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My quibble with the sub- characterization of the BRICS is that it
implies they act on behalf of one or another major or full-fledged
imperialist power, whereas they are mainly acting out of their own
self-interest, albeit in contexts where they are not the strongest powers.
Well Fred, what, in this sense, is an "imperialist power"? A country,
and indeed one led by a con-man president such as Donald J Trump?
And from the standpoint of the BRICS, what is "their" self-interest?
Who's 'they'? If the leading capitalist blocs (neoliberal, financial and
export mining in my South African case) controlling a state are
perfectly happy to endorse BRICS as sub-imperial within a world system
from which they derive maximum profits and hide their wealth (as was the
case until the 'Zupta' power bloc went out of control on corruption
around five years ago), then sub-impi is what we can call it.
So isn't it more satisfying, politically and intellectually, to consider
the broader imperial project of accumulation through global corporate
power relations, and assess each conjunctural situation on its own merits?
a German journal, out today
http://welttrends.de/
Weltmächte im Wartestand?
/WeltTrends/
WeltTrends 136 Februar 2018
South Africa suffers political-economic poisoning from its BRICS membership
By Patrick Bond
The emergence of an alliance between Brazil, Russia, India, China and
South Africa in 2010 signaled enormous potential for a new political
arrangement to challenge Western hegemony. The reality, however, has
disappointed constituencies, especially in the most unequal and troubled
of the five countries, South Africa, where leaderships talks left but
walks right.
***
Jacob Zuma will likely exit the South African presidency earlier than
the next national elections, due within fifteen months. He will leave,
presumably, with certain guarantees against prosecution for large-scale
corruption. He also must give sufficient time to his successor, Cyril
Ramaphosa, to erase the electorate’s memory of the so-called ‘Zupta’
networks combining Zuma’s cronies with the three Gupta brothers, who are
Indian immigrants. Their ‘state capture’ strategy since Zuma took power
in 2009 included a luxurious family wedding in 2013 that notoriously
violated immigration and airport security regulations; the costs were
paid from agricultural support meant for black farmers in the Free State
province. Nearly €1 billion per year was lost to Zupta looting,
according to the former finance minister Pravin Gordhan.[1] (To be sure,
that is a small fraction of the €15 billion lost annually to
overcharging on state procurement contracts by what is the world’s most
corrupt business elite, Johannesburg’s, according to
PricewaterhouseCoopers polling.)[2]
Just before the December holiday break, Ramaphosa’s party presidential
acceptance speech at the African National Congress (ANC) convention
followed a tight election with former African Union chairperson
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who if victorious was widely expected to pardon
her ex-husband Jacob. Ramaphosa graciously thanked Zuma for promoting
the 2012 National Development Plan (NDP) and providing four million
South Africans with free AIDS medicines. Indeed, the latter
accomplishment helped raise life expectancy by 12 years from the early
2000s trough of 52. But the Treatment Action Campaign’s world-historic
battle against Big Pharmacorp profiteering and President Thabo Mbeki’s
AIDS denialism had already been won largely without Zuma’s visible
assistance back in 2004.
Ramaphosa himself will proudly enforce the NDP in coming years, as he
was its co-author. Lacking climate-change consciousness, the NDP’s top
priority infrastructure commitment is a €55 billion rail line, mainly to
export 18 billion tons of coal, entailing 50 major projects of which 14
have already begun.[3] The rail agency, Transnet, has a €4.2 billion
credit from China to finance Chinese-made locomotives that are
sufficiently strong to carry 3 kilometre-long coal trains, though
corruption is already a major problem with the acquisitions.[4] Zuma’s
desired €100 billion purchase of eight nuclear energy reactors from
Rosatom is now highly unlikely thanks to Pretoria’s worsening debt
crisis, so that really leaves just one accomplishment as his legacy:
annual networking with leaders in Beijing, Brasilia, Delhi and Moscow.
BRICS reforms?
Conventional wisdom, as expressed by foreign policy scholar Oscar van
Heerden in late 2017, is that Zuma “ensured our ascendency into the
BRICS Geo-Strategic grouping, made up of Brazil, Russia, India and
China: the emerging economies in the world. This is important because in
the pursuit of a more equitable and fairer world order, this grouping
provides a counterweight to the dominant Western powers. BRICS provides
access to better trade relations as well as better global security
arrangements.”[5]
But conventional wisdom needs a reality check, for the BRICS have
amplified unfair and inequitable world order processes, especially when
pursuing global finance, climate and trade governance:
· The International Monetary Fund’s 2010-15 board restructuring
left four of the BRICS much more powerful (e.g. China by 37%) but most
African countries with a much lower voting share (e.g. Nigeria’s fell by
41% and South Africa’s by 21%). BRICS directors thrice (in 2011, 2015
and 2016) agreed with Western counterparts to endorse leadership by IMF
managing director Christine Lagarde, even though she was prosecuted –
and in 2016 declared guilty of negligence – in a €400 million criminal
corruption case dating to her years as French finance minister.
Moreover, the BRICS €84 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement
strengthens the IMF by compelling borrowers to first get an IMF loan
before accessing 70% of their quota contributions during times of
financial emergencies, while leadership of the BRICS New Development
Bank – which has no civil society oversight – brag of co-financing and
staff sharing arrangements with the World Bank.[6]
· The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement left Africa without any
‘climate debt’ options against the West and BRICS, since legal claims
for signatories’ liability are prohibited. The Paris emissions cuts
commitments are too small and in any case non-binding. Military,
maritime and air transport emissions are not covered, while carbon
markets are endorsed. Thus climate catastrophe is inevitable, mainly to
the benefit of high-carbon industries in the rich and middle-income
countries.[7]
· The 2015 Nairobi World Trade Organisation summit essentially
ended agricultural subsidies and hence food sovereignty thanks to
crucial alliances made with Washington and Brussels negotiators, from
Brasilia and New Delhi representatives.[8]
BRICS elites were vital allies of the West in each recent site of global
malgovernance. However, the short-term victories that benefit their
neoliberal, pollution-intensive corporations and parastatal agencies
come at a difficult time. The allegedly ‘better trade arrangements’ in
the BRICS era, in reality, accompanied a major relative decline in trade
measured in relation to GDP.
From 2008-16, global trade/GDP declined from 61% to 58%. But China’s
trade/GDP rate fell from 53% to 36%; India’s from 53% to 40%; South
Africa’s from 73% to 60%; Russia’s from 53% to 45%; and Brazil’s from
28% to 25%.[9] In the first two BRICS, the crash was a function of
rebalancing through higher domestic consumption rather than export-led
growth. But declining trade shares for South Africa, Russia and Brazil
reflect peaking commodity prices just before the global financial
meltdown that year, followed by subsequent recessions.
Geopolitical turmoil
Ironically, regarding ‘better global security arrangements,’ the world
is much more dangerous since the BRICS took their present form in 2010:
in Syria and the Gulf States, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula and the
South China Sea. Even the Chinese-Indian border is rife with
confrontations: mid-2017 fighting between the two giants nearly
derailing the BRICS annual meeting. That followed Narendra Modi’s
boycott of the Belt and Road Initiative summit last May, due to
Beijing’s mega-project trespassing on what New Delhi considers its own
Kashmir land now held by Pakistan. For Xi it is the crucial turf linking
western China to the Arabian Sea’s Gwadar port. There is no resolution
in sight.
As a geopolitical bloc, the BRICS’ public security interventions have
occurred strictly within the context of the G20: first, to prevent
Barack Obama from bombing Syria using pressure at the larger group’s
September 2013 summit in St Petersburg, and then six months later in
Amsterdam, supporting the Russian invasion (or ‘liberation’) of Crimea
once the West made threats to expel Moscow from the G20 – just as the
U.S. and Europe had thrown Vladimir Putin out of the G8, now G7.
However, when Donald Trump came to last July’s G20 summit in Hamburg,
the BRICS leaders were extremely polite notwithstanding widespread calls
to introduce anti-U.S. sanctions due to Trump’s withdrawal from global
climate commitments just a month earlier.
Fortunately, military and political security in the Southern African
region has improved from prior eras. More than two million people were
killed by white regimes and their proxies in frontline anti-colonial and
anti-apartheid struggles during the 1970s-80s and there were more
millions who died in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)
during the early 2000s’ period of extreme resource extraction. The two
recent armed interventions by Pretoria in the region were to join United
Nations peacekeeping troops in the DRC (2013-present) and aid the
beleaguered authoritarian regime in the Central African Republic
(2006-13). Both are considered political-military failures insofar as
violence continues in both sites; and in the latter’s capital city
Bangui, more than a dozen of Pretoria’s troops were killed in 2013
defending the Johannesburg firms pursuing lucrative contracts, just days
before a BRICS “Gateway to Africa” summit in Durban, South Africa.[10]
As for local security, major upsurges of protest against injustice in
each BRICS country have been met with crackdowns and extreme
surveillance. The worst moment in South Africa was August 16, 2012, when
three dozen mineworkers were massacred by police. They were “acting
pointedly” at the explicit request (by email the day before) of the main
local shareholder of the Lonmin platinum mining company, who demanded
“concomitant action” against the “dastardly criminals” – i.e., 4000
mineworkers on a wildcat strike over miserable pay and living
conditions. That shareholder was Cyril Ramaphosa.[11]
BRICS poison
In sum, conventional wisdom about the BRICS’ liberatory agenda remains
dubious. And even at the level of personal security, two out of South
Africa’s three top politicians are worried. Zuma himself regularly
claims his near death from the toxic compound ricin in 2014, before
rapidly acquiring treatment over two weeks in Russia, is BRICS
related.[12] Last August, he told his rural home constituency ANC
members in KwaZulu-Natal (the site of scores of political
assassinations), “I was poisoned and almost died just because South
Africa joined BRICS under my leadership.” Zuma repeated the claim three
months later in a national television interview, implying a Western
plot.[13]
Is Ramaphosa the antidote to Zuma’s toxic gaming of his BRICS
accomplishments? Yes, according to the BRICS Post, whose South African
correspondent called for an immediate leadership replacement. [14] The
South Africa chapter of the BRICS Business Council, which is led by
local newspaper magnate Iqbal Survé, offered surprising cynical
headlines after Zuma’s speech to the ANC congress in December: “Vintage
Zuma delivers a vengeful swansong, devoid of any responsibility” and
“Ramaphosa prepares to confront South Africa’s bleak future.”[15]
Such headlines will continue if Zuma stays in power at least through the
next BRICS summit, at Johannesburg’s Sandton Convention Centre in
mid-2018. There he can expect not just cheers from followers who view
BRICS relations with symbolic, nationalist pride. Just as loudly,
protesters outside the Centre will call for an end to the vanity of
BRICS, especially its politics of talking left and walking right.
NOTES
(available upon request at pb...@mail.ngo.za ... too long for Louis'
stingy 35k limit)
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