Stop Rooting for the BRICS! It's As Stupid and Wrong As Rooting for the Democratic Party vs the GOP or Vice Versa; It Amounts to Rooting for Billionaires Who Treat the Have-Nots Like Dirt
The so-called "anti-imperialist" left has abandoned the have-nots of the world and is infatuated with and rooting for the "good" billionaires of the world. UGH!
Yes, the leaders of the West—the US, UK, Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand—are very bad guys. And yes, the leaders of the West have for decades been bullying the leaders of the rest of the world—the global South as it’s called today.
And yes, the leaders of the global South—in particular of the nations that recently formed the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) economic alliance—are gaining great economic and military strength that is starting to eclipse that of the Western leaders. And the BRICS nations’ leaders talk about a new world order based on multipolarity instead of bullying by the West.
But does this mean that the leaders of the BRICS are the good guys that we should be rooting for?
NO!
The leaders of the BRICS are all beholden to billionaires who treat “their” have-nots like dirt, just as the leaders of the West treat “their” have-nots like dirt. Do you think it benefits the have-nots of India that their oppressors—the billionaires of India—are creating this new world order with the other global South billionaires? Use your noggin!
The people we should be rooting for and supporting with international solidarity are the have-nots of the world, in ALL nations. We should be rooting for and supporting the struggles of the have-nots in ALL nations against their oppressive ruling classes of ALL nations.
This is not complicated. But somehow the “anti-imperialist” left doesn’t grasp it. The “anti-imperialist” left is infatuated with and rooting for the pro-billionaire rulers of the global South and it considers it a wrongful violation of “national sovereignty” (a bogus concept) to ever even mention the fact that the rulers of the global South oppress “their own” have-nots.
The Leaders of the Global South Are ALSO Enemies of the Have-Nots
All the BRICS national rulers (and almost all the other global South national rulers) reveal their anti-have-nots nature by refusing to condemn Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in other words by refusing to support the Palestinians’ #1 demand—the Right of Return—meaning the abolition of the ethnic cleansing.
BRICS national rulers shamefully actually call for the ethnic cleansing to be made permanent, which is exactly what their calls for a “two-state solution” really mean, as I discuss here. While Iran’s leaders apparently reject the two-state solution, they (like the other national leaders) refuse to do what they could easily do to destroy the power of the Zionists, as I explain here. The reason they don’t do it is because it would entail strengthening the have-nots of the world whom they oppress.
Russia
Yes, the Russian government’s soldiers should be supported in Ukraine for the reasons I spell out here, but that doesn’t mean we should support Putin in Russia.
Read here about the enormous class inequality in Russia.
Read here about how most Russians are PISSED at this class inequality:
Read here how Russian workers are fighting against the rich who oppress them in Russia:
Russia is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The poorest half of the population owns 17% of national income, while the richest 500 people own 40% of financial assets in the country.
Official statistics suggest that labour relations in Russia are amicable and settled, and there are practically no disputes or strikes – but, unsurprisingly, this is far from the full story.
Sociologist Pyotr Bizyukov is trying to paint a true picture of worker resistance in Russia by monitoring labour protests across the country. And according to him, there were almost 400 such protests in Russia in 2021.
Workers not only down tools and walk off the job, Bizyukov says, but they sometimes resort to more radical actions – including hunger strikes, threats of taking their own lives and even the murder of their employers.
…
Strikes were pretty much banned in Russia in 1993, by the neoliberal government that came to power [after the fall of the Soviet Union]. The legislation governing collective labour disputes spells out a long and complicated procedure – which is almost impossible to complete – before you can call a strike. As a result, the most important instrument that workers and trade unions have to influence their employer is not available.
Read the above-linked article for more!
India
Please read my Substack post about India here, titled:
“In India 30 Farmers Per Day Commit Suicide Due to Onerous Debt to Rich People Like Mr. Ambani Who Lives In His 27-Story Mansion by, As the NYT Reports, "the Grace of God" Methinks such gross inequality is actually by the grace of mortals such as India's Modi, Russia's Putin and the USA's Biden as well as others in that class.”
It includes the following:
China
I have written about China in a Substack post here. It includes the following:
SOME FACTS ABOUT HOW THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT OPPRESSES THE CHINESE HAVE-NOTS
“On September 23 [2012], a siren pierced the night at the 80,000-worker Taiyuan plant as rioting erupted. Zhonghong recalled, “During the previous month workers had clocked as many as 130 hours overtime.” Overtime was compulsory. This was more than three times the maximum 36-hour limit of overtime per month allowed under Chinese law. Put another way, workers were subjected to 13-to-1, and under extreme conditions, 30-to-1 work-to-rest schedules, that is, just one day off every two weeks or one day off a month in the pressure-cooker months preceding the release of the new iPhones.
"Fatigue and bodily pain aside, workers experienced being severely ill treated. “Over the past two months,” Zhonghong continued, “we couldn’t even get paid leave when we were sick.” The ever-tightening production cycle pressured workers to speed up. Days off were canceled and the sick were pressed to continue to work. The upgraded iPhone was hailed as a thinner, faster, and brighter model. In stark contrast, workers experienced some of their darkest days on the production floor. Worker fury was fueled by security staff brutality at the male workers’ dormitory. Zhonghong explained:
“At about 11: 00 p.m., security officers severely beat two workers for failing to show their staff IDs. They kicked them until they fell to the ground.”
"This beating of workers by security officers touched off the riot. By midnight, thousands of workers had had enough. They smashed company security offices, production facilities, shuttle buses, motorbikes, cars, shops, and canteens in the factory complex. Some grabbed iPhone back-plates from a warehouse. Others broke windows, demolished company fences, pillaged factory supermarkets, and overturned police cars and set them ablaze. The company security chief used a patrol car public address system in an attempt to get the workers to end their “illegal activities.”
"But as more and more workers joined the roaring crowd, managers called in the riot police. By 3: 00 a.m., five thousand riot police in helmets with shields and clubs, government officials, and medical staff had converged on the factory. Over the next two hours, the police took control of the dormitories and workshops of the entire complex, detaining the most defiant workers and locking down others in their dormitory rooms. More than forty workers were beaten, handcuffed, and sent off in half a dozen police cars. The factory was sealed off by police lines on all sides, so that workers were contained and onlookers were prevented from joining in. While police repression could demobilize, defuse, and crush worker actions, such methods could also highlight the depths of conflict and might even intensify it.
"In emergency mode, Foxconn announced “a special day off” for all workers and staff at the Taiyuan facility. Local officials were sensitive to the fact that riots could undermine economic goals, thereby provoking the wrath of higher authorities if grievances were not quickly resolved and worker insurgency suppressed. The iPhone parts factory reopened after a one-day lockdown. The timely shipment and continuous flow of products appeared to have remained Apple’s overriding concerns. On the same day that the riot occurred, Apple CEO Tim Cook assured the world that retail stores would “continue to receive iPhone 5 shipments regularly and customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date.” 18 But as international news headlines blared “China Apple Factory Riot” 19 and “Riot Reported at Apple Partner Manufacturer Foxconn’s iPhone 5 Plant,” 20 Apple was compelled to reassure consumers around the world, including Chinese consumers, that it was not running sweatshops.”
— Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China's Workers by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, et al.
The Chinese Myth versus Reality
We often hear that the Communist Party of China has lifted the Chinese people up out of poverty. To understand how false this claim is, read "Bill Gates Says Poverty Is Decreasing. He Couldn't Be More Wrong" by Jason Hickel (also see this same point made about Africa here). As Hickel explains, moving people from living in a rural society, where money is a relatively unimportant way of obtaining one's needs and people have less money, to an urban society where money is the only way of obtaining one's needs and people have more money, makes it easy to misleadingly say, "See, people were lifted out of poverty when they went from rural to urban living," even when the actual conditions of life for the urban people--working as horribly oppressed wage-slaves in huge factories--make their lives arguably worse than those of rural peasants. Millions of rural Chinese peasants have been forced to leave the rural countryside and immigrate to cities to work in the cheap labor and extremely oppressive factories, as described in some detail here.
In particular, the Communist Party of China in 1999 eagerly signed an agreement with the United States leading to China's accession to the World Trade Organization, which resulted in the reduction of tariffs on agricultural products and new limits on how much the Chinese government could subsidize farmers as discussed here and here [2003] ("Farmers of land-intensive products--particularly cotton, sugar crops, oilseeds, corn and soybeans--will be among the most adversely affected".) Life prospects for farmers, especially for their adolescent children, were made bleak and this motivated them to migrate to the cities for urban wage work.
In the rural homes they left, these farmers did not have very much money, nor did they need to rely solely upon money to get what they needed to live; but in the city they relied totally on their wage to buy what they needed to live--and it provided an abject poverty standard of living. The fact that their city wage was higher than whatever small amount of money they obtained in the countryside does not mean their standard of living was higher in the city than in the countryside; the opposite was the case. But apologists for the Communist Party of China point to the wage to assert that the peasants were "lifted out of poverty."
An indication of the terrible poverty--in terms of standard of living rather than magnitude of an urban wage compared to a rural wage--of China's urban factory workers who migrated to cities from their rural homes is this: these factory workers cannot even afford to raise their children (69 million as of 2018 or "1 in 5 children in China") with them in the city and so must leave their children to be raised by their grandparents in their rural home, which the parents can only typically afford to visit "a few days over the holidays every year." "By 2006, migrant workers comprised 40% of the total urban labor force.[51]"
Read here about the enormous economic inequality in China today.
The Communist Party of China oppresses and represses the working class much the same as Western capitalist governments do. Read about the repression here and here and here and here.
South Africa
Even though apartheid ended in South Africa, billionaires there STILL oppress the have-nots horribly. Read about it here (PDF), please.
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia participates in BRICS activities as an invited nation but is not a member yet. If/when Saudi Arabia joins the BRICS will you start rooting for its rulers too? REALLY? Even after reading this?
How comes that so many people need ”heroes” or idols at such an extent ?