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Please Visit the BRICs from below website. The BRICs from below website was established in 2016 to news and analysis on worker and community protests in the BRICS countries and against the activities of BRICS based multinationals especially in Africa. The G20From Below website was set up in to 2025 to extened this work to the G20 countries.
Introducing BRICS from above, BRICS from the middle and BRICS from below
BRICS FROM ABOVE
Heads of state, Business Forum, elite allies
*BRICS as anti-imperialist (ANC & Pretoria rhetoric – “Talk Left, Walk Right”, e.g. national-liberation tradition, foreign ministry on global geopolitics, finance minister on IMF reform, sports minister on FIFA)
*BRICS as sub-imperialist (Pretoria relegitimising world capitalism, lubricating neoliberalism in - and exploiting - Africa, intensifying class war against SA’s poor/workers/women/nature on behalf of global/local capital, ensuring maximum greenhouse gas emissions alongside BASIC/US no matter local/continental/global consequences, and playing “deputy sheriff” role to imperialism)
*BRICS as inter-imperialist (Pretoria's potential support for a new internet delinked from US, promotion of Putin v Obama in September 2013 at G20, and mainly backing Russia in Crimea/Ukraine conflict - as well as earlier episodes where SA lined up with China in UN e.g. in relation to Burma)
BRICS FROM THE MIDDLE
Academic Forum, trade unions, NGOs
BRICS advocates (most of Academic Forum, Johannesburg & Pretoria “think tanks” and others who suffer persistent “failure of analytical nerve”)
*wait-and-see (most NGOs and trade unions - as well as “Third Worldist” intellectuals - who wish for BRICS to become “anti-impi” at UN, Bretton Woods Institutions, Development Bank, Contingent Reserve Arrangement, etc)
*critics (those associated with brics-from-below network who consider BRICS to be “sub-impis” and sometimes also “inter-impis”)
BRICS FROM BELOW
Grassroots activists whose visions run local to global
*localist (stuck within local or sectoral silos, including myriad “popcorn protests” - even some against BRICS corporations or projects - that are insurgent, unstrategic, momentary, at constant risk of becoming xenophobic, and prone to populist demagoguery)
*nationally-bound (most activists who are vaguely aware of - and hostile to - BRICS yet so overwhelmed by local, national and sectoral battles, they fail to link across borders - even BRICS hinterlands)
*solidaristic-internationalist (“global justice movement” allies aspiring for joint campaigning against common BRICS enemies such as Vale, China Development Bank, DBSA, Transnet/mega-shipping, fossil fuel corporations and other polluters, coming BRICS Development Bank)
JEALOUS PRO-WEST CAPITALISTS
Most white organic intellectuals of capital connected to Old Money, multinational-corporate branch plants, Business Day, northern-centric big biz, Democratic Alliance and their ilk.
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