Ideology

[blindpig]

BRICS Will Fail to Deliver Anti-imperialism

Multipolarity-- the idea that there are more than one decisive economic actors in the global economy-- is an important fact. More than anything else, the rise of the People's Republic of China demonstrates that fact. The size and rate of growth, along with the expansive Belt and Road Initiative, establishes that the PRC functions somewhat independently of the world’s most powerful player in the global market-- the US. While the PRC spurns the language of rivalry, characterizing its desired relationship with the US as one of cooperation or partnership, the mere fact that the US rejects that relationship creates another competitive pole in the global economy, centered on the PRC.

Similarly, the US ruling class has sought to absorb the post-Soviet world-- Russia, Eastern Europe, and other former Soviet collaborators-- into the US-dominated economic order. The US demands that they play the same game and by the same rules or be banished from participation. When they object or defy accepting these terms, they, too, necessarily become alternative poles.

As other formerly minor or compliant participants-- Brazil, India, etc.-- have risen in economic stature, they can also represent counters to US unipolarity.

The tendency away from the US’s complete dominance of the international market economy is a reality of our time. No rational person can dispute this fact (though the tendency could easily reverse).

Since the origin of international trade, there have been conflicting tendencies and counter-tendencies toward concentration and diversity, toward monopoly and competition, and toward unipolarity and multipolarity. It is the very nature, the very essence of market exchange that a privileged trader will arise to dominate, only to be challenged by rivals who subsequently share or dominate the market, with the process repeating or reversing. As Friedrich Engels insisted: “In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition-- indeed, it itself breeds competition.”

History shows many empires or countries rising to dominate an arena of commerce or trade over its trading “partners”: Venetian dominance in the Mediterranean, Dutch dominance in European trade with the Spice Islands, successive European empires’ dominance of the trading in slaves, British dominance of the opium trade with China, etc. In nearly all cases, other empires or nations challenge and often prevail.

With the rise of the Cold War, the immensely powerful US assumed and maintained the leading role in ruling and protecting the capitalist order, then over half of the world’s population. After the fall of the Soviet Union, US leaders sought to extend their dominance over the entire world, envisioning a new order codifying and guaranteeing the existing inequalities and the established uneven development. Of course, this status privileges US interests.

If this state of affairs constitutes what people consider to be unipolarity, then it is clear that it is not sustainable. Competitors unfailingly will rise to challenge US dominance. Rivals will strive to break the US economic reign, through innovation, deception, trickery, market manipulation, alliances, and even open conflict. That is the way of capitalism.

And that is what is happening.

Thus, the alternating tendencies toward multipolarity and unipolarity are inevitable consequences of market exchange in a world of private ownership and national self-interest.

It should be noted that-- everything else remaining the same-- this dynamic will guarantee neither that working people will benefit nor be disadvantaged by changes in existing poles. Changes in the relative economic position of nation-states in the global economy is neutral with regard to the fate of those living in class societies. A worker or peasant may gain little from a trend from unipolarity to multipolarity-- any gain will be determined by other factors.

*****

There is, however, an entirely different understanding of multipolarity, unrelated to the factual tendency of competition to drive the global economy toward a unipolar or multipolar world. Since the time of Karl Kautsky, leftists have invested in multipolarity as a moral response to imperialism, an antidote to economic exploitation, as anti-imperialism. Nation-states were and are believed to rationally accept a stable order based on common interests and fair and equitable relations (if only the predators were tamed!). Lenin mocked this view and World War I crushed it.

But it doesn’t go away! The illusion of a brotherhood of capitalist powers accepting fair and equitable relations stubbornly persists!

Liberals and social democrats invested heavily in the League of Nations, a reset of the rules of international politics and economics after the disaster of World War I. Both little nations and big nations were expected to live amicably under its umbrella. The League promised to stifle the aggression and domination of great powers. Within two decades World War was again on the agenda.

Once again, after World War II, a new “multipolar” institution came into being-- the United Nations. Dominated by capitalist powers (most also beholden puppets of the US ruling class), the promise of diverse poles ensuring peace, harmony, and fairness gave way to manipulation, indecision, and-- on the best day-- impotence. The UN-- today, a multipolar institution governing capitalist-oriented nation-states-- is a modern-day farce.

Now, we have BRICS-- an alliance of a motley assortment of states with different ideologies, different modes of governance, different economies, different levels of development, and different commitments to social justice, but a common interest in finding some benefit from rearranging the existing world order. Centrists and leftists of every stripe have adopted BRICS and BRICS+ as an anti-imperialist front. With little reflection on history, with little appreciation of diversity, and especially with little understanding of market-based economies, they imagine that nation-states driven by self interest will somehow construct a common organization governed by mutual interest. Kautsky would embrace this shallow hope. Lenin would summarily dismiss it.

Persistently and consistently, I have challenged this misguided concept of anti-imperialism. BRICS is no more an answer to imperialism than an alliance of corporations is an answer to capitalist exploitation.

And that is the tragedy of the BRICS solution to imperialism. It fails to address the foundation of imperialism: the capitalist mode of production. It distracts social justice warriors, and even some Marxists, from the root cause of growing inequality within and between nations. Through ignorance or frustration, it creates the false hope of tempering exploitation without confronting capitalism.

*****

Where theoretical arguments fail, I have proposed a practical test of multipolarity and, specifically, BRICS. If BRICS is an anti-imperialist alternative, then it-- or its most committed members-- must stand tall against the most glaring, most egregious acts of imperialism. I have suggested that the response of BRICS members to the atrocities in Gaza are a litmus test of commitment to anti-imperialism, a test which BRICS has failed abysmally.

One might think that the recent UN Security Council vote on the US/Israeli plan to further maintain Gaza as a semi-colony-- brazenly ruled as brutally as the old Belgian Congo-- might have ignited a resistance from the “anti-imperialism” of BRICS. Instead, BRICS’s most vocal friends of Gaza choose to abstain from the vote.

And, yes, one would think that these scandalous abstentions would cause many multipolaristas to pause, and rethink their delusion of an anti-imperialist BRICS.

And many on the left have recoiled from this plan and criticized the Russian and Chinese abstentions. The Palestinian Communist Party denounced the vote, as did other Communist and Workers parties.

In an article entitled “BRICS Are the New Defenders of Free Trade, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank” and Support Genocide by Continuing to Trade with Israel, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism vigorously challenges BRICS on Gaza, and cites others, including left podcaster Fiorella Isabel and left journalist Vanessa Beeley’s similar critiques.

Nonetheless, apologists like the Friends of Socialist China defend China and Russia’s abstention. They argue bizarrely that: “For China, or Russia, to have exercised the veto would only have weakened their position vis-à-vis the Arab and Islamic nations and correspondingly further strengthened that of the United States.” As though voting against the Security Council resolution would have cost them friendship with some of the backstabbers of the Palestinian cause and defying the US plan would have somehow strengthened the already compliant US relationship with these same traitors to Gaza’s fate.

Since the Gaza resolution, the US has launched an offensive against Venezuelan sovereignty. US military might is staged in waters offshore from Venezuela, insisting that the Venezuelan people bow to US pressure. The threat is real and accompanied by the disgusting demonstration of US power by the murderous killing of boats’ crews in international waters, killings that have no established legitimacy.

How have the PRC and Russia-- the “spear” of BRICS anti-imperialism-- responded?

Kejal Vyas and James T. Areddy, writing in The Wall Street Journal, state smugly: “For two decades, Venezuela cultivated anti-American allies across the globe, from Russia and China to Cuba and Iran, in the hope of forming a new world order that could stand up to Washington. It isn’t working.” They understand that Cuba and Iran are in no position economically to help Venezuela. As for Russia and China, the authors conclude: “Both countries are trying to negotiate major diplomatic and trade deals with Trump now, giving them little incentive to waste political capital on Venezuela.”

It should be clearly understood that Russia, the PRC, and other BRICS states have the sovereign right to forge their own or an independent collective foreign policy, regardless of what others might want. Sadly, unlike in the throes of the Cold War against socialist states, no great power or alliance is willing to risk confrontation with other great powers, where willingness to do so is historically the measure of authentic anti-imperialism.

It should be equally clear that those who elevate the BRICs countries to the status of anti-imperialist icons are doing the left a disservice. However well-meaning some of the BRICS leaders may be, they fall far short of constituting an anti-imperialist bloc. To continue the fantasy that rallying around BRICS is the basis for an anti-imperialist front only deflects the left from attacking the foundation of imperialism: capitalism.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2025/12/bri ... -anti.html

This is a proper Leninist view which I have long held. The downfall of US hegemony will lead to a revival of inter-state capitalist competition. China, as the 'first of equals'('Augustinian', eh?) may well be accepted by most if it continues with it's 'more carrot than stick' approach and we can hope keep a lid on things even as it executes it's planetary sustainability efforts.

[blindpig]

Myth debunked: Communism works in theory…

This article was published in Historic.ly on December 16, 2025 by Esha.

Talking Point: “Communism/socialism sounds good on paper, but it doesn’t work in the real world. It goes against human nature. It’s a nice theory that always fails in practice.”

Summary: This is perhaps the single-most common dismissal used by capitalists against socialist governments. This is repeated ubiquitously against across all capitalist and conservative sources as an Axiom. This aphorism appears in countless forms but rarely with specific attribution—it’s treated as received wisdom that needs no justification. The argument implies that:

The theory is internally consistent and appealing,
BUT human nature or practical realities make it impossible,
Every attempt has failed, proving it can’t work,
Advocates are naive idealists ignoring reality.
Variants:

“Real communism has never been tried” (mockery of defenders)
“It’s utopian thinking”
“Sounds good, doesn’t work”
“Nice idea, wrong species”
“Human nature makes it impossible”
“You can’t change human nature”
The rhetorical function allows the person making the argument seem reasonable (”I understand the appeal…”) while dismissing the actual counterpoint entirely. Positions capitalism as “realistic” and “practical” vs. socialism as “idealistic” and “theoretical.” It frames issue as settled empirical fact rather than debatable question and it functions as a thought-stopping cliché that ends discussion before it begins.

Sources:

Pervasive across Cato Institute, Mises Institute, TPUSA, PragerU materials
Repeated by Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and other prominent conservatives
Standard conservative talking point found in political discourse, social media, and casual conversation
Hoover Institution: “The False Appeal of Socialism” (2020)
Frequently cited without attribution as “common knowledge”
The genius (and weakness) of this argument is that it’s designed to be unattributable—it masquerades as universal wisdom rather than ideological propaganda.

Rebuttal
CAPITALISM DOESN’T EVEN WORK IN THEORY!
This argument is designed to masquerade as universal wisdom instead of an ideological propaganda. “It’s repeated everywhere precisely because it’s a thought-stopping cliché, not an actual analysis.” Everyone who makes this argument always advocate for another system: Capitalism.

It is meant to paint defenders of socialism and communism as idealists living in a utopian society while defenders of capitalism are painted as “realists” who understand the inner workings of the real world. However, nothing can be further from the truth.

While these anti-communists do concede to the fact that communism works in theory, they seem to forget that capitalism, doesn’t even work in theory, let alone in practice.

Why Capitalism Fails in Theory:
Contrary to popular belief, capitalism isn’t when people sell “things” or commodities, which is basically a thing of value that can be traded. Traditionally, people used money to buy commodities such as sugar or rice, and the majority would then consume most of it. However, around the 1600s something changed:industrialization. Commodities that were locally produced and sold, were now produced on a mass scale and sold non-locally in mass quantities. People who were already wealthy were able to use their money in order to trade for commodities in large quantities, not to use or acquire these commodities, but to resell it in order to acquire surplus value. Marx labeled this process the M-C-M’ cycle:

For example, if someone invests €100,000 to buy five cars and register them for ride-sharing services like Uber, the cars are not purchased for personal transportation, rather they are bought as capital. Drivers are hired to operated them. The cars are kept on the roads as much as possible. After a year, the entrepreneur has earned €160,000 in fares and commissions. This is the classic M—C—M′ cycle in modern form:

M (Money): €100,000 capital outlay

C (Commodity): Cars, app registrations, and labor time

M′ (More Money): €160,000–the original sum plus surplus value extracted through the drivers’ work

The point isn’t that society gains more mobility–the cars’ use-value — but that money has returned to its owner augmented. The drivers’ labor and the vehicles’ wear are just the intermediaries through which money begets more money.

In Marx’s analysis, this raised a crucial question: where does that “more money” actually come from? It cannot come from the mere act of exchange, since every trade in a market swaps equivalents–€1,000 worth of goods for €1,000 in cash. The capitalist doesn’t create new value by buying and selling alone. To find the source of profit, Marx followed the chain backward and found it in the one place where something new is produced: the worker’s labor. The capitalist purchases labor power for less than the value it creates. The difference between what the worker is paid and the value their labor adds to the final product is the surplus value–and this, Marx argued, is where exploitation truly begins.

Which begets the first contradiction of capitalism: there’s only so much you can squeeze workers’ wages before the system begins to undermine itself. The more labor is exploited to maximize profit, the fewer people there are with the purchasing power to buy what capitalism produces. In other words, by impoverishing its own consumers, capital saws off the very branch it sits on. This creates a crisis of underconsumption. Capitalism ends up undermining its own market base.



The second way capitalism fails theoretically is that if there are multiple firms that produce the same commodity, each firm must expand their output to flush the competition out of business. But, when all the firms end up doing that simultaneously, the market becomes saturated and the price of the goods drop exponentially. This leads to periodic cycles of bankruptcies, layoffs and and boom and bust cycles. Many of which, we have witnessed in our lifetimes (depending on our age).

During these recurring crises, weaker firms collapse while stronger ones buy up their competitors. This process leads to the consolidation of ownership–both horizontally, when companies absorb rivals within the same industry, and vertically, when they expand control up and down the supply chain. Over time, this turns competitive markets into a handful of monopolies and cartels, exactly as Lenin described in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. What begins as a system of competition ends as a hierarchy of concentrated power.

As Lenin demonstrated in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, by 1907 just 0.9% of German enterprises controlled over half of all industrial workers and the majority of total output. What Marx had theorized as the concentration of capital had already become measurable reality.

Unfortunately, the contradictions and pitfalls don’t end there. As a handful of cartels and monopolies dominate production, their need for profit and raw materials grows insatiable. To keep their factories running and capital expanding, they must look beyond their own borders. Hence begins the drive to colonize the world–to seize new territories, control resources, and secure cheap labor. To keep their factories running and profits rising, they expand outward–colonizing the world. Colonialism reconfigured entire societies for extraction: in India, the British East India Company replaced food crops with tea, opium, and indigo; in Cuba, only sugar could be grown; in Rwanda, fertile farmland was seized for industrial coffee under German and Belgian rule. The result was the same everywhere–famine, dependence, and the destruction of local industry. Colonies that had once fed themselves were forced to import basic food from the imperial core, enriching the same corporations that had robbed them.

As Lenin explained in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, German enterprises entered the colonial race late. By the early 20th century, Britain and France had already divided most of the globe into their own spheres of exploitation. To secure access to raw materials and markets essential for its survival, German capital had only one option left–to seize colonies by force. Thus, imperial rivalry transformed into military conflict, culminating in the First World War: a struggle not of nations, but of capitalist powers fighting over a world that had already been divided.

Capitalism Fails in Practice
When the First World War ended, the map of empire changed, but its logic remained. The victors didn’t simply punish Germany for aggression–they neutralized an economic competitor. The Treaty of Versailles makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of capitalist rivalry, not morality. France and Britain sought to permanently weaken Germany’s industrial base, which by 1914 had already surpassed both in steel production, chemical research, and machine manufacturing.

By stripping Germany of its colonies, restricting its military, seizing patents, and imposing astronomical reparations, the Allies ensured that German capital could not re-enter global markets as an equal competitor. Versailles wasn’t about peace; it was about market control. It froze the world’s hierarchy of production–guaranteeing that France and Britain would continue extracting from their colonies while German capital was deliberately handicapped.


Treaty of Versailles as Explained by a Satirical Cartoon of the time

The tragedy of Weimar Germany was not that fascism overpowered democracy, but that centrism surrendered to it. The ruling class, terrified of socialism and unwilling to sacrifice profits, preferred to dismantle democracy rather than risk redistribution. By the early 1930s, parliament had already hollowed itself out through emergency decrees, wage cuts, and deference to capital. Hitler did not overthrow the system; he inherited it.

As I wrote in The Economy of Evil, fascism did not emerge from chaos or irrationality. It was a rational response of a ruling class cornered by its own contradictions. When capitalism could no longer rule by consent, it ruled by coercion. Fascism became the mechanism through which industrialists preserved their property, destroyed unions, and restructured production under the guise of national renewal.

Parenti called it “capitalism in extremis”–the system defending itself with violence when ideology and markets fail. What began as economic crisis under Hindenburg and Brüning matured into political extermination under Hitler. Capital’s contradictions had finally produced their ultimate form: a state that openly fuses corporate, military, and nationalist power to annihilate class opposition.

In the end, the familiar refrain that “communism works only in theory but fails in practice” collapses under scrutiny, because capitalism has failed on both counts. Its theoretical foundations–competition, equilibrium, self-regulation–implode the moment they are practiced. Each stage of capitalist “progress” has revealed a deeper contradiction: the wage squeeze that undermines consumption, the overproduction that destroys markets, the imperial expansion that breeds world wars, and finally, the fascist synthesis that fuses capital with the state. These are not accidents of mismanagement but the logical outcomes of a system that can sustain itself only through crisis, conquest, and coercion. History’s lesson is not that communism failed to live up to its ideals–it is that capitalism inevitably lives down to its own.

Check out all the other arguments as I build the talking points:

ANTI-COMMUNIST TALKING POINTS DEBUNKED
Victims of Communism—A comedy in the making



https://mronline.org/2025/12/18/myth-de ... in-theory/