At The Rio Summit, Signs Of BRICS In Retreat – Just When We Need Serious Anti-Imperial Muscle
On Sunday-Monday, July 6-7, leaders from the BRICS countries will meet in Rio de Janeiro for their annual summit. Because Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will also host the UN annual climate summit in December, the BRICS event was pushed relatively early. That means the bloc’s work schedule has been curtailed, even in a year for which much more robust preparation and greater consensus are needed to withstand U.S. imperialist aggression.
Vladimir Putin had hosted 2024’s summit in Kazan, Russia in late-October. In most other years, the dates have been in the busy September-November period, allowing many pre-meetings to set the stage for a more meaningful heads-of-state meeting.
BRICS is far more complicated now, with consensus difficult to reach in part due to the 2023 Johannesburg summit having expanded the bloc to ten member countries (assuming Saudi Arabia is counted, as does Lula, even though last December the Russians ‘froze‘ its participation), and to eleven with Indonesia early in 2025.
They carry an enormous burden in mid-2025: to stand up to Donald Trump’s juggernaut, at a time – as historians may deem this – of the peak moment of his power, winning corporate tax cuts and austerity at home, while bullying countries abroad to bend to his erratic will on trade, aid, climate, public health and especially military matters.
Worse, next year, the bloc will be hosted by India, whose leader Narendra Modi is considered among the most loyal of (several) BRICS elites to Trumpism, due not only to parallel neo-fascist ruling tendencies but also to strongly-overlapping economic, military, migration and regional geopolitical interests.
Hence, even in this crucial period, in which the cry ‘No Kings!’ resonates from the world’s grassroots against Trump, here are ten pessimistic features that can be expected to derail the 2025 BRICS summit:
There will be at best just seven BRICS-member heads of state present, because neither Putin (subject to a 2022 International Criminal Court arrest warrant, for mass child-kidnapping in eastern Ukraine, that must be respected in Brazil) nor Xi Jinping will be present – this being the Chinese leader’s first missed summit – and nor will Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi attend (and don’t expect Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and maybe not even Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian), thus diminishing the gravity of the event;
No expansion of the BRICS is expected this year, as the digestion of new member states and the assessment of new ‘partners’ (a Kazan innovation) continues, given how disruptive the geopolitical scene has become;
To illustrate, invited full-member Saudi Arabia has not yet confirmed or denied its accession (which is predictable, given that Riyadh was Trump’s first overseas visit this year), thereby lowering the bloc’s prestige, and indeed nor have two nominated partners — Algeria and Turkey — indicated whether they will accept their invitations (both had expected full membership late last year, i.e., as Indonesia received and accepted in January);
Internal geopolitical conflicts abound, partly witnessed in the lack of genuine solidarity with Iran during the recent Israeli-American bombings, what with Tehran being the only BRICS capital to forcefully oppose the genocidaires in material terms (apart from South Africa – but then only rhetorically – in The Hague), while all the other nine BRICS have very lucrative economic relations (and most have military, energy and logistics ties);
Also in relation to military conflict, the most populous BRICS founder, India, clashed with neighbor Pakistan in May, in the process revealing strong Chinese military support for Islamabad, sufficiently sophisticated to shoot down several of Delhi’s French-made bombers, while on the Indian side, a Russian missile defense system fended off Chinese-made drones, missiles and jets;
Internal power struggles within the African Union are serious, leading Egypt and Ethiopia to sabotage the latest meeting of BRICS foreign ministers (in April in Rio) due to their opposition to South Africa becoming one of two potential African permanent members of the UN Security Council (a process most likely to resume only after Trump leaves office);
The loyalty of some BRICS elites to the U.S. has been evident, especially in the cases of India and also at the notorious meeting South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa had in the White House in May (when he sought to defuse Elon Musk’s absurd ‘white genocide’ charges), but also in the internal power relations shaped by Brazil’s Western-oriented ruling class, not to mention long-standing U.S.-subimperial allies Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia;
Economically, there remains a serious risk that Trump’s trade wars will result in much greater Chinese ‘dumping’ (sales below costs-of-production under conditions of ‘overaccumulated capital’) of cheap manufactured goods into other BRICS economies, accelerating their deindustrialization (e.g. already resulting in South Africa imposing tariffs against Chinese steel, tyres and other imports);
There will be no progress on de-dollarization, given Washington’s threats to impose extreme tariffs if BRICS were to move in this direction (made by Trump no fewer than seven times from December-February), while the ‘BRICS Pay’ local-currency correlation strategy developed by Russia is difficult to implement fully due to South-South trade imbalances, and China’s strong exchange controls prevent another route to facilitating a long-overdue dollar alternative; and As for new multipolar institutions, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) has five new members (chosen illogically, with very low voting quotas, ranging from the UAE to Bangladesh and most recently Algeria), but one of the five original members, Russia, remains subject to financial sanctions following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine – remaining in force even under (pro-Putin) NDB President Dilma Rousseff over the last two years – due to the bank’s bowing to New York credit rating agencies, and worse, the vast majority of NDB new loans are still denominated in US dollars, and yet worse still, as a much-needed alternative to the International Monetary Fund, there is still no BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, despite the majority of member countries (Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Iran) being rated ‘junk’ (or unrated), and hence desperate for foreign currency injections (and no BRICS credit-ratings agency yet, notwithstanding annual promises to launch an alternative to the New York oligopoly).
Blame Brazil – both state-corporate elites, and civilized society?
Many other features of Brazil’s half-hearted BRICS hosting will continue to receive criticism, especially given the adverse balance of forces in which Bolsonaro supporters and other rightwing forces stymie the Workers Party. In May, Brazilian journalist Marco Fernandes – allied to the Movement of Landless Workers and a member of the BRICS official new People’s Council – remarked to Breakthrough News that in “a country like Brazil, most of the ruling class in Brazil, they still dream to buy houses in Miami, the same for the ruling class in the whole of Latin America. They’d rather align with the U.S. than BRICS or China or Russia, and you can see this for instance right now in in the Brazilian government. There is not like a unity, regarding BRICS, for instance. There are sectors of the government that are more pro-BRICS. There are some sectors of government that are very suspicious of BRICS. And this happens also in South Africa. This happens in India. This happens in Indonesia.”
Even more to the point, five weeks ago, former founding NDB vice president Paulo Batista complained that in Brasilia’s key economic ministries, “what we have there is a collection of neoliberals, all aligned with the Western agenda.” As a result, he continued,
“the Brazilian government is not politically strong. Among other reasons, because it is infested with officials who have little or no identification with the BRICS and maintain priority links with the U.S. and Europe (the famous fifth column). The Foreign Ministry, for example, with a few exceptions, has been dominated by bureaucracy and careerism. The Treasury is silent, with Minister Haddad frequently absent from the debate. The Central Bank has always been an obstacle to the BRICS.”
That may be, but Treasury did attempt three consultations with some of Brazil’s major civil society forces – especially mass social movements and labor – ahead of the July 4-5 Finance Minister meetings. These were, the Treasury claimed, “In line with the objective of Brazil’s BRICS presidency to promote more democratic and transparent global governance… based on the principle that public engagement is a fundamental pillar in shaping inclusive and representative public policies.”
All that may sound trite, yet one Movement of Landless Workers leader, Judite Santos, explained: “For us, it will be an important and symbolic moment, as it will be the first time in the history of BRICS that a summit of leaders listens to the voice of popular movements.”
Yet, in reality, given the power imbalance, will reactionary BRICS elites actually listen to such voices? And is Santos stretching the term ‘popular movements’ beyond recognition? The main event Santos promoted included representatives – albeit not of mass movements – from Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates (and in the majority, extreme repression against social activism prevails).
Not to be found in this space are any hint of movements – officially approved or not – from China, Egypt, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia. With the exception of India, which has regularly held firmly critical ‘People’s BRICS’ counter-summits, these others are among the world’s most impossible sites, when it comes to left civil society counter-summiting.
Moreover, the ten BRICS partner countries that have accepted this status since January are Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam – and most are extremely hostile to any ‘People’s’ anything.
Yet even the term ‘People’s BRICS’ has, since Russia’s Kazan summit, been incorporated deep into officialdom. So a more cynical way to look at this, from the left side of civil society, is that Lula is now repeating a controversial process he initiated late last year when hosting the G20 in Rio, succeeding in suave divide-and-conquer politics that disempowered the alternative Cúpula dos Povos Frente ao G20 – even if he has not done much to respond to the despair and fury experienced by so many Brazilians, with which we must conclude as a silver lining.
From hype to hope to helplessness in the commentariat
Ironically, the public commentator most critical of BRICS 2025 host Lula – gonzo-multipolarist Brazilian-born, Bangkok-based journalist Pepe Escobar – is also simultaneously the most supportive of BRICS in general. He has increasingly expressed worry about what he calls the West’s “hybrid war against BRICS, selected BRICS, including BRICS partners. With the terrorists, we know that it’s a war against one of the top BRICS – China – many of the partners, many of the members and many of the partners, and it’s a war against the Global South, and the global majority, and the emergence of the global majority, and a more unified global majority, a united front, to quote Mao and China again, where China is one of the leaders. The other ones would be Russia, and possibly Iran, depending on how it goes from now on.”
But the big question – as has been the case at least 15 years – is whether there is capacity in BRICS to fight back as anti-imperialists, or in contrast, to succumb as subimperial regimes, which jointly with the West uphold the laws of global capital?
One approach to this question is to hype the BRICS. In late April, Escobar told podcaster Danny Haiphong:
“Now the BRICS under Brazil in early July, they have a rare earth style opportunity, to politely – in a very sophisticated manner, indirectly but forcefully – respond to the Trump tariff offensive. Because the offensive is directed against most of them and to a great deal of the Global South. And this will include how the models that they were testing in terms of alternative payment systems, how they are progressing. I want to see if it’s getting deeper in terms of the unit, for instance, which so far is the best system, completely different and bypassing completely SWIFT. What are the next steps? BRICS Bridge, which was inspired by [the East Asian cross-border central bank digital currency] MBridge, and we have several BRICS members which are involved in it, including Thailand. And Saudi Arabia is still on the fence, and the Emirates. And the People’s Bank of China, very very important, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority… They are fighting against time. But at the same time, they have this extra incentive to come up with something really strong, which will be interpreted all over the Global South and the global majority as the response of the united front to this circus-like Trump tariff offensive. So there are some auspicious aspects to the whole story, you know. And the fact that the Chinese are now very much geared to be on the forefront, and start leading, which they were not until a while ago.”
But two days later (April 30), on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s podcast, Escobar claimed – with more restrained hope:
“So this week in Rio, earlier this week in Rio, they discussed preparations for the summit of course they talked about alternative payment systems. Very very important. And in two interviews that [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov gave – one to CBS in the US and another one to a Brazilian newspaper. These interviews were excellent, because it was explaining what BRICS are actually doing, in terms of, ‘No, it’s not that we’re going to have a BRICS currency tomorrow, no.’ Lavrov said explicitly, once again, explaining to a Western audience, ‘When we have all our models that we are testing in terms of alternative payment systems, etc, then – which means in the next few years – we’re going to start talking about a possible BRICS currency.’ But the progress is visible, the Brazilians have an extraordinary opportunity in less than three months, to be like the agglutinators of the Global South and the global majority and organize a common BRICS answer to the tariff war, for that matter, and for other let’s say deliriums coming from the Trump presidency.”
Sadly, by June 21, as it became clear nearly every BRICS regime had approached Trump individually to ‘kiss my ass‘ (except China, which instead kicked back), there was neither hype nor hope in Escobar’s discussion with another geopolitical podcaster, Brazil-based Nima Alkhorshid. In the wake of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (a Russian answer to the Davos World Economic Forum), Escobar expressed growing helplessness:
“Everything is slowing down, the Brazilian way. But at least we have people like Paulo [Batista], one of the founders of the NDB New Development Bank. He knows that there’s got to be a structural reform of the NDB and all that. And this is something that is practically not discussed even in Russia and in China… Paulo talked online for less than 10 minutes and told the show, it was a panel about a possible reform of the international financial system, and the Russians, there was a Chinese there, was one Chinese, as they were too careful. They, you know, ‘ah we have to go little by little, one step at a time and all that.’ And Paulo says the real thing: ‘No, we have to go for broke and our window of opportunity is, you know, it’s quite small. And the real important reforms, they have to start now.’”
Batista is correct. But because of the lack of political will, due mainly to local financial-sector elites who gaze to New York and London, there simply won’t be sufficient coherence to make any break, by all accounts. Yet again, the BRICS summit experiences takes observers through the now-familiar three stages of hype, hope and helplessness.
(In late May I also witnessed this hesitancy during Brasilia and São Paulo debates; but I disagree with Escobar ,insofar as this is not a matter of ‘slowing down’, Brazilian style – but instead being dragged down by adverse power relations, thanks largely to the overweight gravity of unpatriotic, reactionary BRICS capitalists.)
A last moment of Escobar’s BRICS-helplessness was on display (engagingly with Judge Napolitano again), on July 2, reflected his own presence in Rio. The homecoming left him nostalgic for the beaches, but as for BRICS, “I would not say great expectations, because compared to the Russian presidency last year, the Brazilian presidency this year is meek, to say the least. And I’m being diplomatic… What do we do? Are we going to stop being a hyper polite group of emerging nations or are we going to take a stand against the empire?”
The Russian ‘new growth model’ for BRICS?
To be sure, Escobar came out of St Petersburg in June, veering back to hope:
“It’s no wonder that one of the most important quotes from Putin during his plenary session is that he said we not only we Russia we are betting on BRICS as the future, but we are betting on the constitution of a new growth model with everything that implicates. A new growth model, something completely different to what we have since 1945.”
Completely different? Putin’s St Petersburg plenary speech on June 20 did have rhetoric to that effect:
a global growth platform, built on the key principles of BRICS: consensus, parity, mutual consideration of interests, and – most importantly – openness to all who wish to join this effort… To achieve this, a breakthrough development model is needed, one that is not based on the rules of neo-colonialism, where the so-called golden billion siphons off resources from other countries in the interests of a small group of the so-called elites. Not even in the interests of the people of these countries, but specifically in the interests of the elites… the task is not to modernize the outdated mechanisms of the era of globalization – these have largely exhausted or even discredited themselves. Instead, we must propose a new development model, one free from political manipulations, one that takes into account the national interests of states. Naturally, this model must be focused on the needs of citizens and their families.
Yet most of the details Putin provided, of how Russia was growing, included garden-variety neoliberal marching orders, “It is essential that we consolidate our standing as a major economy by offering a business-friendly environment… We believe that private investment is what we need, and the Russian economy is unlikely to develop effectively without this. Well, this also concerns foreign investment in full measure. We did not evacuate our investors (who worked here for a long time) from Russia, and we did not expel anyone from our country. Many investors quit of their own accord, suffering major losses. But our policy in this sphere has not changed… Nationalization cannot have a positive effect on Russia’s economic growth, and we realize that… We need to pursue sound, well-designed fiscal, tax and monetary policies, aligning these mechanisms above all with the goals of supporting and stimulating growth, while, of course, maintaining macroeconomic, inflationary, and financial stability.”
Putin’s vision was overlaid more than usual by celebration of a Military Industrial Complex that has profited from several hundred thousand working-class Russian deaths and serious injuries (and many more Ukrainians), in turn relying upon the annual export of $200+ billion in fossil fuels: “Wherever feasible, it is vital to achieve integration between the defense industry and the civilian sector, facilitating the production of dual-use goods… Compelling examples include the implementation of surveillance and monitoring systems using artificial intelligence, which has significantly reduced the number of offences, for instance, in Moscow. Additionally, the deployment of inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles has proven effective in targeting expensive military equipment. We will, of course, take into account our own negative experiences. Everything is put to good use to make the necessary and correct decisions in our chosen area. Overall, our defense industry has picked up a good pace. The enterprises have increased the output many times over and are mastering the production of new types of armaments and military equipment.” (emphasis added)
Putin also spoke of “geopolitical tensions that manifest through crises and rapidly escalating regional conflicts, unfortunately visible today in the Middle East” – but apparently that are not visible when it comes to invading Ukraine or skirmishes involving China and India, nor in Russia’s role in terrible theatres of war like Sudan, alongside UAE gold merchants. There, the two BRICS corporates’ influence is just as catastrophic as any of the Western powers’ meddling (although South African-born Musk deserves recognition as a world-leading mass murderer, for taking the chainsaw to Sudanese emergency food aid delivered by USAID).
Only in passing, with no details or follow-up discussion, Putin mentioned “climate change and urgent environmental issues that demand our attention and response.” At the same time, Donald Trump is exiting UN climate negotiations, and Cyril Ramaphosa is attempting to lure Trump to the G20 November 21-22 summit in Johannesburg – an event at which ‘sustainability’ is one of three themes (the other two are ‘solidarity’ and ‘equality’) repellent to Washington – by committing to massively increase Liquefied Natural Gas purchases from U.S. firms (replacing purchases from next-door Mozambique).
So not only Putin’s but all the BRICS’ ecological agendas look like merely tokenistic, add-on phraseology.
When it comes to Big Data, on the one hand, Putin continued, “It is essential that the benefits of these technological breakthroughs are shared broadly, transforming society, reducing poverty, improving quality of life, and providing equal opportunities for every individual to acquire the knowledge needed to fulfil their potential.” But on the other, he bragged about the opposite process:
“Over the past two years, the number of patent applications from domestic companies and research organizations has increased by 13 percent… It is necessary to expand the intellectual property market, specifically by expanding lending opportunities secured by patents and trademarks. These assets should become real business assets that help attract funding for creating or expanding production facilities.”
So in reality, instead of a model “focused on the needs of citizens and their families,” as Putin talk-left advertised his intent, the actual walk-right political economy of most BRICS economies generates all the mordant symptoms of neoliberalism that result in Western-style neo-fascism. Reactionary socio-cultural processes take very different forms in the BRICS, but can be just as lethal as MAGA’s paleo-conservativism to the domestic Other: Brazilian Protestant evangelicism that spiked under Jair Bolsonaro’s rule; Russian homophobia; Indian Islamophobia and patriarchy; Chinese hostility to Muslim Uighurs, Buddhist Tibetans, ethnic Mongolians and Hong Kong democrats; South African xenophobia; and in the new BRICS member regimes, Egyptian militarist authoritarianism; Ethiopian ethnicism; Indonesian police brutality; Iranian discrimination based on religious tyranny especially in relation to gender and sexual preference; and the UAE’s and Saudi Arabia’s tribal, patriarchal autocracy and state stifling of dissent.
BRICS pour petrol on several hot wars
The most reactionary political project in the world today is Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, a point made in Putin’s speech, at which the lack of a genuine new approach became clear: “I want to draw your attention to the fact that nearly two million people in Israel are immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. Today, Israel is almost a Russian-speaking country. In modern Russian history, we have always taken that fact into account.”
When the BRICS meet, Putin’s representative Lavrov will not be alone in sharing nudge-nudge wink-wink support to the Israel Defense Forces. Thousands of BRICS-member citizens are openly fighting Palestinians within Gaza, especially from Russia, Ethiopia, India and South Africa. And war-time profits are accruing to countless BRICS firms with Israeli military-industrial-complex contracts: Brazil’s oil-exporting Petrobras; Russian coal and oil exporters and Kazakh-oil facilitators; India’s Adani privatizer of the old Haifa Port and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) arms supplier, the Bharat Forge weapons partnership with Elbit and Rafael, and many others; Chinese state-owned drone-maker DJI (whose products tracked Yahya Sinwar in his last minutes), port privatizer Shanghai International Port Group (still importing IDF military supplies via the deep-water Haifa Bay Terminal) and firms serving settler colonies in the Occupied West Bank; South African coal companies Glencore and African Rainbow Minerals (owned by Ramaphosa’s brother in law and potential successor), and arms company Paramount;
not to mention numerous companies based in new BRICS members Egypt, UAE, Indonesia and even Ethiopia – indeed all except Iran.
All this should infuriate make Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian – so much that there rumours he would stay away from Rio. In the new, hottest war zone in which on June 13, Israel unilaterally attacked Iran (unprovoked), there was meant to be a security arrangement between Moscow and Tehran, with Beijing also considered an ally. But even with the U.S. joining the bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear energy facilities, there was no evidence of that alliance being of any use to the Iranian state or its people (nearly 1000 of whom were killed over 12 days, compared to 28 Israelis).
It was only on June 24 that BRICS foreign ministers issued a banal statement without any action items, 11 days after Israel’s initial attack:
“We express grave concern over the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran since 13 June 2025… We call on all parties to engage through existing channels of dialogue and diplomacy… We express serious concern over any attacks against peaceful nuclear installations that are carried out in violation of international… We extend our sincere condolences to the families of the victims and express our solidarity with civilians affected… we also reaffirm the necessity of establishing a zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, in line with relevant international resolutions. We call upon the international community to support and facilitate dialogue processes, uphold international law, and contribute constructively to peaceful settlements of disputes for the benefit of all humanity.”
Could mealy-mouthed ‘we express concern’ statements not have been backed by something stronger? Did any of the BRICS look inwards, to their own firms’ technologies, logistics and fuels that powered the IDF attack on their fellow member?
(Without proof, Escobar claims that in mid-June, Russians helped the Iranian army recover after both bombing and software attacks by Israel: “Sometimes as a foreigner I can say things that the Russian media and even Russian media close to the spheres of power cannot. Russia helped Iran to put their military grid back together after it was hacked in the beginning of the Israeli attack. It’s still a taboo subject here in Russia.” But if it’s taboo, why even babble about a supposed security-oriented ‘Primakov Triangle‘ between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran?)
Pushback from below
In this ghastly context, the idea of brics-from-below is vital but at a very low ebb, as witnessed in the success of Lula’s civilized-society cooptation processes. Reflecting Western recognition of that skill, one of the most suave Berlin imperialist agencies – the Liberal Party’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation – unveiled (a few days before the Rio summit) their expectations for the Brazilian president’s neoliberal tap-dance:
“Lula is unlikely to be interested in being drawn into current international conflicts at the summit and will instead endeavour to find ‘diplomatic formulations’ in the final declaration that are both face-saving and non-binding for all parties involved… Brazil will endeavour to advance concrete measures for further cooperation in the BRICS group on consensus topics, while avoiding conflict-prone topics or moderating them diplomatically, particularly in order to avoid provoking new tensions with the USA under Trump. Germany and Europe have the opportunity to utilize Brazil’s pragmatic foreign policy approach to intensify political and economic cooperation. The EU-Mercosur [Free Trade] Agreement which is now finally due for ratification after 30 years of negotiations, offers the best framework for this.”
The late Brazilian dependency theorist Ruy Mauro Marini would have nodded in recognition at European corporate expansion into Latin America facilitated by Lula; in 1965, he coined the term ‘subimperialist’ to describe his post-coup homeland: “It is not a question of passively accepting North American power (although the actual correlation of forces often leads to that result), but rather of collaborating actively with imperialist expansion, assuming in this expansion the position of a key nation.”
Next door in Uruguay, six years later, novelist Eduardo Galeano used Open Veins of Latin America to lament how “Subimperialism has a thousand faces” – especially Brazilian ones.
The thousand faces of resistance to imperialist expansion are certainly present in today’s Brazil, even if they really have no chance in the near future to become, quoting Escobar, “the agglutinators of the Global South and the global majority and organize a common BRICS answer to the tariff war, for that matter, and for other let’s say deliriums coming from the Trump presidency” … and his subimperial BRICS-elite allies.
Those Brazilian dissidents include the mass base (albeit perhaps not the leadership) of the Landless Workers’ Movement, which in April organized 55 local actions for the International Day of Peasant Struggles that included public-office occupations, mutual-aid feeding projects, demonstrations and marches – many expressing strong grievances against Lula’s compromised government.
And even if Central Única dos Trabalhadores labor movement leaders are also coopted into official BRICS ‘People’s Council’ events this coming weekend, their workers and allies were out in force on May 1 with angry demands for a shorter work week and higher net wages, made to the Workers Party-led state. University and high school students were already protesting hard last year, against both government’s failure to restore education funding following Bolsonaro’s brutal budget cuts, as well as Lula’s failure to cut ties to Israel.
And perhaps with most intensity, environmentalists and Indigenous Brazilians have criticized the national legislature’s ‘devastation bill,’ eerily parallel to Trump’s gutting of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. One feature of this is Lula’s personal promotion of Petrobras oil drilling at the confluence of the Amazon River and Atlantic Ocean (as well as offshore the South African Atlantic coastline), the subject of a major June 17 demonstration in Rio.
So even at a low ebb, the global left can look to Brazilians for inspiration, but not BRICS-from-above elites and Brics-from-the-middle functionaries (categories that Ana Garcia helps develop); instead, to the grassroots, labor, social and environmental movements (and allied intellectuals) who offer resistance to both Western and BRICS capital and states, on numerous grounds.
(Yes, the category of allied intellectuals is still segregated in parentheses, because we do tend to be unreliable. And I don’t mean by that the small army of Brics-from-the-middle careerists, conslutants and think-tankers who convulsively express BRICS-hype. Instead, to illustrate, I anxiously wait for two of the most experienced global-left strategists – Walden Bello and Boaventura de Sousa Santos – to notice bottom-up dissident movements and give them their due endorsement, instead of vainly investing hope in BRICS elites, as they did this week, sigh.)
Bottom-up critiques of both the Western and BRICS states and capitalists will only grow more profound and insistent, the more wisdom is gathered about imperialist assimilation of subimperial BRICS, which in turn have so far either co-opted or crushed (or mainly just ignored) their popular movements, and too often also crushed those resistance movements in quasi-colonized peripheral countries which BRICS corporates plunder, as Galeano reminds.
The latter’s grievances will grow, about the West+BRICS’ often catalytic involvement in: unjust wars and violations of sovereignty; worsening income and wealth inequality; sometimes extreme levels of poverty and unemployment; often-unchecked worker exploitation and violations of labor rights; Covid-19 pandemic mismanagement (and failure to support vaccines as global public goods as two BRICS leaders, Ramaphosa and Modi, had requested); their firms’ looting of poor countries’ resources; their economies’ extreme contributions to climate change and ecocide; high levels of violence against women; abusive high technology, censorship and sometimes extreme surveillance; austerity and neo-liberalism; the BRICS’ fake-news (and so desperately-needed) de-dollarization gambits; human rights abuses; LGBTQI+ repression; tyrannical rule; and venal corruption in many if not most regimes, led now by Washington but certainly including BRICS capitals.
There is, frankly, little or no scope yet to link all or most of these struggles, whether in Rio this weekend or in Joburg for the G20 summit in November. Actually, even if we do see protests against the West+BRICS later this year (especially if Trump accepts Ramaphosa’s obsequious invitation for a game of golf nearby) – especially by the feisty Palestine solidarity and climate-justice movements here – activists will still be secluded away in a barren park at a distance of 3.6 km, as happened two years ago when diverse groups opposed the BRICS summit at the same financial-district convention centre.
But there’s still time to learn – and avoid – these latest BRICS lessons of degenerating hype, hope and helplessness, and adopt a very different approach to anti-imperialist and anti-subimperialist resistance.
By Patrick Bond