Down with BRICS! Long live, um...

...excuse me waiter, I'll have another espresso, and do you have a light?

Hopes were high in 2001, at the founding of BRICS.

The Chinese government had long wanted to build a global anti-imperialist alliance, going all the way back to the Mao era. Now, instead of Stalin and his successors – who sought to build socialism in one country, because they thought it too risky to foment global revolution in the face of a superpower led by religious fanatics and crackpot realists, and armed to the teeth with nukes – they finally had an ally in Russia. Putin, chastened by the disaster of the capitalist transformation of the 1990s, had just imprisoned and expropriated all of the country’s newly minted oligarchs, who over the prior decade had expropriated the public’s property. He was keen on picking up the torch of revolution from Lenin, which is why from the very start the Western mass media hated him. Brazil, not yet led by the betrayer-of-socialism Lula, had the Marxist and Dependency Theory pioneer F. H. Cardoso as its president. No surprise then that Brazil was an enthusiastic founding member. Even India at the time was full of hope and promise, with its first-ever prime minister from the Indian People’s Party (English translation), A.B. Vajpayee, promising to finally fix the mistakes that weakened his country to the point that a tiny island nation off the coast of Asia’s European peninsula could conquer it, steal its wealth, and kill tens of millions by enforced starvation. South Africa joined a decade later due to its leading role in the socialist transformation of the African continent – not at all because BRICS sounded cooler than BRIC, looked better than BRICs, and the formation needed representation in Africa.

Given such an auspicious start, the crushing sense of disappointment we all rightly feel today is no wonder. The tweeted prayers of so many American girls and boys for BRICS to send advanced fighter-bombers, on BRICS aircraft carriers, with logistics provided through BRICS’ global network of military bases in hundreds of countries, to liberate them and end the U.S. empire? They went unanswered. Or, worse: they were answered, with deafening silence!

Or, so it was in an alternate universe.¹

In the universe we live in, things were otherwise.

Our universe

BRICs was the 2001 brainchild of a Goldman Sachs i-banker, Jim O’Neill. It was a mere list of countries ripe for exploitation, to help rich people make more money. (I only just learned this: Jimbo Neill here wasn’t some hardscrabble Irish-American rags-to-riches story – his full title is the Right Honorable Lord Terence James O’Neill, Baron of Gatley, “Gatley” presumably being some sort of feudal domain within the United Kingdom.)

By the early 2000s, the Chinese government had long given up on fomenting global revolution. It focused instead on building socialism in one country, in orthodox Marxist fashion: by first going through the capitalist stage of development.

The Russian government, true enough, had expropriated some of its most parasitic and destructive recent expropriators. But it coalesced into a committee for managing the common affairs of the rest of its expropriator-oligarchs, the wiser parasites who could figure out that they needed to keep the host alive, if barely, and would play ball with Putin’s government.

Brazil, whether presided over by the former dependency theorist Cardoso, former guerilla Dilma, or former trade unionist Lula, was nonetheless always ruled by its oligarchy, which in turn was dependent on foreign capital. Sure, it is further from the U.S. than Mexico, but it is still just as far from god: it remained the offspring of an arguably even more vicious slaveocracy than the hegemon to its north, lacking a revolution to reshape its political economy. And Uncle Sam’s long arm could reach Brazil just as well as Mexico.

India was under its first Hindu-fascist BJP government, which had forgotten that the progenitors of Hindu fascism had accurately identified caste as a, arguably the key reason for India’s weakness. India was then and still is today an absolute horrorshow, having ended more Muslim lives by violence than Israel’s Jewish Power Party could ever dream of, and ended still more Hindu lives by deprivation.

South Africa? Well, it does in fact start with an ‘S’. And it has the highest rate of violent crime and inequality of all BRICS members, including the newly added members and partner states. But, it doesn’t have apartheid any more! In today’s South Africa, the law denies justice to no one, regardless of skin color – just like a Ferrari.

OK, we get it, you say; you already wrote about how this group is as useless as amputated foreskin without China in BRIS. Ha, ha. How erudite for a dick joke. What’s your point?

Glad you asked!

Starting points

My point is that one’s evaluation of our current predicament varies according to where we start. Do we start with breathless clickbait announcing the immanent dawn of multipolarity en route to fully automated luxury communism thanks to BRICS, the omnipotent anti-imperialist alliance?

Or do we start in the early 2000s, in our world? Or, still in our world, in the middle of the 20th century, when the East was red and the West was sure to follow? In the 19th century, when capitalism, if it continued to follow its trajectory to that point, would by logical necessity be overthrown and replaced with a system more rational and humane? Over 10,000 years ago, before there were large sedentary civilizations, organized warfare, and anthropogenic ecological destruction other than hunting megafauna to extinction?

Each of these starting points lead to a different evaluation. The first, a terribly depressing one: “Why, Iran, a new BRICS member, was just attacked by USrael – and yet, fellow new BRICS members Egypt and the UAE did not immediately start bombing USraeli bases! Nor did new BRICS member-invitee Saudi Arabia or partner-invitee Turkey! Nor did the government of Ethiopia, also a new BRICS member… and what about China, the country with more economic might than even the hyper-powered imperialist hegemon, once you adjust GDP for purchasing power parity (but not for population)? I’m starting to doubt the immanence of multipolar, fully automated luxury communism’s rise from the ashes of the U.S. empire. A pox on all their houses, dammit! We are doomed without an unprecedented, widespread moral awakening in which we all go on an uncoordinated general strike, or self-immolate!”

If that depressing evaluation is similar to yours, even to a slight extent – then, as Arundhati Roy told Unitedstatesians after 9/11, “in the gentlest, most human way: welcome to the world.”

This is the world in which we live. One that, yes, permits the sickest shit. And has done so for the last 10,000 years.

And if we, the small minority of thinking beings scattered around the world, do not join/create disciplined organizations in which we give up some of our precious individualism so that we can accomplish collectively what we could never hope to achieve individually, then this is the same kind of world future generations will continue to live in. Except, those future generations will comprise far fewer people, as the ecological catastrophe and its concomitant social catastrophe (mass migrations, famines, wars) work toward omnicide, bringing the amount of life on our planet into closer balance with the rest of the solar system.

Bear with me though, there is some hope.

China bad! But from the left 😊

The PRC’s foreign minister Wang Yi in 2018, sharing the reaction of all humanity to Trump the vast majority of the time he emits sounds from his mouth. In the UNGA, a cameraman caught the moment that Wang heard the Chinese translation of Trump’s claim that Djina! was interfering in the 2018 U.S. elections.

The depressing evaluation I provided above is an obvious exaggeration, but it it is inspired by actual arguments. Take, for example, China’s silence on Iran reveals its true priorities, by Yang Xiaotong. In one regard, this is an unfair example: it was published this year, but way back on the anniversary of the illegal U.S. war of aggression against Iraq (and my birth). So its implicit prediction that the Chinese government would seek to trade support for Iran in exchange for the U.S. conceding Taiwan does not look good in (20/20) hindsight. And its more timeless point, that the Chinese government would prioritize a more important priority, its own territory, over a less important priority, a country on the other side of Asia, seems of import only to travelers from another planet. And probably would come as no surprise even to them.

The essay focuses not on “silence”, as advertised in the title, but on a two-day delay in communicating the Chinese government’s position to the press – as if the Iranian government were huddled around a TV tuned to CGTN, desperately awaiting the Chinese position to be delivered by a MFA spokesperson, rather than, I don’t know, their embassy in Beijing. Or as if the Iranian government had anything to await at all, like the USraeli attack was entirely unexpected (“bu-bu-but they were in the middle of negotiating with us!”), not a matter that high-ranking officials from both governments would have discussed exhaustively ahead of time.

But this is my favorite part:

While China contacted several Middle Eastern countries and sent a special envoy on a diplomatic tour of the region, a move that helped prevent Iran’s neighbours, many caught in the crossfire, from joining the fray, it made no attempt to directly confront the US, the country ultimately responsible for the war, let alone send Iran military aid.

Assuming for the sake of argument that everything here is true, in context it amounts to saying: sure, the Chinese government made significant and successful diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran’s GCC neighbors and U.S. client states from adding even more blood and gore to USraeli war crimes, ripping apart additional schoolchildren, doctors, and nurses – but China didn’t start or risk starting WWIII, the immoral bastards!

That being said, if I am reading behind the lines correctly, I largely agree with Yang overall: that the Chinese government should move beyond a relatively conservative realism, and innovate through applying a moral realist foreign policy.

A better example of bad thinking comes, of course, from the Right. (Former assistant to Mike Pompeo) Miles Yu’s In Marx We Trust, in Iran We Bust: China’s Iran Strategy Collapses, is from a rightwing ideological perspective; but with a few changes to moral tone and emphasis, it could be reframed as a leftwing perspective held by a child or naif. In Yu’s telling, the Chinese government had grand plans to vassalize Iran, turning it into its West Asian proxy. The Reds were of course emboldened by Biden’s weakness, as they were by Obama’s weakness, and are only ever cowed into terrified submission when a man’s man like Trump is in the White House. So under Biden, they pledged to invest $400 billion in Iran to “establish a reliable anti-U.S. foothold deep in America’s traditional sphere of influence” – the Iranian government never having had any grievance toward the U.S. government prior to these Chinese bribes, presumably. But the Chinese government’s Leninist strategy was thwarted by USraeli brilliance and high explosives:

Perhaps most devastating for Beijing was how the strikes revealed the hollowness of its anti-U.S. alliance system, known as the CRINK axis (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea). When the U.S. and Israel began pounding Iranian military targets, none of these supposed partners—not Russia, not North Korea, not even China—lifted a finger to defend Tehran.

This humiliating abandonment showed that the CRINK coalition is transactional at best. Iran was left to absorb the blows alone, despite [sic] being the most vicious and destabilizing actor within that axis. … In effect, the 12 Days War revealed that Beijing’s ideological and strategic partners cannot be counted on to shield one another when directly threatened by U.S. power. The myth of a cohesive anti-American front, with Iran as a flagship client, has collapsed.

Sound familiar? It would only take a few word changes to reframe this as a naive leftwing argument. And the telltale flaw is that there is never any actual prescription; no “this is what x did, it was wrong, and x should have done this instead, as I will describe in appropriate detail.”

Because it takes only minimal thought to see that there is no good alternative prescription. Should the DPRK government have fired artillery volleys at U.S. bases in the ROK, to start a war killing millions on the Korean peninsula? Maybe it should have nuked the U.S. in defense of Iran, to result in the end of most life on earth? Or should the Russian government have done the same?

What exactly should the Chinese government have done? Of course it should not have started WWIII, or crossed a line resulting in the death of most living things on this planet – we aren’t idiots here! But what exactly is that line? If the PRC government sold scores of its most advanced warplanes and missiles to Iran on credit, would that result in the U.S. government tipping its hat, intoning “well played, my honorable opponent”? No, it would result in the U.S. military quickly destroying these weapons, since Iran presumably wouldn’t have enough time to train its pilots. So the Chinese government would also have to rent its pilots to Iran, quickly switch their citizenship, and have them use Deepseek to translate between Chinese and Farsi.

Sorry for getting bogged down in practicality. Returning to the plane of pure morality, unsullied by material reality, the most virtuous option would be for the Chinese government to organize a volunteer army, as it did during the Korean War or the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. But since China lacks a land border with Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine, it would need to send that army through the spiritual plane, since the countries in between would be loathe to allow passage.

Regardless of whether we talk about military plans in the real or the spiritual world, does anything of the sort sound like something the crackpots and fanatics in the U.S. government would ignore? Or in the vicinity of the Pentagon, would orders for pizza skyrocket as officers spent late nights planning WWIII against China? The answer is obvious.

All of this wishing for a deus ex machina without even thinking through the machinery is entirely understandable, as a desperate reaction to our own failure to develop enough power to rein in our blood-soaked ruling class. But it is also absurd. And obviously so, if one would only take the time to face the disappointing reality without flinching. Or without retreating into the comforting realm of pure morality, in which oneself would always do good, and it is always others who fail morally due to their cowardice or malice.

Why China isn’t doing what I think it should

So what the hell is China doing? Or the BRICS jointly?

From my vantage point, the Chinese government is attempting to build its national power to the extent to which it never again has to fear a Western imperialist boot on its neck.

The Russian government gave up that ambition in the ‘90s, and tried to join the imperialist club, but eventually figured out that they were not invited. Since that realization, the government has been trying to re-realize that ambition, but in the process has managed to scare Europe into the grip of the U.S. empire ever further, while inflicting unimaginable and unjustifiable pain and suffering via a fratricidal war very much provoked by the U.S. government.

The current Brazilian government, at least its PT-and-allies component, would love to share China’s ambition; but as Lula pointed out, China’s accomplishments are due to the fact that it has a serious revolutionary party that carried out a revolution, and can wield state power over the objections of would-be parasites. Unlike in Brazil, where the most engorged, strongest parasites can derail what he or Dilma or any leftist politician might attempt to accomplish.

The Indian government may share China’s ambition, but is similarly hamstrung by the lack of a revolution, and the continued power of its parasites to fatten themselves off the hard work of the majority, while squandering the potential of its massive population.

South Africa certainly has people sharing the same ambition, but its government was the product of a negotiated revolution that preserved the basic parasitic dynamics of capitalism in the periphery. (Whether the ANC and its allies had any better choice at that time, in their context, is a question I cannot answer.)

Setting BRIS aside, what is China doing?

China’s future is unwritten. It could turn turn right; and you would know if it did, because immediately the NYT or “The” Economist would start running pieces praising China, while life for the majority in the country deteriorated. On the other hand, China could lead the world out of ecological catastrophe and into a socialist world system.

Personally, the funniest (black humor) outcome would be a reverse-Mongol conquest: no invasion or formal takeover by the U.S. or Europe, but China permanently adopting the political-economic system of its de facto conqueror. (The U.S. empire is best described as an empire of capital, but it can also be accurately described as a reverse-Mongol empire: the opposite, in that the U.S. empire does not conquer and annex territory, and rather than adopting the culture of the conquered, it imposes its economic system and to some extent its culture on its formally independent territories.)

I certainly hope not. But what can foreign leftists do? Learn Chinese, read an immense corpus of political-economic writing so as to be fluent enough in relevant debates as to be taken seriously, make friends and comrades in the country, and then jointly attempt to sway as many people as possible. That’s a perfectly admirable endeavor. But for most, a better use of one’s life is probably in organizing with co-nationals and trying to capture state power in one’s own country.

Regardless, feel free in arriving at any opinion about China that you like.

And that includes opinions about China relating to the USraeli/GCC war against Iran.

Since the cat is already out of the bag – look at the sources linked here – I feel free to say that China’s support to Iran’s economy and military defense has been absolutely essential.

Nonetheless, do feel free to arrive at any opinion you like; just please keep it tethered to reality on planet Earth. You can certainly say that China’s support to Iran was insufficient – for instance, they should have banned drone sales to USrael’s 51st state (meaning in practice: “they should have increased the cost of imported drones by a few percentage points, by adding a middleman re-shipper from a third country”) – but on this planet, it is impossible to say that it was not necessary. Unless someone can explain to me how any country in the contemporary world can survive under decades of U.S. embargo, enforced globally, and then USraeli military aggression, without a China-sized country willing to violate it by (at minimum) buying the overwhelming majority of that country’s primary export.

Your opinion will of course be heavily influenced by your starting point. If you are like me, first learning about Chinese politics in the ‘00s from Western and Chinese leftists, you probably are a bit hopeful, if cautiously so. After all, back then, there were two major contending schools of thought. One: China is screwed, it turned irremediably capitalist and will remain stuck at the bottom of global value chains, a hewer of wood and drawer of water for the rich countries with a small wealthy capitalist class and an impoverished majority looking like India. Versus school two: wait and see, because perhaps they are integrating into the global capitalist system for technological catch-up, and once that is accomplished, and their security finally re-established after nearly two centuries, possibilities abound.

Given how good school two is looking today compared to school one, a bit of cautious hopefulness is warranted.

Whereas, if you went into a coma in the 1950s and only awoke yesterday, then your starting point would probably be total despair. Or, if you just started to learn about global politics recently, say via the Gaza genocide, then your starting point might be shock mixed with righteous indignation, directed nearly everywhere, and little else.

Whatever your opinion, it is OK. Believe China is the second coming of the Paris Commune, a worker’s paradise; or believe it to be a horrible capitalist country full of exploitation and sinfully failing to sacrifice the lives of its citizens for those being murdered by the governments of Western countries. Neither belief makes any real-world difference.

Unless, that is, the more negative set of beliefs turns you into a meat puppet for the U.S. government, like many ostensible leftists (e.g., the DSA) during the last Cold War. Back then, a negative view of the USSR, resulting in a neither-Washington-nor-Moscow stance, served Washington just fine. Western leftists were never going to be enthusiastic spear-carriers for empire (except for some ex-Trotskyists), so the only potential upside there was to capture was to ensure that they at least did nothing to impede imperial strategy.

Don’t be captured.

Your intellect can be as pessimistic as you like about China; just make sure that your will gets your ass out on the picket line, into the meeting room and voting booth, etc., to try to stop your government from achieving its goal of crippling, splitting, or destroying China.

Time for us all to drink some ice

‘"Crimson mansions reek of wine and meat, while on the road lie frozen bones. Rich and poor but a foot apart; sorrows too hard to relate.” … I look at the slums of New York and deeply lament that socialism is absolutely indispensable.’ Liang, 1903

I was just in Tianjin, China, for a conference at Nankai University, Miles Yu’s alma mater! (Please, former, current, and future students of mine, do not ever become a future Miles Yu; and if you must, please first smother me with a pillow in my sleep, so I will never have to suffer awareness of that fact and worry that I had something to do with it.)

Far more importantly, and of far greater consequence to humanity, Tianjin is also where Liang Qichao spent his final years, writing and teaching at Nankai. Liang was a Chinese intellectual from around the turn of the 20th century, who like many of his contemporaries, realized that China’s political-economic system was hopelessly deformed, and had to be transformed.² He called himself the “ice-drinker”, because he felt consumed by a passionate desire to fix China’s problems, but he first needed to coldly and rationally diagnose them – so it was as if he tamed his ardor by drinking ice-water.

I still have much to learn about his thinking, but what struck me was how familiar his position felt to me. That is, for the first half of his life he witnessed a decrepit regime, one that left China weak from the parasitism of feudal rentiers and the squandering of the Chinese people’s potential.

I see very few words I would need to change in that last sentence to make it apply perfectly to myself today. (Leaving aside any guesses about my lifespan, of course – and as a reminder to my students, well before you ever turn into an intellectual-cum-bureaucrat assistant to a man like Mike Pompeo, it’s time to use that pillow). In the U.S., it isn’t feudal detritus but monopoly-finance capitalist rentiers, the people gorging on the work product of others through monopoly power and the bank-written laws which govern the financial system, draining the country. In Liang’s day and context, the people gorging on the work product of others were the idle landlords, aristocrats, and court intellectuals, but the fundamental principle remains the same. Collective power is squandered when a few parasitize the many, and it is maximized when the potential of each member of society is cultivated.³

Here I can only speak for the United States, but I suspect that others in the Anglophone world and beyond may feel similarly. And that is that the position of the Left in the U.S. feels like the position of Chinese intellectuals at the start of the 20th century. They had to read and travel widely, discuss and debate, to first grasp the problem afflicting their country, and then devise solutions. But mere individual edification was insufficient. Their enemies were organized, and they would need to be too. It would take two decades for some of these intellectuals to found the Communist Party, and even then it was almost destroyed at birth by KMT massacres of its initial members. And when the early Communist Party went on the offensive, in the Guangzhou Uprising of 1927, it was defeated, and thousands of its members were killed in the fighting or executed afterwards. Yet they persisted even through a far worse tragedy: the tens of millions of people murdered by imperial Japan’s invasion and occupation. Only out of this mayhem were they able to capture state power, and use it to revitalize their country – merely starting the task halfway into the century.

Is our position, as Western leftists, so different at the start of the 21st century? We have no serious organization capable of capturing state power, to stop the ongoing genocide and aggression, fashion a just economic system, and avert ecological catastrophe. We are still a gaggle of individuals, not a disciplined, united organization with an attractive, energizing ideology. Hence the chances of us being able to steer our countries away from the cliff, transforming our political-economic systems for long-term ecological sustainability, in time to avoid catastrophe… seem quite low.

But as it happened, the chances of turn-of-the-20th-century Chinese intellectuals avoiding catastrophe in China turned out to be zero. They were unable to fashion a unifying ideology and organization with enough time to transform their political-economic system, industrialize, and defend themselves from Japanese or European imperialism. The great tragedy of WWII, with all of its constituent atrocities, was unavoidable by that time. Just as today’s atrocities, and the ecological catastrophe facing us in this century, are likely unavoidable because we did not build power and organization in time.

The stakes today may very well be higher. We are likely looking at hundreds, not tens of millions of human lives at risk this century. But as long as we manage to be lucky enough to avoid nuclear Armageddon, there will still be survivors; as there were after the immense bloodshed of WWII. Like Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century, we have lost the chance to avoid the worst outcomes altogether; but we retain the chance to make something good out of the wreckage. We simply need to follow a similar path: building an ideological consensus and an organization around it, getting more people to support us and fewer to oppose us, and eventually, capturing state power.

As for right now, we should acknowledge that we are in a position of profound fucktitude. And China is our least hopeless major polity. Whether you see that as a sign of just how deep our fucktitude runs, or a ray of sunshine, is immaterial. I think it is both. But we can learn from those who came before us, who occupied a similar position. Victory is possible, and while distant, well worth fighting for; we will need unity of purpose, discipline, and organization to attain it.

We could all stand to drink ice.

- Peter

1. This entire section is meant to be satire, not in earnest. And thanks to a Bond, not James, for the corrections later on!

2. I was first introduced in a book by Pankaj Mishra, a fascinating look at similar intellectual reactions throughout Asia, West, South, and East, to Europeans’ development of superior killing machines, and how their own societies needed to change drastically to be able to protect themselves from the European threat.

3. “If you use the eyes of all those under Heaven to see, there is nothing you cannot see. If you use the ears of all those under Heaven to hear, there is nothing you cannot hear. If you use the minds of all those under Heaven to think, there is nothing you cannot understand.”