BRICS

Esteban Mercatante discusses how recent global shifts in processes of capital accumulation have contributed to China’s rise, the new (and old) mechanisms big powers use to plunder the Global South, and its implications for anti-imperialist and working-class struggles today.
Patrick Bond — The BRICS summit in Johannesburg concluded on August 24 after a major disappointment: the long-overdue challenge to U.S. dollar hegemony was stillborn due to the bloc’s conservative forces.
Michael Pröbsting — The expansion of BRICS reflects the rise of Chinese and Russian imperialism at the cost of their Western rivals.
Patrick Bond — Talk of a “BRICS+” with new members and a “de-dollarization” agenda are raising the profile of this network to an unprecedented — and unrealistic — level.

Early March 2022 provided a surprising reflection of the extent to which dominant Western norms of international finance could retain hegemony, even as the world’s North-South polarisation suddenly worsened. The Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB) was set up by five countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) – at a 2014 Brazilian conference of presidents.

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By Patrick Bond June 23, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — A ‘think tank’ is sometimes a group of people paid to think, by the people who control the tanks (as Naomi Klein once remarked). Here in Johannesburg, one of South Africa’s highest-profile intellectual vehicles appears to be a victim of drunken driving by scholars from whom we otherwise expect much stronger political navigation skills.
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By Patrick Bond April 23, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Review of African Political Economy —Two leading critics of imperialism – John Smith and David Harvey – have recently fought bitterly on roape.net on over how to interpret geographically-shifting processes of super-exploitation. The risk is that they obscure crucial features of their joint wrath: the unjust accumulation processes and geopolitics that enrich the wealthy and despoil the world environment.
 
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By Renfrey Clarke

April 3, 2017
Links International Journal of Socialist RenewalFor several weeks in mid-December, media outlets were aflame with the news: Russian President Vladimir Putin, no less, had led a cyber-assault on US democracy, hacking the files of the Democratic Party in an effort to secure the election of his ally Donald Trump. Or perhaps, the real source of the tale had nothing to do with Russia: perhaps it was an attempt to reinforce the self-hypnosis of US liberals that Hillary Clinton’s defeat did not stem from the disgust of millions of rust-belt workers at years of disdain and neglect by Democratic Party politicians. Retired US intelligence experts soon shot the “hack” allegations full of holes.[1] But the refutations were ignored by the mainstream media. And the prejudice the allegations created would survive, to strengthen the rationale for Western economic, diplomatic and military pressures on Russia unparalleled in the post-Cold War period.
 
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By Patrick Bond

March 30, 2017 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal – Will the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc ever really challenge the world financial order?