An excerpt from a great new book: http://www.amazon.com/BRICS-Anti-Capitalist-Critique-Patrick-Bond/dp/0745336418
But these moments aside, how much will BRICS-from-above actually threaten the capitalist world order? In Brazil in mid-2014, the BRICS heads of state and finance ministers clearly confirmed they would avoid challenging the unfair, chaotic world financial system. Reporting from the Fortaleza summit on 15 July, China People's Daily (2014) bragged that the BRICS 'are actually meeting Western demands'. The point is 'to finance development of developing nations and stabilise the global financial market'. Indeed, if BRICS subservience continues, remarked financier Ousmene Jacques Mandeng (2014) of Pramerica Investment Management in a Financial Times blog, 'it would help overcome the main constraints of the global financial architecture. It may well be the piece missing to promote actual financial globalisation.' Applause for the 'alternative' BRICS financial initiatives thus came logically from both Jim Yong Kim at the World Bank and Christine Lagarde at the IMF, and in 2015 both Bretton Woods institutions and more than 40 countries became founder-members of China's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, foiling Obama's sabotage diplomacy. As for the shallow sturm and drang occasioned by BRICS' rhetorical challenges to Washington's political or economic power, the deeper, more vital task of progressive intellectual work is to consider big-picture problems. For not much structural insight can be drawn from unpredictable geo-military conjunctures such as Russia in Ukraine, China in the South China Sea, Brazil in Haiti, India in Kashmir, or South Africa in several African war zones, aside from vague assertions about sub-imperial territorial imperatives which sometimes hold up and sometimes don't. The fact that in each of these sites there is so much effective resistance — often by irregular guerrilla forces of the sort that defeated both Washington and Moscow in Afghanistan, or Pretoria in the Central African Republic — suggests that even as regional deputy sheriffs, the BRICS have their work cut out for them. The fine art of geopolitical analysis should find surer moorings than these conjunctures and the gunboat diplomacy that necessarily arises when BRICS states and capital assert their agenda of expansion. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
