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The Global South and BRICS from Below with Professor Patrick Bond We’ve had so many intellectuals from India that have guided us through understanding BRICS. I would just point to Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik as two who, right from early on, certainly with Prabhat telling us, ‘if you’re going to celebrate new institutions in the BRICS, be careful because of the class configuration.’ And that has continued. That was in 2014, when the BRICS Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement were announced. So I’ve always looked at India as being the source of so much wisdom and caution. Someone like Praful Bidwai would have said – when he was in Greenpeace India or doing his other climate work – that the Indian elite at that time, Congress, were hiding behind the poor when they went to the United Nations climate summits, in order to negotiate for more coal-fired power plants in India, even though the solar and the wind would have been a much better option. But he pointed out how the elites, the Ambanis and so forth, were hiding behind the poor when they set up energy systems that were the most profitable, even though they were most polluting. And likewise, Achin Vanaik at the University of Delhi. And so many of my dear allies at JNU, like Jayati Ghosh and Chandrasekhar, who’ve had to relocate to Massachusetts, a more liberated place, believe it or not, under the Trump regime than JNU. So many aspects of the Indian intellectual and activist experience have informed all of us, especially these mass demonstrations and the mass actions and the critiques of what Indian elites do in the world. And there’s no better time to talk about that, than Narendra Modi’s attempt in the BRICS, on the 12th and 13th of September 2026, to try to paper over the huge differences. But maybe I can ask you, Aaliya: how does it feel sitting near Delhi, seeing such pomp and ceremony, but nothing really has come from it? And even Modi admitted, ‘we’re all talk and people are expecting us to do something now.’ What do you think? How did it look from your side? So close. Aaliya: I mean, I feel like people by now are pretty used to this. Like a couple of years ago, the G20 summit, there was a similar act that was being done where the slums were being hidden by a giant tarp so that the guests couldn’t see it. I think every few years the same thing happens. Modi gives us a lot of promises, but like nothing really comes of it. And I think we’ve all like sort of resigned in like just accepting it. Patrick: I think that’s right, except people don’t resign. When I look at a few of the things, let me just think of the last five years of the big BRICS from below protests, we would call them roughly. And I’ll explain what I mean. It’s a phrase that had come in 2013 from our activists in Durban. Junaid Ahmed: Patrick, my apologies. Patrick, if I may just interrupt you. Just for an audience, can you just give us a brief, very brief introduction? How did BRICS come about? What was BRICS? And, you know, what was it meant to kind of offer as a response to the dominant kind of institutions of the West, the IMF, the World Bank and jet NATO or what have you? How did it come about? What was it? Who are the BRICS countries? And then speak about kind of the reaction of social movements and particularly what you’ve articulated as BRICS from below. Just for those of us that may not have all of the knowledge of what BRICS has been. Patrick: Yes, good. That context is vital because, ironically, it was a Western banker, a guy called Jim O’Neill. He was at Goldman Sachs, in 2001, when he came up with the term BRIC – the Brazil, Russia, India, China, building BRICs, he said, for the 21st century – as the next set of major emerging powers that would boost world capitalism. And he was at Goldman Sachs, probably the most notorious of the investment banks engaged in predatory financial activities. Notorious, really. And so it was ironic. He was sort of an establishment character in Britain and became one of the Lords and very respected. And his original paper is still the most cited analysis of what the BRICS could be in this century, which was for him the next burst of economic activity. And it was in 2006-07, in various sort of side meetings, with the first summit in 2009 in Yekaterinburg in Russia, that some of the original BRIC members got together. In 2010, they realized that they needed to find a way to get Africa in, and South Africa was a useful idiot, frankly. I mean, there was a guy in charge here named Jacob Zuma, who became a notorious figure himself for his own foibles. And he had to be kind of pushed out in 2018 and is still undergoing prosecution. And his 2021 jailing meant riots around the country amongst his followers, that did enormous damage. And he runs the third main opposion party, called uMkhonto weSizwe. And his presidency was one in which the traditions of the African National Congress, which were third worldist and liberatory on the one hand, but also became more predatory and corrupt because of the extent to which black South Africans had been stepped on and kept down by white South Africans, even after apartheid ended economically. So he was out for any deals, any alternative power structure. And so that meant it became BRICS, not just Brazil, Russia, India, China. Brazil, by the way, not just led by Lula da Silva from 2003, but his foreign minister, Celso Amorim was really one of the visionaries who said, let’s figure out if we can get some countervailing power. And then in China, there was already some interest in connecting across the emerging markets because China was beginning to run out of its own space, having joined the WTO in 2001, producing massive export surpluses already by the late 2000s. But the crucial reason I think BRICS came together was because the G20 came together in late 2008. It had been around for about 10 years. It was in 1998 that Lawrence Summers, who was a key figure in the US, he was a finance minister in Bill Clinton’s last couple of years, but he decided because of the emerging markets beginning to melt down in about 97, 98, including big countries – Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia – he decided we’d need some finance ministers that would gather, that weren’t just the G8. That group included Russia at the time, the big Western powers plus Russia. But instead, you needed to figure out how to deal with these emerging market crises. That’s the origin of the G20. But then by October of 2008, George W. Bush and his treasury secretary, finance minister, Hank Paulson, they said, ‘actually we’re suffering our own meltdown in the United States,’ and it was excessive lending by Goldman Sachs, for example, and other mortgage lenders. The loans were based on very speculative conditions and so the real estate market began to crash. And so that brought down, first, Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers by September 2008. So they pulled all of these big powers together in 2008, October, that could give them their surpluses, especially China and Saudi Arabia and Korea, which had lots of foreign reserves. And it was that that gave the sort of emphasis to saving world capitalism within the G20, but it wasn’t just the G7, you needed something coherent to represent the interests of the emerging markets. Now BRICS, therefore, if you didn’t call it BRICS, you’d have had to invent it. It was already that block within the G20. But then China saved the day by having huge infrastructure investments in the period from about 2008 when the crash began, right through about 2012, 2013, and then switched to its own real estate bubble and ghost cities, especially housing, and then re-emerged as the major manufacturing exporter. After COVID had ended by 2023, the last three years or so has been a massive expansion and one reason is that China has moved its bank credit from real estate into the export of manufactured goods. And I always see not just the BRICS – but also the Belt and Road Initiative, that’s the broader attempt by China to build out infrastructure and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – in that context. That is, if you look at BRICS just as some diplomatic arrangement, a club, you don’t get really the accumulation process and its contradictions. Why contradictions? It’s because the features of the BRICS that make the centripetal, that is they’re falling apart, they’re spinning around, they’re disintegrating, they’re fragmenting. The core description of the centrifugal is tightening up as they move together, they tighten up. You flush the toilet and things all move in a circle. It depends what part of the world you’re in, but in South Africa, the sort of circular flow falls down in a centrifugal way. And Xi Jinping has actually described the BRICS in that way. But the reality is the opposite. It’s centripetal. And I think therefore the potential to do things that would bring BRICS together, like a BRICS bank, Contingent Reserve Arrangement, credit rating agency, maybe a common cyber currency to help manage the different currencies, maybe even a common currency. All of those don’t really have a chance if the rest of the world economy – and the BRICS role amplifying it – is really centripetal, falling apart. If you have a young child, as I’ve had two, and they love being spun around, you hold their arms and they love being spun around and then you let go. Obviously, you don’t let them spin out of control, but they start wandering around in a kind of dizzy way. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that, but I love that the kids love that. But they didn’t really know where they were going, because they were so dizzy, having been spinning around. That’s centripetal force and that centripetal force is, I think, Junaid, where we are with the BRICS. They’re falling apart and spinning around, regrettably. Junaid: Has BRICS been trying to frame itself as the new Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement of the 21st century, the voice of the global South? Whether it really represents anything remotely like that, that’s another question, but is that how, at least, it wants the world to perceive it as? Patrick: Some of the world left would like that. And we would call them maybe the multipolar advocates: that there should be not just the West, but an alternative that counteracts the power of the West. The BRICS haven’t put it quite so ambitiously or crudely. They’ve said, no, we want to accompany, and are therefore providing institutions like the BRICS New Development Bank and Contingent Reserve Arrangement – mythical as it is – that would be not alternative so much as being accompaniments to Western institutions. The more conservative forces, especially finance ministers and central bankers, will put it like that. The more ambitious, and I’m thinking here of multipolar advocates, I’ll use a couple of names, people I know and love and respect, like Radhika Desai, an Indian economist who set up the geopolitical economy school – a very good comrade and ally – but she would have argued that the BRICS should be the alternative, indeed, the antithesis of the IMF, and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement should be, therefore, something that – instead of going to the IMF – you go to as an alternative. And therefore, you get the Bandung myth that we can actually develop in the current context with the current balance of forces, some non-alignment. And Vijay Prashad, a brilliant guy with the Tricontinental in Delhi and Johannesburg and Sao Paulo, can make an argument very persuasively that Bandung has a chance. Now, I take the different point of view, that under conditions, currently, in which elites in the BRICS and the power structure and the class system and the accumulation process, actually provide not an anti-imperial, but sub-imperial reality, then the anti-imperial ambitions, the talk left, contrasts with the walk right, the sub-imperial. Junaid: I loved that concept of yours, Patrick. If you can, the sub-imperialism and the sub-imperialist power, if you can just speak to that a little bit. Patrick: Yeah, it’s good to set this up because if we talk about resistance, we should do so in the spirit of the Brazilians who found ways to understand the particularities of their societies in the period that we talk about, the dependency theorists. And the most important, in my view – maybe one of the least known, Ruy Mauro Marini – in 1965 developed this idea. Now, look, others have talked about this intermediate layer. There were Germans, there’s even in Lenin’s Imperialism, a sense that it wasn’t just the core and the periphery, it wasn’t just the colonies that were reporting, and giving surplus, to the colonial powers, but you actually have this middle layer. And in the mid-1970s, Immanuel Wallerstein developed it as a ‘semi-periphery’ in the world system. And so from Marini, who thought that Brazil had a much better chance to defeat the conditions of dependency, unfortunately, in 1964 – with the coup, with the U.S. supporting the military and the multinationals – it looked like, as you put it, Brazil had become a key nation in the expansion of imperialism. It wasn’t going to be its own development process. Dependency theorists advocated a more coherent linking to the mass base. Instead, it would be the super-exploitation of the mass base, which meant you actually ran out of room if you were a corporation, because you weren’t paying workers enough to buy the products, what you were making, or if you were having a branch plant for a multinational corporation. And so many countries, certainly most of Africa, were in that condition where, therefore, the only way out was if you were, as Frantz Fanon described it in The Wretched of the Earth, a national bourgeoisie. You would take the state because the capitalist class had been wrapped up by imperialism and its compradors, and you didn’t really have a chance to develop a petty bourgeoisie, and working class, that could consume. It’s in that context, from the 1960s, that the term subimperialism emerges, partly because the U.S. then had established with white South Africa under apartheid, with Israel, with Turkey, with Saudi Arabia, with many outposts of the U.S. empire, the beginnings of what we would now argue is that very expansive, maybe overblown empire, in which the allies, the compradors, the Western-gazing elites, still play a dominant role. I mean, we could say that the age of empire in terms of U.S. dominance is over, but the reality, unfortunately, is that we’ve seen the BRICS emerge, not against but within. And the best example, by the way, I think, Junaid, comes from Barack Obama. He talked to The Economist magazine. It’s worthwhile maybe just to remember exactly how Barack Obama put it, because in 2014, maybe at the peak of his power, Barack Obama, I’ll just read the exact quote when The Economist magazine interviewed him. He said simply, after being asked, what do you want to do with China, specifically “Should China end up inside the world system or challenging it? That’s the big issue of our times.” Here’s Barack Obama saying, quote, “Yes, it is. It’s important for the United States and Europe to continue to welcome China as a full partner in these international norms. As China shifts its economy away from simply being the low-cost manufacturer of the world to wanting to move up the value chain, then suddenly issues like protecting intellectual property become more relevant to their economies.” Now, that quote in 2014 was pushing it. Even though Obama, by 2016, at the time he left office, had involved much of the Asian economies that he could influence in an anti-China pincer movement to contain China. But he was also very committed to saying, ‘China, you should be in the World Trade Organization. The IMF and the World Bank will let the yuan have a greater say, part of the IMF bundle of official currencies, and your Intellectual Property will make it stronger.’ And this became very important for China when they developed vaccines called Sinovac and Sinopharm, and when Russia developed Sputnik. Because instead of uniting with India and South Africa for generics – an Intellectual Property waiver for the COVID-19 vaccines and medical treatment – China and Russia didn’t co-sponsor. And of course, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, was against. I guess I’m saying, Junaid, that this is one of the crucial points where you’d see the contradictions. And the way I think Marini put it was brilliant. He looked not just at a simple assimilation strategy, what Obama just said. He looked at the contradiction that came from having a ruling class in a country like Brazil or any of the BRICS today, and those contradictions with the West being so explicit, he called them ‘antagonistic cooperation,’ because he could see that this case of imperial, sub-imperial fusion also contained frictions. Junaid: Yep. Patrick, I was just going to ask you, could you identify some of the major sub-imperialist powers today in your view? Patrick: Well, let’s just start with the BRICs because not only the original five, but the most crucial in some ways was also drawn in, and that’s Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia has not been completely open because of the continual pressure of Trump, who sees the BRICS as a potential source of the de-dollarisation threat: that people might not use the US dollar as the currency that is, you know, good as gold. The U.S. delinked from the gold standard and what was a kind of gold peg, $35 an ounce set up in 1944, at Bretton Woods along with founding the World Bank and IMF. And what happened in 1971, was Richard Nixon defaulted on the obligation. And gold went wild. I mean, here underneath me was half of the world’s historic gold at the time. And then the price went to $850 from $35 over the course of a decade. And then it fell back. And that was because the guy running the Fed at the time – named Paul Volcker – put the interest rates up so high that it didn’t make sense to buy and to hold gold. And that’s why our currency system suddenly re-stabilised after the chaos of inflation, and the gold price going out of control in the 1970s. Because the US suddenly gave a very high rate of return to holding dollars because of the interest rate being so high. And at that point, the Third World Debt Crisis was set off and a lot of countries, and you know, South Africa was one: it defaulted in 1985, the first. Brazil was in 1987. We saw a variety of defaults of poor countries and middle-income countries. And by 1997-98, it wasn’t because of the interest rates so much, but just over-indebtedness and runs on these currencies. So we saw very turbulent processes in world finance. And I think what that meant for the variety of countries that became a subimperial set of allies of the West in the late 1990s under Bill Clinton as the president, is that they were sucked into the idea that free markets – and that exporting to Western markets – would be beneficial. It started with Mexico having what are called maquiladores, the border region in Northern Mexico and Southern belt of California and New Mexico and Arizona and Texas. When you kind of look at across the border, it’s a vast set of factories, very cheap labour, very good proximity of the US market. And the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect under Clinton. And he really sold out his Democratic Party worker base, and they therefore turned increasingly right-wing and became MAGA, Make America Great Again. Junaid: You’re not arguing that Mexico is a subimperialist power, but you are that perhaps Saudi Arabia is. Patrick: Yes, I think Mexico was qualifying, until a more centre-left government has made it more difficult for Trump to do anything and everything he wants. I mean, as you know, he’s just bombing randomly ships or small boats in the Caribbean. He’s invading countries like Venezuela and he would do Cuba at the next opportunity. It will be harder for him to do so with Mexico because it’s so large. But yeah, I would put Mexico, especially Pemex, into sub-imperial practices of Western capital because they went along with it. I mean, they had a guy called Vicente Fox who was completely on board with the agenda of Reagan and neoliberalism and then Clinton. So I would put Mexico as a subimperial power at that same stage. But things change because of some geopolitical circumstances and just because you’re structurally in the world economy within the global value chains in which first the poorest countries provide minerals, cash crops, and then the sub-imperial powers are often doing the dirty work. Think of China in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s where these very poor countries find that their main enemy immediately is not actually Glencore anymore. It’s a very big problem company for sure, which has a major office here in Johannesburg. But it’s actually Chinese companies, about 400 of them, that are doing most of the mining in the DRC, of the coltan and the cobalt that go into our phones. So I think, Junaid, I would start by describing subimperialism partly in relation to the global value chains in which Mexico is also more in that intermediate level. It does, of course, contribute – through Pemex – vast amounts of oil and gas. And of course, some of these countries, like you mentioned, like Saudi Arabia, they coincidentally also have now become part of BRICS+. Well, in fact, let’s think about that. The contradictions there are extreme and we saw that in the Delhi meeting, because Saudi Arabia didn’t actually come – as was expected – as a full member. What had happened in 2023 here in Johannesburg was Saudi Arabia – including Mohammed bin Salman here in Joburg – accepted provisionally. But then they didn’t quite join. And in the next year, 2024 in Russia, it became so frustrating for the Russians that by December, since the Saudis were in and out and they sort of saw Trump was coming to power and they therefore didn’t really come to the Kazan summit. And Mohammed bin Salman’s always playing footsie. So then the Russians said, no, you’re frozen out. You’re no longer a member. And instead in early 2025, Indonesia was invited in. Don’t forget the other four that were invited in Joburg were, well, five were invited, but four joined Egypt and Ethiopia and Iran. And then the UAE. But then the most crucial one symbolically was Argentina. Why? Because they rejected the invitation once a far-right president, Javier Melei, was elected late in 2024. And by December he said, ‘no, I’m not coming in.’ In early 2025, Indonesia came in. Russia was very frustrated with Saudi Arabia in spite of some, you know, bonhomie between Putin and Mohammed bin Salman. But it was in 2025, that Lula hosted, and he was pretending Saudi was there, but they weren’t really. And we thought that India would because India and Saudi Arabia and UAE and Egypt and Indonesia and to some extent Ethiopia had already by early 2026 signalled their support for Donald Trump, even after he invaded Venezuela, which had been suggested as a BRICS partner. And then in February 28 this year, when Israel and the US bombed Iran, Modi was in a very ridiculous and uncomfortable position. Just three days earlier, he’d arrived in Tel Aviv and hugged Benjamin Netanyahu very visibly and spoke to the Knesset and did an arms deal. And yet the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed just after he left. I mean, it was an extraordinary moment where you could really feel that Donald Trump for all his clumsiness – his ridiculousness – had succeeded in a divide and conquer of the BRICS. And that meant hosting on September 12 and 13, meant an exceptionally uncomfortable weekend, where you couldn’t really talk honestly about wars in West Asia or Ukraine. You had to pretend that these weren’t really problems. They were just, you know, they didn’t exist. And then the rest of the BRICS agenda, which did include Saudi Arabia and this sort of support for multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, that just continues with the BRICS very strongly supporting those institutions, committing to giving much more money to the IMF, committing to returning to the neoliberal version of the WTO before the US was sort of ruining that in their defensive and protectionist way. And then we could also talk about the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Junaid: Patrick, just the last one from me and then Aaliya. But it does feel like the excessive enthusiasm about BRICS from even staunch supporters of it, from people that we know, friends like VJ Prashad and Pepe Escobar, it had been tamed quite a lot, especially because of these developments you just pointed to, the way that, in fact, India geopolitically positioned itself so closely to Israel in the genocide against the Palestinians. And then in this war against Iran, it seems like now it’s trying to reintegrate itself back into that framework. However, again, it did seem like that enthusiasm had declined. One, I mean, do you think that they are trying to rehabilitate that and if that’s possible? But more interestingly, I want to ask you, what is the state of the social movements that have a significant critique of BRICS? You have coined BRICS from below. What is the state of those social movements at this point? Patrick: Well, let me come back to that because it’s very uneven. And in some places, like the host India, I’m looking forward to learning from Alia how it feels to be a youth when the Cockroach Janta are raising expectations and winning battles. Let me return to that, but I think the biggest problem for the world left, has been a division between those believing that for example Russia was justified – let’s say explicitly, Vladimir Putin – with his arguments that the NATO expansion, which was done against the logic or against even the the promises of the West in in the early 90s. Don’t forget that Ronald Reagan and then George HW Bush and Angela Merkel, and actually her predecessor was Helmet Kohl and at the time I think it was not just Thatcher but by the early 90s it was her successor John Major, and those guys all committed that they wouldn’t expand NATO to the east of East Germany, and then they violated that again and again under the Clinton, Bush and then Obama governments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMuj6NWlIlA Back |
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