an argument by contamination. “You know ‘so and so smells bad, therefore this must stink’. So it is tough, it needs navigating skills. You have to be clear as a country and a country can only be a balance of the kind of forces that can speak in the country.”

A critique of the 2018 BRICS Think Tank and Academic Forum conference is offered in the 2018 BRICS Politricks reader, as well as a more nuanced rejoinder by an activist (Bandile Mdlalose) and a scholar (Lisa Thompson) working on the inside to improve these two institutions.

The proper model for this is to have a “tree shaker” and a “jam maker” division of labour. But in spite of tree-shaker efforts, this approach has not yet been arrived at by either the insiders or outsiders.

Instead, there is a danger of the Civil BRICS repeating what Mandeep Tiwana and Cathal Gilbert describe as 2017’s fate:

As a symbolic exercise in civil society engagement, a “Civil BRICS” meeting was held in June. It was tightly controlled by Chinese authorities, however, and the concluding declaration was pre-drafted before the meeting even took place.

The Civil BRICS’ problem is also evident within BRICS Youth, as argued by Njabulo Maphumulo and Lynford Dor, as well as in the BRICS Trade Union Forum.

One central test of whether the BRICS offer anything different, and whether civil society reformers can open up ‘engagement’ opportunities, is the BRICS New Development Bank.

Regrettably though, at least one civil society watchdog project – by African Monitor and Oxfam – endorsed perhaps the most objectionable aspect of modern development finance: the privatisation of profits and the socialisation of losses. Not only did the ‘watchdog’ promote NDB co-financing with multilateral development banks (the neoliberal World Bank and African Development Bank to choose from in South Africa), this additional endorsement also suggests a network out of touch with on-the-ground realities:

The use of Public – Private Partnerships as an important instrument for the bank to leverage resources of private sector and increase its participation in major infrastructure.

Moreover, according to African Monitor and Oxfam, “civil society appreciates the work and progress that the NDB has made thus far.” This may have been true for civilised society but for the large group of civil society watchdogs of the BRICS bank, the institution was practically impossible to work with, repeatedly failing the most basic tests of communication, transparency and consultation.

There are much less civil critics in relation to the BRICS Bank, including those in South Durban (such as community leader Desmond D’Sa) who are disgusted with the bankers’ lending criteria and unwillingness to engage local critics, even when widespread debtor corruption appears to run rampant.

The South Durban case – in which the parastatal Transnet is attempting to raise funding for expansion of Durban’s controversial port-petrochemical complex – is illustrative, given long-standing eco-social protests against Transnet.

Subimperial BRICS
But there is an even greater concern about the BRICS positioning in global circuits. The cases of finance, trade and climate negotiations are discussed below in detail.

Geopolitical processes are also revealing. Vijay Prashad observes “BRICS in the ruins of the present.” A major problem is the ongoing failure of the BRICS ‘centripetal’ strategy of capital accumulation.

Add to this regional repression, e.g. the way Modi’s colonial-style control of Kashmir is unfolding, with crimes so severe that the UN Commission for Human Rights issued another report in June 2018 condemning India. Even South Africa’s moribund National Prosecuting Authority began investigating Modi’s role prior to his BRICS visit, as noted in reports below by the Voice of the Cape and Iqbal Jassat.

As for BRICS in the Middle East, according to Ramona Wadi in an essay below, they are merely “paying mere lip-service to a legitimate demand is harming Palestine’s prospects, rather than enhancing opportunities for anti-colonial, legitimate resistance.”

In reality, notwithstanding the occasional bursts of anti-imperialist rhetoric from some pro-BRICS politicians and analysts, these are sites where ‘subimperial’ politics are on display. The term comes from a Brazilian political economist, Ruy Mauro Marini (1932-97), and will be referred to periodically, below, where it is useful to indicate overlapping interests of Western and BRICS powers, or ways that BRICS firms penetrate their societies and hinterlands in a manner comparable to Western Multinational Corporations.

The BRICS also play a role as ‘deputy sheriffs’ in their respective hinterlands. Regions surrounding each of the BRICS’ hosts are also important. Since 2013, leaders from neighbouring states and regional blocs have also been invited to spend time with the BRICS leaders (usually a half-day after the members’ meeting has closed):

• In Johannesburg, in addition to select African heads of state, five major guests are regional leaders who are also heads of state of: Egypt (as Chair of the G77+China), Argentina (Chair of the G20 and a MERCOSUR member), Indonesia (Co-Chair with SA of the New Africa-Asia Strategic Partnership and an ASEAN member), Jamaica (incoming Chair of CARICOM), and Turkey (as Chair of the OIC).
• In Xiamen, the BRICS-Plus group was initiated to include Egypt, Guinea, Mexico, Tajikistan and Thailand.
• In Goa, notably, regional collaboration did not include Pakistan, but did include India’s Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation neighbours: Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal.
• In Ufa, the BRICS overlapped with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan along with the observer states Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan.
• In Brasilia just after the Fortaleza meeting, the Brazilian hosts invited leaders from the Union of South American Nations, including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The tradition of drawing in the host’s friendly neighbours was begun in Durban when more than a dozen African leaders (never formally named) joined the summit at the Zimbali Lodge. SA’s deputy foreign minister Marius Fransman (later disgraced and fired in a #MeToo incident) expressed these objectives just before the March 2013 summit: “South Africa presents a gateway for investment on the continent, and over the next 10 years the African continent will need $480 billion for infrastructure development.”

In some cases, depending partly upon which political party is in power, such outreach is welcomed as genuine partnership; in other cases, this strategy appears to be akin to a co-optation process, in which weaker neighbours are seen mainly as the BRICS’ hinterlands. Geopolitical and material benefits accrue mostly to the strongest BRICS countries and firms. The case of IMF reform – which disempowered many BRICS neighbours by lowering their voting power (so four of the BRICS could rise, as discussed below) – makes clear this latter sub-imperial dynamic.

As a bloc, BRICS issues periodic communiques and occasionally acts in concert. One example was the successful lobbying by BRICS foreign ministers against the proposed expulsion of Russia from the 2014 G20 Brisbane summit following sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West after the March 2014 transfer of power in Crimea.

BRICS will ultimately be known not for its generally anti-Western rhetoric, but for what it does, concretely, to change the world. The most important innovations are institutional: the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) for project loans and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) for potential financial crises. The CRA stands ready to augment the IMF in the event bail-out credits are required by BRICS members.

There was also a proposed internet cable rerouting to avoid US interference, and a credit ratings agency alternative to Moody’s, Fitch and Standard&Poors. Such a ratings agency may be moot, however, if BRICS countries continue to float their bonds in international markets where those “three brothers from Manhattan” (not Saxonwold) continue to exercise “state capture” of weaker BRICS’ treasuries and central banks. (SA remains a case in point.)

The latter two strategies appear to be largely conceptual, with a less than certain chance of coming to fruition in the near future. BRICS countries’ invasive surveillance of their citizenries is nearly as obnoxious as the US National Security Agency, and a “market-oriented” approach to a new BRICS credit ratings agency (as discussed in most such meetings) would leave such an institution operating much as do the existing agencies.

Reviewing BRICS Politricks in this way, we find far more in common with the worst of the Western imperial powers: aggressive geopolitics, self-interested economics, social repression and environmental irresponsibility.

Which brings us to ask, why would BRICS-from-the-Middle scholars, NGOs and labour strategists within civilised society want to spend so much time and political capital legitimising these leaders and states?

To that question, we have only the standard answer that critics of petit-bourgeois centrism have always offered: opportunism.

There is another answer, too: the forces of uncivil society that meet annually to delegitimise the BRICS have not achieved powers of persuasion to change all the minds we will need to.

Until then, political tricks will be apparent on the surface of society – tricks we would like to ignore but simply cannot…
READ PDF



Hello BRICS watchers,
The BRICS Summit, with Temer-Putin-Modi-Xi-Ramaphosa, joined by Erdogan-Al-Sisi-Macri-etc - begins on Wednesday. Already, brics-from-below folk are gathering.

First, we have a new book for free download here. It will be updated over the course of the week, as our partners from around the world chime in with new critical analysis and as various official resolutions are passed. (For example, the 2018 Civil BRICS resolution is available, as you see here - not elsewhere online yet.)

If you're in Johannesburg, join us to discuss multiple crises - political, social, economic and ecological - and society's responses at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance on Monday-Tuesday, 9am-6pm (2 St David's Place, Parktown). (Please RSVP to bricsfrombelow2018@gmail.com for catering purposes.) Well-known scholars, commentators, journalists and NGO experts will be with us. I can send you the final programme later today if you're interested; let me know by email. And there will be more updates soon about follow-up activism.

Cheers,
Patrick

TEACH-IN PROGRAMME

PICTURES FROM THE TEACH-IN

PICTURES FROM THE MARCH
Click on images to view more photos

Click on image for more information

PICTURES FROM THE NDB PROTEST

CRITICAL THINKING ON BRICS VIDEOS


CRITICAL THINKING ON BRICS DEDOLLARISATION


CRITICAL THINKING ON BRICS- ECOCIDE V2


CRITICAL THINKING ON BRICS UKRAINE V2



LATEST BRICS ANALYSIS