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BRICS in the new global disorder However, while BRICS countries shared common interests in critiquing the US-led system of domination, they were also part of that system. Russia and China hold veto power in the UN Security Council; alongside the US, China was both an architect and major beneficiary of neoliberal globalisation after the 1980s. At the beginning of the century, India and Brazil positioned themselves as rapidly expanding economies within the prevailing world market. So, BRICS served as a privileged location for global economic expansion as a whole. This was the case even if, in the imagination of a Left that had lost its identity, it symbolised an anti-Western, anti-Atlanticist, anti-imperialist stance (even while having other imperialist traits). To that Left, it seemed to represent the potential of the Global South (in its class, rather than strictly geopolitical definition). But we should not mistake desire for reality. BRICS was not that. Rather, it was a diffuse network of pragmatic national interests, driven by capitalist classes that were growing faster than in the old US-Europe-Japan core. Evolution of BRICS BRICS has evolved alongside the trajectory of its members over the past two decades. Russia, which reorganised itself as a fossil fuel-producing country under Putin’s authoritarian political leadership, broke away from its cooperation with the Atlantic system. This happened more immediately with the invasion of Crimea in 2014, but comprehensively after 2022, with its broad territorial claim over Ukraine. It has become highly dependent on trade with China and India. India has maintained a trajectory of steady economic growth, while asserting an authoritarian Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim stance under Modi’s leadership, viewing China as its primary rival. Brazil underwent further deindustrialisation and reorganised its economy as a major global supplier of agricultural and mineral commodities under the governments of Fernando Henrique, Lula, and Dilma. After 2013, it experienced nearly a decade of crisis and political instability, with Dilma’s impeachment and the Temer and Bolsonaro governments, until the election of the Lula III government in 2022. All these countries were deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis it unleashed. However, the major shift occurred with China’s economic advances and political changes. After 2012, Xi Jinping became China’s undisputed leader and set out an ambitious plan for the country’s economic empowerment. This ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ multiplied China’s presence in the Global South, through extractive and infrastructure projects, particularly in transport. These boosted Chinese exports and imports, and replaced US and European initiatives. Two years later, the Chinese government launched the ambitious ‘Made in China 2025’ project. This was an industrial policy programme aimed at internalising the development of cutting-edge technology sectors from the digital revolution and transforming the country into an industrial superpower in the coming decades. The plan identified ten key sectors for advancement: advanced information technology (including chips and artificial intelligence), CNC machines and robotics, airplanes, ocean equipment and navigation, railway transport equipment, electric vehicles, power generation equipment, agricultural equipment, new materials, biopharmaceuticals, and medical devices. Both ‘One Belt, One Road’ and ‘Made in China 2025’ were largely successful and significantly altered China’s position in the global economy. It moved from being the ‘world’s factory’, anchored in cheap labour, to becoming a superpower. It challenged the economic and technological supremacy of the US and corporations established in the US-Europe-Japan network, and integrated into global value chains. Chinese companies now compete in most high-tech sectors in the global market. Today, China is the leading economic partner of almost all countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. These changes deeply altered the nature of BRICS, which has become an economic space for the projection of China’s power, while the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation coordinates security issues across the Asian continent. China is deeply integrated into the global market. The BRICS expansion in 2022 responded to the country’s strategic economic interests in strengthening ties with many of its key suppliers of agricultural and energy raw materials. On the other hand, expanding economic relations among BRICS countries also benefits its other members; for example, China is the primary buyer of Brazil’s exported commodities. The US is seeking to reindustrialise and reduce its dependence on China in various sectors, triggering trade wars with its partners. Reducing dependence on US trade is strategic for all countries, although it is a tougher task for Canada, Mexico, and the EU countries. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that today, China is the primary global driver of extractive economies for raw materials and agricultural exports to the international market, across much of the capitalist periphery. Deglobalisation BRICS is part of the world shaped by the WTO. Economic relations among its members, particularly with China, may help build more plural and diverse international relations. But this can only happen if peripheral countries can break with neo-extractivism, which Chinese capitalism now drives most aggressively. Indeed, sustainable societal alternatives must involve deglobalisation—that is, breaking away from the logic of the global market governed by the law of value. This may seem impossible today, but it will become an urgent issue when ecological collapse and population migration emerge in full force. We must be strategically certain that, between the brutality of Trump’s international policies and the people’s aspirations for freedom from the tyranny of the global market, the institutions managing neoliberal globalisation must fall. Just over twenty years ago, at the height of the alter-globalisation movement and the World Social Forums process, Walden Bello published a short book titled Deglobalisation: Ideas for a New World Economy. His starting point was that pre-WTO trade frameworks were far more democratic than those that defined neoliberal globalisation after 1994. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), created in 1947, and later the 1964 framework, established by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), offered greater flexibility and alternative ways for nations to engage in the global market. These alternatives were further reinforced by the disconnection strategies of revolutionary experiments. We must recover such alternatives rather than sticking with monolithic systems that impose universal rules which serve only the major powers. From an ecological perspective, most economic production and international trade is irrational. Countries should organise their economies around regional integration processes guided by the principle of subsidiarity—producing locally, nationally, and regionally what they need; importing only what they cannot produce. The market economy doesn’t include the costs of environmental damage or social harm in the prices of goods and services. To address this, governments will likely need to step in and regulate these costs, using digital tools and data analysis, which are now common in modern technology, to guide decisions. The core goal for our people is to promote ecosocialist revolutions and integrate our economies on a continental scale. South America, Africa, and Asia are regions that, without imperialist domination, could achieve near-complete self-sufficiency in providing for their people’s well-being. In the case of Latin America, with its 600 million inhabitants, we have already industrialised and then experienced deindustrialisation imposed from the outside (with the complicity of much of the local ruling class). We could sustainably produce practically any product that does not inherently require a fully global supply chain. The rupture we need is not only with US imperialism but also with the global capitalist market itself. China is neither a model to follow nor a liberating force; it reinforces neo-extractivism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, even with victorious ecosocialist revolutions, we cannot abandon the use of certain advanced technologies, whose production is now concentrated in two poles: in the US and Europe on one side, and in China and parts of East Asia on the other. In this sense, the network of relationships between countries such as Brazil, South Africa, China, and India can provide invaluable support points in the context of the widespread economic disorder we are now entering. https://www.amandla.org.za/brics-in-the-new-global-disorder/ Back osé Correa Leite is a Brazilian socialist activist and scholar. He is a leading member of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) and the author of The World Social Forum: Strategies of Resistance. |
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