WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere #21: Assault on the dollar - Giovanni Cimbalo* (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

The XV Brics summit (an acronym formed from the initials of the founding
countries of the organization Brazil, India, Russia, China, South
Africa) was held in Johannesburg from 22 to 24 August. The leaders of 67
countries and representatives of the main international organizations,
as well as representatives of the world of international economics. 23
requests for new memberships, 6 "full members" admitted from January 1,
2024: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates. With the entry of the new members, the Brics countries "will
represent 36% of global GDP and 47% of the population of the entire
planet". A heterogeneous group of nations that are committed to
establishing an equal partnership between countries that have different
points of view, but a shared vision for a better, multipolar world, and
share a declared goal: the de-dollarization of trade at on a global
level, proof of this is that in trade between the five Brics countries
during 2022 the use of the American currency amounted to only 28.7% of
the total. During the meeting the five members of the Brics reached a
agreement on the guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedures
of the expansion process of the group of emerging economies. "We have
reached a consensus on the first phase of this expansion process,"
underlined the South African President, who chaired the summit, adding
that the leaders of the various countries have instructed their finance
ministers and central bank governors to consider the issue of the use of
local currencies as payment instruments and of commercial exchange
platforms as instruments of de-dollarization, instructing them to report
to the Brics leaders themselves at the next summit on the possibility of
adopting a common trading currency. Reiterating the need to move in this
direction the President of Brazil proposed to strengthen the Bank of the
Brics countries to make it «stronger than the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), enabling it to guarantee loans for the development and
creation of a common currency, finding the support - granted - of his
dolphin and former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who arrived in
Johannesburg in the role of head of the New Development Bank of the
BRICS, the New Development Bank, the international banking fund based in
Shanghai created by the Brics on 14 July 2014 in the meeting of
Fortaleza (and chaired by her). The Bank plans to start lending in South
African and Brazilian currencies as part of a plan to reduce dependence
on the dollar and promote a more multipolar international financial
system. The Brics bank has also sought to distinguish itself from the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund by not establishing lists
of policy conditions on loans. This is one of the conditions with which
to make its services attractive. However, in the official agenda of the
summit in recent days there was no mention of the construction of a
common anti-dollar currency, but the question is being studied by the
various partners. Certainly Saudi Arabia's membership of the
organization, which has opened the negotiations to become a new member
of the Multilateral Bank, introduces the presence of a country that has
immense capital reserves, and the same goes for other members such as
the United Arab Emirates which certainly will not deny their support to
the new banking institution. Strength and weakness of the BRICS The
current enlargement of the BRICS, born in 2001 as a group of countries
that share a developing economic situation and have abundant strategic
natural resources, are characterized by strong GDP growth and hold a
significant share of the World trade has a precedent in the entry of
South Africa in 2010 and now knows a further development that inserts
into the group. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates
and Iran which are among the largest producers of fossil fuels; this
inclusion allows the group to control a large part of the world's
production of crude oil and natural gas. It should also be remembered
that among the candidate countries there is Venezuela whose entry into
the organization is considered imminent. In this way the majority of oil
and gas producing countries would be part of the organization which
would thus have the possibility of guide the production and marketing of
this important raw material. The rapid entry of Argentina into the
organization was explicitly desired by the President of Brazil Lula, who
in this way wanted to send a signal to all of Latin America, taking
charge of a country that finds itself experiencing an economic
contingency difficult, with very high inflation, and this despite the
fact that it has immense resources and wealth, evidently poorly used and
poorly managed. The less we understand the reasons that led the
organization to admit to its membership countries such as Ethiopia and
Egypt which do not seem to present characteristics that would arouse the
interest of the Brics at first sight, unless it is concluded for the
choice to give a signal of attention to African countries and to frame
the admission within the scope of the policy of good neighborliness with
the poor part of the world. There are those who wanted to see in the
BRICS an alternative to the G7 and an instrument of opposition to the
"West. If this is true for Russia and China, it is certainly not so for
India which strives on every occasion to remember that the spirit with
which the Brics operate is to collaborate for a more harmonious
functioning of the world economy and to give trade and exchanges between
different economies a greater balance. The same goes for other countries
that operate within the organization, but the fact is that the BRICS
model today represents an alternative to a economy dominated by the
dollar and the terms of trade set by the most advanced economies of the
West. Certainly the growth of this aggregation can only enhance the
transformation of international balances, making them evolve in the
direction of a multipolar world within which countries such as China,
Russia and India play a certainly new role. In particular, the expansion
of the organization demonstrates Russia's ever decreasing isolation at
an international level, especially since at the meeting in Johannesburg
it assured that it will provide 50,000 tonnes of wheat free of charge to
six African countries, including the Burkina Faso, Mali, Eritrea and
other African countries, presumably in the Sahel area, where Russia's
strategic interests in Africa are concentrated. Furthermore, the Russian
government stated: "This year we expect to export around 55 million
tonnes according to our harvest plans. This figure can be adjusted
upwards during the harvest. If we see that our harvest forecasts in
terms volumes of cereals are growing, we will also adjust the figure in
terms of export volumes." Confirmation of these statements by Russia
comes from the observation that last week, Kenya began processing 34,000
tons of condensate for fertilizers, supplied free of charge by Russia in
May. According to local media, this condensate will be used to produce
100,000 tons of finished products, which will be allocated as subsidized
inputs to farmers, gaining support for the donor. Outlook and
development In China's intentions, the BRICS countries "should be
companions on the path of development and revitalization and oppose
decoupling and the breakdown of supply chains and economic coercion." It
should be remembered that after Johannesburg, Algeria, Bangladesh,
Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Indonesia, Kazakhstan,
Kuwait, Palestine, Nigeria, Senegal, Thailand, Venezuela, Vietnam remain
on the waiting list, while further requests cannot be ruled out
membership to the extent that the policies practiced by the organization
will prove effective in guaranteeing development financing through the
Bank that they themselves founded and through the cooperation policies
established. It should also be noted that China is present in many of
these countries with massive investments, especially in infrastructures
that facilitate the development of these countries, but at the same time
link them to the Chinese economy. The consequence is that the multipolar
world is now a reality and the West and the United States in particular
have only take note of it, waiting to see the role of the dollar as the
cornerstone of the world monetary system increasingly undermined. If
this were to happen we would find ourselves faced with the end of a
positional rent for the US economy that dates back at least to the end
of the Second World War and which will pose many problems by upsetting
the operating rules of both monetary and global trade. What is happening
can only have adverse effects on the European Union and its economy
which will be called upon to choose which side to take. The role of
vassalage towards the American economy, as well as that of privileged
partnership towards the US economy, is destined to wane and the new
balances will be difficult to draw because it will be necessary to deal
with a completely new and currently unpredictable. German industry knows
something about this and must decide how to behave with its exports to
China and how to deal with the growth in competitiveness of goods
produced in the BRICS countries. Mario Draghi, former president of the
ECB and former Italian prime minister, warned in a recent statement
given to the Economist in relation to Europe's future problems: "The
strategies that have ensured Europe's prosperity and security in the
past - dependence on America for security, on China for exports and on
Russia for energy - have become insufficient, uncertain or unacceptable.
In this new world, paralysis is clearly unsustainable for citizens,
while the radical option of leaving the EU has produced decidedly mixed
results. Creating a closer union will ultimately prove to be the only
way to guarantee the security and prosperity so desired by European
citizens." The new scenarios At a time when we hypothesize impossible
scenarios of evolution of economic and commercial relations at we do not
want to formulate a value judgement, but we limit ourselves exclusively
to ascertaining the trend lines on the basis of which the new major
players in international economic policy move, destined to become actors
of a new power politics that are neither worse nor better than the
Western capitalist powers that preceded them, nor than the groups of
states and powers that survive in the European and North American
scenario and which will continue to operate to perpetuate the
exploitation of the weak part of the world, at all latitudes. look
carefully, the new BRICS aggregate includes countries governed by
regimes that certainly do not shine for their openness to civil
liberties, just think of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates
and, why not, China, Russia , to India. The atrocities of the Saudi
Arabian government are all too well known: it is enough to recall the
murder of the journalist Cassogi and the repression of civil liberties
in the country, while its role in supporting the politics of the Wahhabi
movements in the world and even of the jihadist movements is well known;
what can we say about Iran where for more than a year there has been a
ferocious repression of women and their most basic freedoms, while there
is class exploitation carried out by a clerical society managed by a
retrograde and obtuse clergy. Even the United Arab Emirates certainly do
not shine for civil liberties, nor for that of women, nor for the rights
of workers, exploited to the point of causing their death, in a total
absence of the most basic guarantees of safety at work and protection of
workers' rights. As for China, the country's civil liberties have been
sacrificed on the altar of the achieved well-being of the population
which, moreover, experiences growing inequalities and an ever-increasing
concentration of wealth in the hands of a bourgeois elite which now
constitutes the backbone of the country . The famous phrase in its
Constitution which describes the Chinese state as an entity governed by
an alliance between peasant workers and the national bourgeoisie is,
certainly, today unbalanced in favor of the power exercised by the
latter class component. What can we say about Russia, where the Putin
dictatorship is leading the country to disaster and where the
pan-Russian vision of power supported by the Russian Orthodox Church and
based on the close alliance between State and Church is increasingly
imposing itself, where the Church provides the ideological cover for
politics of expansion and power of the State, with the total sacrifice
of civil liberties and the imposition of traditional and regressive
values which destroy the most basic rights of citizenship. Among the
members of the BRICS, India stands out for its role and presence,
governed by the policy of Hindutva, the nationalist ideology on which
Prime Minister Modi's political vision is based, based on the motto
"Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan".: a religion, Hinduism, a language, Hindi, for
a land consecrated to a homogeneous national community and whose
domination must belong to a well-defined lineage: the Hindu one. The
analysis, albeit brief, of the member countries ends with Ethiopia
governed by a government that has made its own the "theology of
prosperity" of the evangelical Churches, perverting the tradition and
nature of the country as well as Egypt whose dictatorial and criminal
tendencies of government are well known.

An exception seems to be represented by South Africa which, after
difficult choices, is moving towards a development policy which is
however not without shadows and above all by Brazil which under Lula's
management seems to have rediscovered that impetus towards open social
policies and towards environmental protection and which is trying to
lead Argentina in crisis along this path. In these countries, regardless
of how the various governments are classified, the subordinate classes
are exploited to pursue a policy of concentrating wealth in the hands of
a few, to perpetuate the slavery of wage labor, which is also
characterized by wages that are often below subsistence thresholds. Just
think of the working conditions practiced in India to shudder when
compared with similar situations but perhaps of more attenuated and
refined exploitation in Western countries. In fact, we would not like
our analysis which notes the evolution of the economic and political
situation to give the impression of satisfaction with what is happening,
for a second-hand Third Worldism, exhaustive of class reasons, which
enjoys the end of hegemony of the West in the economic and political
fields. Unfortunately, the evolution and development of the forms of
State and government remains highly punitive of the interests of the
exploited classes and tends to perpetuate class domination and
capitalist exploitation with forms that see changing only the
configuration of the main actors who hold the levers of power but keep
class exploitation intact. The solution must be sought in a new and
strong internationalism, based on class solidarity and on the
construction of institutional legal systems that guarantee a fair
distribution of resources, access for all workers to the goods produced
and the beautiful things of life, the way that everyone is allowed to
access resources to satisfy their needs. This function is becoming
increasingly possible today on the basis of the evolution of production
capabilities, new technologies, a more careful vision of the resources
offered by the planet, the need to respect nature for a rational use of
resources in order to fairly satisfy needs of all.

*Political Growth N.176 September 23 - UCADI Newsletter (Union of
Anarchist Communists of Italy)

Construction site no. 21 November 2023 ilcantiere@autistici.org

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca