Gantry 5

 

15th BRICS summit in South Africa

Bulletin N° 38 septembre 2023 BRICS summit was held in South Africa [1] . Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African President, was joined by Narendra Modi (India [2] ), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil [3] ) and Xi Jinping (China [4] ). Vladimir Putin (Russia [5] ) was not present.  Had he been present, South Africa, as a member of the International Criminal Court, would have been obliged to follow through on the arrest warrant that this Court issued in March against the Russian president. Russia was therefore represented by its Minister of Foreign Affairs S. Lavrov and V. Putin spoke by video conference
BRICS, made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has grown in importance over the past decade, with the rise in power of its members, especially India and China. which have become respectively the 5th and 2nd world powers. China's share in BRICS production, which was 47% in 2001, is now 70%. In 2022, it represented 69% of the group's total trade, compared to 55% in 2001.
BRICS has a population of 3.24 billion, or 40% of the world's population. In 2001, they represented 8% of global GDP. In 2023, they contribute 31.5% of global GDP, exceeding for the first time the share of the G7 [6] (30.7% of global GDP).
The fact that the heart of world trade and the development of capitalism [7] is today in Asia and the Pacific [8] shows the importance of the presence of India, China and Russia in the BRICS.
The major characteristic of the BRICS constituent states is that they are states of capitalist development which are qualified as emerging, more or less integrated into the global economy and which aspire to occupy a more important place in global governance .WTO, IMF, UN...largely dominated by the United States and their Western allies and which largely use them for the benefit of their monopolies in the fierce and violent struggle they engage in with their States to control access to natural resources , communications routes and the workforce. However, the BRICS are far from constituting a homogeneous bloc, which they do not claim, but a group where common interests prevail over differences and which seek to consolidate their positions in the world capitalist order with sometimes an ambivalence regarding their external relations as is the case for India and Brazil. As the newspaper La Tribune writes :geopolitical rivals . Washington has said it intends to maintain " strong relations " with Brazil, India and South Africa, while continuing to " manage " its relations with China .
This contradictory reality, beyond the verbal declarations on the emancipation of neo-colonialism, is reflected in the main decisions taken during this 15thsummit. The most notable is the extension of BRICS by the admission of six new full members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If the presence of Argentina, in great economic difficulties, strengthens the situation of Brazil within the group, like that of the two largest African countries that of South Africa, the most remarkable is the admissions of three countries major in the field of oil and gas production: Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. With Russia within OPEC+, this energy center will weigh more heavily in production and therefore price strategies, thus ensuring greater global economic and political weight.[9] BRICS and thus broaden its scope of action. In addition, the final declaration of the summit recommends strengthened economic cooperation between Member States by pleading for the use of national currencies for their trade. If some see this as a path to the dedollarization of global trade, this is far from being a cut-off given the respective volumes involved.
At the international level, the summit called for the peaceful and negotiated resolution of ongoing conflicts, noting, with regard to Ukraine, the role of the mission of African countries in this direction. However, no BRICS member country has formally expressed support for the Russian Federation's special operation in Ukraine, cautiously recalling their commitment to respecting national sovereignty and the territorial integrity of States. The BRICS also want the voice of the Global South [10] to be better heard and integrated into the G20 [11] during the presidency of India in 2023 and of Brazil and South Africa in 2024 and 2025. We are far, here too, from overturning the tableof imperialism, but on the contrary in the search for a more important place in global capitalist competition.
In summary, the development of the BRICS, for which another acronym will have to be found for eleven, reflects the desire of many countries to find a world capitalist order which is, from the point of view of their interests, more balanced. If this desire is partly orthogonal to the maintenance of an imperialist power dominated by the United States, it does not fundamentally call into question the existence of the imperialist system itself. It is to the struggle of the people, of their revolutionary class, that the historic task of putting an end to capitalism in their own country falls, relying on internationalist class solidarity.
 
[1] BRICS acronym of the constituent countries of this group: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa
[6] G7: Germany, Canada, United States, France, Italy, Japan and United Kingdom.
[8] Of the top ten world trade ports, nine are located in the Asian region, including three of the five BRICS: China, India, Russia.