To: Detroit Workers' Voice mailing list
March 18, 2013
RE: the anti-BRICS counter-summit in Durban, South Africa
The leaders of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) will be holding their fifth annual summit on March 26-27 in Durban, South Africa. But this time a counter-summit is being organized by several groups of activists involved in environmental and social issues.
The counter-summit will be a significant event. It may help spread knowledge of the real nature of the bourgeoisie of the BRICS countries; it will highlight the policies of market fundamentalism, environmental devastation, and support for dictatorial regimes carried out by the BRICS' governments and BRICS' bourgeoisies.
There are reformist parties and even militant activists who regard the governments of the BRICS countries as bulwarks against US and Western imperialism, but in fact the BRICS countries are major capitalist regional powers. They are imperialists and would-be imperialists in their own right. It is the working people of the world, not the governments of the lesser imperialist powers, which is the only true basis for a struggle against world imperialism, including US imperialism. Activists who haven't yet broken decisively with today's widespread market illusions think that the BRICS countries have policies that are fundamentally different from Western and American neo-liberalism. But this is not so. The bourgeoisies and governments of BRICS countries work with the major world capitalist agencies likes the IMF and World Bank, and both cooperate and haggle with US and Western imperialism. South Africa, for example, is today one of the most zealously neo-liberal countries in the world, and inequality has skyrocketed there under the rule of the African National Congress. And no matter which group of imperialists dominates the World Bank, the IMF, and the neo-liberal trade agreements, these institutions will remain tools of the bourgeoisie to exploit the masses and enforce the interests of the various imperialist powers.
So help spread news of the anti-BRICS summit and study the record of the bourgeoisie and governments of the BRICS countries! At the same time, we should assess realistically the nature of the different activist trends at the anti-BRICS events. The fact that the counter-summit is promoted as a meeting of "civil society" shows that in South Africa, as elsewhere around the world, there is still a long way to go before we see the development of an independent working class movement. The conference brings together activists who dream of a "bottoms-up" rather than "top down" approach to politics and who are engaged in struggles against some of the great outrages of the current capitalist system. But it mixes together activists oriented to the oppressed masses with NGOs and civil society, and there is still no general consciousness among the militant activists of the need to build a movement independent of all the exploiting bourgeoisies and with a policy distinct from that of the bourgeois reform movements of "civil society".
Below we reproduce three articles of interest concerning the BRICS countries.
(1) An excerpt from the announcement of the BRICS
counter-summit.
(2) An article by Patrick Bond, an activist with the militant wing of the protest movements in South Africa and one of the main organizers of the anti-BRICS summit. He describes some of the crimes of the BRICS governments, and he highlights their hostile class nature by calling the BRICS countries sub-imperialist, not anti-imperialist. We don't share all his views, and we wouldn't attribute the failure of various reformist schemes simply to the sabotage by the BRICS, as harmful as that sabotage was. But he provides an overview of BRICS activities, in order to help encourage a more realistic assessment of the BRICS alliance.
(3) Excerpts from an article in our journal Communist Voice on the rise of new imperialisms over the last century.
Join a civil society summit during the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa heads-of-state summit in Durban, March 22-27 with groundWork, the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance and CCS [the Centre for Civil Society]. In Durban, South Africa, five heads of state meet in late March, to assure the rest of Africa that their countries' corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and US multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA (BRICS) summit has invited 25 heads of state from Africa, many of whom are notorious tyrants. Given how much is at stake, critical civil society must scrutinise the claims, the processes and the outcomes of the BRICS summit and its aftermath. In Durban, three local organisations with a strong track record of advocacy and research on social, economic and ecological justice propose several events between 22-27 March, with the aim of raising critical voices so that long-overdue social, ecological, political, economic and other rights-related concerns are no longer ignored by BRICS leaders.
For more on the counter-summit see
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/brics-from-below%20call%20version%2017%20March.pdfThe heads of state of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa
(BRICS) network of governments
are coming to Durban, South Africa, in four months, meeting on
March
26-27 at the International Convention Centre (ICC), Africa's largest
venue. Given their recent performance, it is reasonable to expect
another "1%" summit, wreaking socioeconomic and ecological havoc. And
that means it is time for the first BRICS countersummit, to
critique
top-down "sub-imperialist" bloc formation, and to offer bottom-up
alternatives.
After all, we have had some bad experiences at the Durban ICC.
"The Durban Platform [at the 2011 UN Climate Change Summit]
was promising because of what it did not say",
bragged US State Department official Trevor Houser to the New York
Times. "There is no mention of historic responsibility or per
capita
emissions. There is no mention of economic development as the priority
for developing countries. There is no mention of a difference between
developed and developing country action."
The Durban deal squashed poor countries' ability to defend against
climate disaster. With South African foreign minister Maite
Nkoana-Mashabane in the chair, the COP17 confirmed this century's
climate-related deaths of what will be more than 180 million Africans,
according to Christian Aid. Already 400,000 people die each year from
climate-related chaos due to catastrophes in agriculture, public health
and "frankenstorms" like last month's Hurricane Sandy.
Degeneration of global governance is logical when Washington unites
with
the BRICS countries, as was first demonstrated three years ago with the
Copenhagen Accord [at the 2009 UN Climate Change Summit]. At the COP
climate talks, South Africa's Jacob Zuma, Brazil's Lula da Silva,
China's Wen Jiabao and India's Manmohan Singh joined Barack Obama to
foil the Kyoto Protocol's mandatory emissions cuts, thus confirming
that
at least 4 degrees Celsius global warming will occur by 2100. "They
broke the UN", concluded Bill McKibben from the climate advocacy
movement 350.org.
The negotiators were explicitly acting on behalf of their fossil fuel
and extractive industries. Similar cozy ties between Pretoria
politicians, London-based mining houses, Johannesburg "black economic
empowerment" tycoons and sweetheart trade unions have since been
exposed
by the police massacre of striking Marikana mineworkers, with another
blast against the climate anticipated when fracking soon begins in the
Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal's Drakensburg Mountains,
driven by multinational corporate oil firms led by Shell.
The 2012 Yale and Columbia University Environmental Performance Index
showed that aside from Brazil, the other BRICS states are decimating
their -- and the Earth's -- ecology at the most rapid rate of any group
of countries, with Russia and South Africa near the bottom of world
stewardship rankings.
Like Berlin in 1884-85 [the infamous Berlin West Africa Conference
of
1884-85 which accelerated the carving up of Africa among European
colonial powers], the BRICS Durban summit is expected to carve up
Africa
more efficiently, unburdened -- now as then -- by what will be derided
as "Western" concerns about democracy and human rights. Reading between
the lines, its resolutions will:
The question is whether in exchange for the Durban summit amplifying
such destructive tendencies, which appears certain, can those few of
Africa's elites who may be invited leverage any greater influence in
world economic management via the BRICS? With South Africa's finance
minister Pravin Gordhan's regular critiques of the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF), there is certainly potential for
BRICS to "talk left" about the global-governance democracy deficit.
But watch the "walk right" carefully. In the vote for World Bank
president earlier this year, for example, Pretoria's choice was
hard-core Washington ideologue Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian
finance
minister who with IMF managing director Christine Lagarde catalysed the
Occupy movement's near revolution in January, with a removal of petrol
subsidies. Brasilia chose the moderate economist Jose Antonio Ocampo
and
Moscow backed Washington's choice: Jim Yong Kim.
This was a repeat of the prior year's fiasco in the race for IMF
managing director, won by Lagarde in spite of ongoing corruption
investigations against her by French courts, because the Third World
was
divided and conquered. BRICS appeared in both cases as incompetent,
unable to even agree on a sole candidate, much less win their case in
Washington.
Yet in July, BRICS treasuries sent US$100 billion in new capital to the
IMF, which was seeking new systems of bail-out for banks exposed in
Europe. South Africa's contribution was only $2 billion, a huge sum for
Gordhan to muster against local trade union opposition. Explaining the
South African contribution -- initially he said it would be only one
tenth as large -- Gordhan told Moneyweb last year that it was
on
condition that the IMF became more "nasty" (sic) to desperate European
borrowers, as if the Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish poor and
working people were not suffering enough.
And the result of this BRICS intervention is that China gains IMF
voting
power, but Africa actually loses a substantial fraction of its share.
Even Gordhan admitted at last month's Tokyo meeting of the IMF and
world
Bank that it is likely "the vast majority of emerging and developing
countries will lose quota shares -- an outcome that will perpetuate the
democratic deficit." And given "the crisis of legitimacy, credibility
and effectiveness of the IMF", it "is simply untenable" that Africa
only
has two seats for its 45 member countries.
Likewise, South Africa's role in Africa has been "nasty", as confirmed
when Nepad was deemed "philosophically spot on" by lead US State
Department Africa official Walter Kansteiner in 2003, and foisted
privatisation of even basic services on the continent. In a telling
incident this year, the Johannesburg parastatal firm Rand Water was
forced to leave Ghana after failing -- with a Dutch for-profit partner
(Aqua Vitens) -- to improve Accra's water supply, as also happened in
Maputo, Mozambique, (Saur from Paris) and Dar es Salaam (Biwater from
London) in Tanzania.
As a matter of principle, BRICS appears hell bent on promoting the
further commodification of life, at a time when the greatest victory
won
by ordinary Africans in the last decade is under attack: the winning of
the Treatment Action Campaign's demand for affordable access to AIDS
medicines, via India's cheap generic versions of drugs. A decade ago,
they cost $10,000 per person per year and only a tiny fraction of
desperate people received the medicines. Now, more than 1.5 million
South Africans -- and millions more in the rest of Africa -- get
treatment, thus raising the South Africa's average life expectancy from
52 in 2004 to 60 today, according to reliable statistics released this
month.
However, in recent months, Obama has put an intense squeeze on India
to
cut back on generic medicine R&D and production, as well as making
deep
cuts in his own government's aid commitment to fund African healthcare.
In Durban, the city that is home to the most HIV+ people in the world,
Obama's move resulted in this year's closure of AIDS public treatment
centres at three crucial sites. One was the city's McCord Hospital,
which ironically was a long-standing ally of the NGO Partners in
Health,
whose cofounder was Obama's pick for World Bank president, Jim Kim.
So we must ask, are the BRICS "anti-imperialist" -- or instead, "sub-imperialist", doing deputy-sheriff duty for global corporations, while controlling their own angry populaces as well as their hinterlands? The eco-destructive, consumerist-centric, over-financialised, climate-frying maldevelopment model throughout the BRICS works very well for corporate profits, but the model is generating crises for 99% of the people and for the planet.
Hence the label sub-imperialist is tempting. As originally
formulated
during the 1970s, Ruy Mauro Marini argued that his native Brazil is
"the
best current manifestation of sub-imperialism", for the following
reasons:
Matters subsequently degenerated on all fronts. In addition to these
three criteria -- regional economic extraction, "export of capital"
(always associated with subsequent imperialist politics) and internal
corporate monopolisation and financialisation -- there are two
additional roles of BRICS if its components are genuinely
sub-imperialist. One is to ensure regional geopolitical "stability":
for example, Brasilia's hated army in Haiti and Pretoria's deal-making
in
African hotspots like South Sudan and the Great Lakes countries, for
which a $5 billion arms deal serves as military back-up.
The second is to advance the broader agenda of neoliberalism, so as
to
legitimate continuing market access -- typical of South Africa's Nepad,
China, Brazil and India's attempt to revive the WTO and Brazil's
sabotage of the left project within the "Bank of the South" initiative.
As Belgian political economist Eric Toussaint remarked at a World
Social
Forum panel in Porto Alegre in 2009, "The definition of Brazil as a
peripheral imperialist power is not dependent on which political party
is in power. The word imperialism may seem excessive because it is
associated with an aggressive military policy. But this is a narrow
perception of imperialism."
A richer framing for contemporary imperialism is, according to
agrarian
scholars Paris Yeros and Sam Moyo, a system "based on the super-exploitation
of domestic labour. It was natural, therefore,
that, as it grew, it would require external markets for the resolution
of its profit realisation crisis." This notion, derived from Rosa
Luxemburg's thinking a century ago, focuses on how capitalism's
extra-economic coercive capacities loot mutual aid systems and commons
facilities, families (women especially), the land, all forms of nature,
and the shrinking state -- and has also been named "accumulation by
dispossession"' by David Harvey, and in special cases evoking
militarist
intervention, Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine".
Along with renewed looting are various symptoms of internal crisis
and
socioeconomic oppressions one can find in many BRICS, including severe
inequality, poverty, unemployment, disease, violence (again, especially
against women), inadequate education, prohibitions on labour organising
and other suffering.
The rising inequality within BRICS -- except for Brazil, whose
minimum
wage increase lowered the extreme Gini coefficient to at least a bit
below South Africa's -- is accompanied by worsening social tensions,
which in turn is met with worsening political and civil rights
violations, such as increased securitisation of societies,
militarisation and arms trading, prohibitions on protest, rising media
repression and official secrecy, debilitating patriarchy and
homophobia,
activist jailings and torture, and even massacres (including in Durban,
where a notorious police hit squad has killed more than 50 people in
recent years, and even after exposure by local media and attempted
prosecutions, continues unpunished today).
The forms of sub-imperialism within BRICS are diverse, for as Yeros
and
Moyo remark, "Some are driven by private blocs of capital with strong
state support (Brazil, India); others, like China, include the direct
participation of state-owned enterprises; while in the case of South
Africa, it is increasingly difficult to speak of an autonomous domestic
bourgeoisie, given the extreme degree of de-nationalisation of its
economy in the post-apartheid period. The degree of participation in
the
Western military project is also different from one case to the next
although, one might say, there is a 'schizophrenia' to all this,
typical
of 'sub-imperialism'."
As a result, all these tendencies warrant opposition from everyone
concerned. The damage is going to be ever easier to observe, the more
that BRICS leaders prop up the IMF's pro-austerity financing and
catalyse a renewed round of World Trade Organization attacks; the more
a
new BRICS Development Bank exacerbates the World Bank's human,
ecological and economic messes; the more Africa becomes a battleground
for internecine conflicts between sub-imperialists intent on rapid
minerals and oil extraction (as is common in central Africa); and the
more specific companies targeted by victims require unified campaigning
and boycotts to generate solidaristic counter-pressure, whether its
Brazil's Vale and Petrobras, or South Africa's Anglo or BHP Billiton
(albeit with London and Melbourne HQs), or India's Tata or
Arcelor-Mittal, or Chinese state-owned firms and Russian energy
corporations.
One opportunity to link issues and connect the dots between
campaigns
so
as to find a unifying anti-subimperialism that aligns with our critique
of global capitalism, is within a Durban uncivil-society counter-summit
on March 23-27, 2013. Like the rest of South Africa, Durban has
witnessed an upsurge of socioeconomic conflict in recent months, and it
is incumbent upon visitors to understand where tensions are emerging so
that similar processes in the other BRICS are not left isolated.
An overall objective is to "rebuild BRICS from below", so the usual
"globalisation-from-the-middle" talk shops -- featuring speeches by
petit-bourgeois NGO strategists and radical intellectuals (like myself)
-- must be balanced through community-based teach-ins where reality
tours and sharing between oppressed peoples take precedence.
One of the most critical sites is South Durban, where a $30 billion
project to destroy two black neighbourhoods (Clairwood and Merebank)
through 10-fold expansion of shipping, freight and petrochemical
activity is being vigorously contested. The narratives of the
communities resisting go well beyond "not in my back yard" reasoning,
and instead much more widely question the extractivist, export-oriented
model of maldevelopment that has seduced the current South African
government, as well as other BRICS. <>
A century ago, in the years leading up to World War I, the struggle
by
the Great Powers to enlarge their vast colonial holdings led to wide
talk about a period of imperialism. This was a period of renewed
international tensions, as each Great Power sought to encroach on the
empires of its rivals. The ensuing disaster of World War I led to the
development and spread of the Leninist theory of imperialism. It
emphasized that the cause of colonial wars and other rivalries of the
major powers was the development of monopoly capitalism; that monopoly
capitalism was paving the way economically towards a new system that
would supplant capitalism; and that working class revolution would be
the midwife of this new system.
There have been great changes in the world situation since then. The
major world colonial empires have collapsed. International governmental
organizations such as the UN, the WTO, and the IMF, regulating, to some
extent, some aspects of international economics and politics, have
taken
on an unprecedented prominence.
Some say that this makes the Leninist theory outdated, or even means
that imperialism no longer exists, although there's much less of that
talk since the Afghan and Iraqi wars. But a closer look shows that, on
the contrary, the present world tensions verify precisely the Leninist
theory of imperialism, which pointed to monopoly capitalism as the
economic base for the massive bloodshed and militarism and other
features of imperialism. The old empires are gone, but monopoly
capitalism remains, and sure enough, so are wars, relations of
domination and subordination among countries, and bitter exploitation
of
weak countries by strong. The old empires are gone, but empire-building
of a new sort remains; today even many bourgeois ideologues talk about
the present imperial system.
Today, as regard to colonies, the picture of the world is quite
different from what it was on the eve of World War I. The vast world
wave of anti-colonial revolt in the twentieth century led to the
dissolution of the old colonial empires. Among the former colonies and
semi-colonies there has been an explosion of capitalist development.
Some of these countries have become major capitalist countries and
perhaps regional powers, and may deserve to be called imperialist
countries. As a result, today the majority of the world's population
doesn't live in colonies or semi-colonies but in imperialist countries
and regional powers, including lesser and would-be imperialist
countries.
Thus China, a former semi-colony, has become not only an imperialist power, but a Great Power. Its economy is taking on a greater and greater world significance; it is competing with the other world powers for influence in Africa, Latin America, and Asia; and it is a nuclear power which is continually strengthening and modernizing its military. The former colony of India, too, has developed rapidly. It has its own monopoly capital; its big bourgeoisie makes major investments in other countries including the most developed ones; it is a nuclear power; and it is continually striving to modernize and strengthen its armed forces.
If China and India were the only former members of the colonial and
semicolonial world that had become imperialist, this would still
represent a major change in the world. They may be only two among about
two hundred presently-independent countries, but they have over a third
of the world's population between them, and three-fifths of Asia's
population.
But in fact capitalism has developed rapidly in most of the former
colonies and semi-colonies. In any of these countries which have a
certain weight or power or geopolitical advantage, the bourgeoisie
generally strives to become a regional power in its own right (Turkey,
Indonesia, Iran, Iraq in the 1980s, etc. ), or to have its own place in
the imperialist world. How this striving is manifested depends on the
history of these countries, how far they are within the spheres of
influence of more powerful countries, and how powerful they themselves
are. On a world scale, these countries are subordinate to the main
imperialist powers, but they seek to climb the scale of influence and
power.
Today there are relatively few outright colonies left. The overwhelming
majority of the world's people live in imperialist powers or
subordinate
capitalist countries. Moreover, among the subordinate capitalist
countries, a disproportionate role is occupied by the more powerful
ones, such as the would-be imperialist countries and the regional
powers. No doubt, there are also a large number of people in small and
very weak countries, but the overall picture of the world situation has
changed. The great anti-colonial movements of the past have radically
revised it. And this new picture has changed the prospects for how
revolution will take place, for it has brought the class struggle more
to the fore.
It is often objected that the existence of poverty and growing
inequality in the former colonies and semicolonies, including the very
largest and most powerful of them such as China and India, shows that
their status hasn't really changed. Since they have not achieved decent
living standards for all their people, it is held that their
development
must not be real, but sham. The significance of the growth of an
ambitious local bourgeoisie with its own predatory interests is
overlooked.
But capitalist development has always been accompanied by the growth
of
insecurity and inequality. It has gone hand-in-hand with the
development
of mass devastation in many of these countries; and the growth of the
capitalist world economy has been accompany by increasing inequality
between different countries and regions, as well as inside each
country.
Thus the growing gap between the countryside and the city in both China
and India does not disprove the existence of economic development, but
is a typical result of capitalist development. Meanwhile, some
countries and regions push forward, and some fall back. The East Asian
tigers
have
grown rapidly. But the last two decades of neo-liberal reforms have
seen
the the economic ravaging of much of Africa, and the stagnation of much
of Latin America.
The old colonial empires are mainly gone, but this does not mean
imperialism is gone. The colonial empires were only one feature of
imperialism. Other characteristic features of imperialism remain. The
domination of great powers over weaker countries remains. One country,
the US, is the world's sole remaining superpower, with the ability to
apply pressure throughout the entire world. Meanwhile the US and other
imperialist powers carve out particular spheres of influence in various
regions of the world. Thus the world is still caught in a net of
domination and subordination between countries.
Among the features of this continuing imperialism are the following:
Thus capitalism hasn't become civilized. As it has gone into the
twenty-first century, it has retained the basic features of the old
imperialism, albeit with certain modifications.
For the rest of the article, see
http:www.communistvoice.org/38cImperialism.html.
<>
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