From October 22-24, the 16th summit of heads of state of the BRICS countries, an acronym by which the world’s major emerging economies are referred to, was held in the Russian city of Kazan. We are talking about a grouping of states that, after recent accessions, accounts for about 50 percent of the population and more than 35 percent of the world’s GDP. They control an estimated 42 percent of the world’s oil production. With $10.4 trillion, 21.6 percent of global trade, by the end of 2023 they rank second after the European Union.

But what are they really and what do they represent? They were born in 2009, with the union of the first 4 founding states-Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs)-to which South Africa (BRICS) was added a year later, later growing to 10 countries, the BRICS+, by early 2024, with the addition of Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran, while Argentina with the election of Milei in November 2023 has withdrawn from the project for now as it is still engaged in negotiations with the IMF on the terms of repayment of its debt, which amounts to about $45 billion.

As of Jan. 1, 2025, Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on the planet, joins the list while Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan join as “partner members.” The enlargement of this “alliance” would appear to be aimed at promoting an economy in competition with that of the declining imperialism of the United States and its allies, through the use in international transactions of a currency to replace the dollar and the founding of an alternative bank to the IMF and the World Bank, the New Development Bank (NDB).

The strategy is summed up in a few main objectives: greater fiscal and customs cooperation among member countries, greater influence on the international financial scene, and cooperation among the banking systems of member states. The NDB, which lends to emerging economies, mainly in the construction, infrastructure and energy supply sectors, was created in July 2014 at the 6th Summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, and has been providing financing since late 2016. The five founding countries each have an equal share of capital, which, together with that of the other members, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Uruguay, reaches $50 billion. No member has veto power. Assets currently total $30 billion and finance a hundred projects, with the aim of reaching $350 billion by 2030, surpassing the IMF, which manages $110 billion, and the World Bank with $98 billion.

The realization of this prospect is also attested to by a recent Goldman Sachs study on global growth to 2075, which sees the BRICS+ countries expanding sharply compared to the West. The association’s current president Dilma Rousseff, former president of Brazil, who will remain in office until 2025, has repeatedly stated that “the $87 trillion debt bubble of developed countries is a heavy ballast and a block to the development of emerging and poorer countries.” The solution to the problem is clear: “interest rate increases in international markets and excessive depreciation of emerging country currencies feed a vicious cycle of debt. The discrepancy between hard currency debt and income generated by local projects creates a drag on investment and development.”

The problem could be overcome by giving the NDB 30 percent of its financing in local currencies. This would allow expanding the influence of emerging capitalisms to the detriment of hegemonic imperialism in the international market, all within market rules, nothing displacing in the laws of capitalism and their devastating consequences. The Kazan summit, under the chairmanship of Vladimir Putin, was attended, in addition to the member states, by a group of candidate-observers from 36 countries. In addition to economic and financial issues, the summit dealt with open issues in the international arena, finally summarized in 134 points on 43 pages. Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Erdoğan (Turkey is the only NATO country to apply to join) showed no difficulty in shaking hands with Putin, disassociating themselves from the order to “isolate Russia” issued by Washington. Intimation this passively taken up by the EU, with the exceptions of Hungary and Slovakia, which proved to be a disaster for European economies instead of Russia, with Germany also in recession due to rising commodity prices, and in favor of the U.S. economy, which replaced, in part, Russia as a supplier of natural gas.

It is confirmed that all alliances between bourgeois states are fictitious and determined by the volatile needs of the moment. Today many countries do not intend to break with Russia because of its strategic weight and as suppliers of raw materials, energy and even weapons. The participation of UN Secretary General António Guterres was a further sign of a shift in the political line of that world robber organization. Also on the Ukrainian issue was support for China and Brazil’s call for an international conference with participation of Russia and Ukraine, which had already been rejected by Zelensky on the grounds that it did not include maintaining Ukrainian territorial integrity. In the Middle East, Israel was condemned and concern expressed over the extension of the war in Lebanon, whose territorial integrity is to be “maintained” by “ceasing attacks on Unifil personnel.”

After the invasion of Ukraine and as the international war crisis mounts with the massacre in Gaza, the Kazan summit gave further acceleration to the BRICS project, which is increasingly posing itself as an alternative to the post-World War II international equilibrium. However, despite the soothing and conciliatory tones about peace, a fairer and more equitable “multipolar” world for emerging capitalisms, the BRICS, led by Beijing and Moscow, cannot help but strive to replace U.S. hegemony, their real goal.

Within the group are India and Brazil, which do not always hold the same anti-Western positions as Russia and China. Between China and India there remains a historical and strategic rivalry made up of territorial disputes that led only four years ago to clashes along the Himalayan border with several deaths on both sides. At the same time, the two countries are in strategic competition in the Indian Ocean. Delhi, which aspires to compete with China’s world factory, is a member of the Quad, a strategic alliance with the United States, Japan and Australia whose main purpose is to counter any Beijing hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.

The possible expansion would add new critical issues. Iran’s entry, with Saudi Arabia waiting, will inevitably lead to new tensions in the group over increasingly complex Middle Eastern issues as evidenced by opposing fronts in the latest Syrian abyss where regional capitalisms and beyond employ proxy forces. If for the bourgeoisie it is an inextricable tangle, for revolutionary Marxism the issue is simple: within any alliance in capitalism the competition between bourgeois states inevitably leads them toward confrontation, commercial and military. The same rules of capital market and competition apply in the West as in the East.

Europe, too, has created its own bank and regulatory and customs union to better cope with competition in the world market, but this has not prevented each nation from asserting its own interests. Competition among individual bourgeoisies is ineradicable and can never allow lasting peace for humanity. Under economic crisis, competition can no longer be peaceful. Much less will it be able to free from wage slavery the working class, whose exploitation remains brutal in the East as in the West, in the North as in the South, in capitalisms old or young. In the more advanced BRICS+ countries, such as China and India, Brazil and Russia, social differences remain unchanged, just as in Europe or the U.S., and workers are called upon to make great sacrifices for the “good of the country.” Tomorrow they will be called upon to immolate themselves in the general war that capitalism is maturing.

It will not be a multipolar world, yet another fable designed to delude the workers, that will heal the wounds of capitalism but the ever-expanding and united class struggle among Western and BRICS+ workers for their own economic claims first and for the establishment of the Communist dictatorship state later.