BRICS Breakthrough? Economists Richard Wolff & Patrick Bond on Growing Alliance, Challenge to U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with the summit of BRICS nations that concluded Thursday in the Russian city of Kazan as President Putin made a comeback to the global stage, hosting 36 world leaders and representatives from countries including China, India, South Africa, Iran, even Palestine. Israel’s war on Gaza took center stage, with many heads of states demanding an immediate ceasefire. Putin also faced direct calls at the summit from some of Russia’s most important allies for Moscow to end the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the BRICS coalition, which was founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, officially added 13 new nations to the alliance as partner countries, including Bolivia, Cuba, Nigeria and Turkey.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Here in New York, Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School, founder of Democracy at Work, author of several books, including, most recently, Understanding Capitalism. And in Johannesburg, South Africa, we’re joined by the political economist Patrick Bond, distinguished professor and director of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg, his recent CounterPunch article headlined “Rising Dangers of Imperial and Sub-Imperial Partnering.”

We’re going to begin with you, Patrick. Talk about the significance of this BRICS summit.

PATRICK BOND: I must quickly say thank you for having me. But also, in 10 or 11 days, you may know whether the great teams at Democracy at Work and Democracy Now! need to be in exile because democracy won’t be allowed. And you’ll come to Johannesburg, and we’ll have a very fine site for your production systems. It’s a great address here at the moment.

And I think the fact that we had the BRICS summit just 14 months ago — I was chatting and debating with Vijay Prashad, along with my colleague Trevor Ngwane. And it means that in the current period, where the de-dollarization rhetoric coming up to this BRICS, because Russia hosting it and being shut out of the SWIFT system, having $600-and-some billion seized illegally by the Western banks, and not getting loans, even from the BRICS New Development Bank, suffering sanctions, that meant a lot of attention has been on whether Vladimir Putin and his team can generate a de-dollarization strategy. Unfortunately — and fortunately, that didn’t transpire.

And then, since we’ve just come out of the Israeli genocide story, not using genocide in the Kazan Declaration on Wednesday night, not calling for sanctions, even though the United Nations General Assembly effectively did last month, and not acknowledging that nine out of the 10 BRICS countries have very profitable relationships, like South Africa, number one coal exporter to Israel, and China and India having companies that run the Haifa Port, you could turn those off and really put pressure on Israel if they really had the guts. But we see them talking left, walking right.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Richard Wolff, your takeaway from this BRICS summit? How historic was it?

RICHARD WOLFF: In my judgment, and even though Patrick is right about a number of his criticisms, this is a historic turning point. I cannot overstress it. Here we have, for the first time in a century, a serious economic competitor to the United States and its role in the world. We’ve never seen this before in the lifetimes you, me and the people watching this program and listening to it. Here are a group of countries that together have a larger GDP, a greater production, than the G7, the United States and its allies. We haven’t had that before. And the gap between them is growing. The economic growth of the United States this year, by the IMF, is scheduled to be 2.8%; in China, 4.8%; in India, 7%. So, they are growing faster than we are. They’ve been doing it for decades. It is a new economic world. And as an economist and an American, I am aghast that our presidential election isn’t putting that front and forward.

This is a new world. Everybody else in the world is adjusting to this reality. The American Empire and our system is in a decline relative to what the BRICS are about. Are there problems among them? For sure. Do they have their faults? Absolutely. This is not good and bad, but it is a radical alteration. And if we continue as a nation to pretend it isn’t happening or it isn’t important, we will continue to make big strategic mistakes, not the least of which is to bring us into a war kind of situation that people are already sensing might be in the air.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, for his comments at the BRICS summit.

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] We are in touch with the leadership of Iran, in a very close contact. We see our role in creating conditions to settling the situation by finding mutual compromises. I think it is possible.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Bond, your response, the Russia-Iranian alliance, and also the latest news that North Korea is sending soldiers to Russia, perhaps to fight in Ukraine?

PATRICK BOND: Well, those conflicts, Russia-Ukraine, are just so tragic, since some several hundred thousand Ukrainian working-class people, and maybe 100,000 Russians, have been killed in what is a power grab, that I think goes outside my line of argument that it’s a subimperial — it’s a rogue subimperial, the way Janet Yellen’s rogue imperial grab of all those assets could be described.

But, you know, if I come back to where Richard was saying that this is an alternative, it’s something new, it’s a real challenge, I must fight you on that, my old friend, because I think there’s not an anti-imperial, but a subimperial, not against, but within. Just think of the global value chain, my phone that has the cobalt from child labor in China, in Chinese mines in the eastern DRC, then coming back into a Western phone. And these are the sorts of relationships we really have to be restructuring, not just a sort of shifting of the deck chairs on a global capitalist Titanic, certainly as the multilateral system expands. Next month, there will be, you know, a G20. Last year in Delhi, the African Union was added. As it expands to have more legitimacy, without changing the IMF and the World Bank and the WTO in any substantive way, the BRICS are playing a greater role, I think, in amplifying the worst aspects.

Just as one final example, 51% of global emissions come from these 10 countries, but they only produce 29% of GDP. What it means is, BRICS next month go to Azerbaijan for COP29. I’m sure Democracy Now!, as usual, will go there and do cutting-edge analysis. You’ll find that the BRICS and the West are tightly allied against the rest of us.

AMY GOODMAN: Last word goes to Richard Wolff.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, history does not happen in a morality play. You’re not going to have the bad disappear and replaced by the good. It’s never worked that way. What you have to have is an analysis of what’s actually going on. And the unanimity, the dominance of the United States is over. And the whole world is trying to figure out, every company in the world, every country: How do you navigate a new international order? The United States is pretending that, as a nation, it doesn’t have to worry about this. And I’m afraid Patrick’s remarks will lead people to think, “Well, there’s problems on their side, too” — which there are, but that misses the larger historical phenomena. This is the first serious economic competition this country has faced, and the consequences of that will be overwhelming to us.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us, Richard Wolff, economics professor, visiting professor at The New School, and Patrick Bond, professor at the University of Johannesburg.

That does it for our show. Yes, Democracy Now! will be in Baku, Azerbaijan, covering the U.N. climate summit in mid-November. And tune in on election night, Tuesday, November 5th, for a four-hour Democracy Now! election special, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” Join us from 8 p.m. to midnight Eastern, and any television or radio station can take the broadcast, as well. We’ll also be airing an expanded two-hour election show on Wednesday, November 6th. That does it for our show. Check out our job listings at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.