My Dream for BRICS and its Critics

by Bruce Lerro / January 17th, 2026

Orientation

With the recent kidnapping of President Maduro by Yankee imperialists, I wonder about how BRICS nations and other countries sympathetic to them such as North Korea and Iran will respond. Venezuela has made an attempt to join BRICS and clearly they are in the socialist camp so I would expect it would be especially important to China. Were BRICS countries and their allies aware of the build-up for the kidnaping and what kind of help did they offer?

Some of my Facebook friends with an especially deep appreciation of geopolitics think I am naïve in my hopes that BRICS can be an operative to intervene politically in these events or other coups by a desperate United States. After all, BRICS is a formidable economic organization with infrastructural commitments like China’s Belt and Road Initiative to name just one economic commitment. Also, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to name another. However, they are not just international political organization. BRICS, after all has a wide variation of political orientation within its countries. There is a socialist country (China), Hindu fundamentalist (India) and capitalist nationalist (Russia) not to mention two Islamic allies, Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia). Can all these countries muster enough unity to stand up to the United States now and in the future? Time will tell. Let me provide a world historical perspective as to the uniqueness of BRICS in the overview of the history of capitalism.

A World-Systems Theory of the History of Capitalism
Capitalism gets around. In his great book The Long Twentieth Century Giovanni Arrighi claimed capitalism has gone through four stages, including:

• commercial capitalism of the Italians trading cities in the high Middle Ages;
• commercial seafaring Dutch in the 17th century;
• industrial manufacturing of the British in the 19th century and
• industrial manufacturing, financial and military capitalism US in the 20th century.

Another world systems theorists, Immanuel Wallerstein writes that each of these countries has gone through 5 phase of capitalism:

• commercial;
• slave;
• industrial;
• financial and
• military.

Arrighi points out that the speed through which the four hegemons go through the cycles speeds up so that their risk and decline accelerates. It ranges from 220 years for the Italians to 100 years for the United States (1870-1970). Why did they collapse? It was because of wars and financial ruin. What we have is the rise and fall of four hegemons having gone through the five phases of capitalism. This is all laid out in detail in my articles: “Beyond Socialist Purity” and “The Cycles  and Spirals of Capitalism.”

If the United States has been in decline for 55 years. Where will the world economy go? These days it is easy to say it is China. Both Andre Gunder Frank, in ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age and Giovanni Arrighi Adam Smith in Beijing put their money on China and did so over 25 years ago.

However, today there is something new that neither Arrighi nor Gunder Frank predicted. In the whole history of capitalism over the last 500 years it is only individual political entities that have risen and fallen. Today we have a regional configuration on the rise, BRICS and a regional confederation in decline, the United States and Western Europe. So, if economics was the only thing that matters, BRICS with China in the lead will be the new hegemon. But as most radicals know it is not economics on one hand and political science on the other. There is only political economy. The attack on Venezuela was an international political act in the service of economics (oil, gold and other natural resources). Can or will BRICS countries respond to this politically, either individually or as a collectively?

Can My Dream Come True?
How much do the Russian and Chinese leaders understand this world historical picture of the history of capitalism? My hope is that they do. My hope is they act not just as single nation-states within a region but rather as a regional consciousness within the national policies. Secondly, my wish is that they operate under the following political and economic values:

• nationalism as a political force that fights against the globalization of capitalism;
• nationalization that fights imperialism and colonialism;
• support of industrial capitalism as opposed to finance capitalism whether that system is socialist or capitalist;
• support of surplus value for technological innovation as opposed to investment in military aggression, and
• a new concept of the political spectrum which unites left and right against political centrism.

It seems to me that China, Russia and Iran have the most potential to come closest to this dream. India and Brazil seem to still want to imagine deals can be made with the West.

Skeptical Leftist Responds:
No Illusions about China and Russia
This is from my friend Raul:

“I am sorry, my left-leaning ideologue camaradas, but after many disappointments and fiascos from Syria, to Libya, to Palestine, to Venezuela and beyond, I no longer believe in the illusion of Russia and China representing a multipolar option to the empire. I used to believe in that illusion, but the well documented arguments presented by a couple of friends and easily verifiable historical facts broke the spell (and I am glad about it.)

While not exercising the same form of brutal gangster-like form of imperialism as the U.S. or Israel, Russia and China are certainly not going to put their hands on the fire for no one but themselves, and I hope Iran is taking notes of the Syria and Venezuela fiascos before they deposit their trust blindly in Russia and China as allies not willing to do a damn thing when they are attacked by the sick satanic Zionist forces.

Just look at Russia welcoming with open arms the illegitimate terrorist government of Ahmed al-Sharaa former leader of Al Qaeda/Daesh in Syria. Not making any unfounded accusations here, but literally the last meeting Maduro had before his abduction was with China’s Qiu Xiaoqi, special representative of the Chinese government on Latin American affairs, at the Miraflores Palace a day before the U.S. attacks. Again, I am not accusing them of participating in these crimes, but at the very least, they decided to remain passive and limit their response to issuing a few toothless platitudes condemning the war crimes in Venezuela and criminal abduction of the leader of a sovereign nation which was supposed to be their ally.

Now, let us discuss Russia and China’s backstabbing of  Palestine. On the 15th of November Putin initiated a phone call with Netanyahu to discuss Middle East affairs which included discussions on both Syria and Gaza. Just two days later a Russian military delegation showed up in Damascus and was filmed touring Southern Syria just before Russia’s abstention at the UN allowing Trump’s colonial plans to proceed while giving the green light to Israel to bomb a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.

Israeli military claimed that the attack targeted a Hamas training compound where militants were preparing to carry out terrorist operations. In fact it was a sports field within the refugee camp – 15 civilians were killed, many of them young teenagers who were playing football at the time

As we speak, Russian and China are enabling and endorsing war criminal Trump’s ethnic cleansing project in Gaza. So seriously, from now on pro-Russia/China ideologues should spare us any multipolar world rhetoric and stop at once with the foolish notion suggesting that Russia and China are moral models of reference, because evidently they are not. Blind ideology is wrong on the right side of the political spectrum and blind ideology also happens to be wrong on the left side of the political spectrum…”

In the Name of Marxist Leninism
Here is another comment by a friend that Ismael passed on.

Just quick thoughts: China does not practice romantic anti-imperialism. It practices historical materialism under conditions of uneven power. It just cannot come rescue you and trigger a full-fledged confrontation. All socialist states understand the need to avoid actions that collapse contradictions too early, especially when such actions can allow Washington the opportunity to reframe the conflict as “democracy vs authoritarianism”.

In fact, this is what distinguishes Chinese anti-imperialism based on dialectics from isolationist, “civilizational” or elite-led selective populist anti-imperialism  that avoid the real battlefield of global capitalism itself, its circuits of rent, debt, logistics and surplus. Venezuela (even as I understand real constraints it faced under severe sanctions) could be cited as one such example with some nuance.

I thought we knew this as Marxist Leninists. China will not die on someone else’s barricade… It expects states to manage their own internal contradictions. Solidarity means keeping the system open for future autonomy, not rushing in with gunboats to prove ideological virtue.

I know this is exactly what is frustrating inqilab types (not saying history doesn’t favor them when time is ripe and they did make sense in Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria). And I can actually sympathize with them. But premature showdown with empire (from Hungary 1956 to Chile 1970s) tends to end in obliteration. China as a really existing socialism knows these lessons deeply and avoids fetishizing “the moment” that seduces the weak into fatal confrontations, taking away its weapon of time in asymmetric equations. It is this very strategic patience and peace that makes China more “violent” and revolutionary in the most radical sense.

So when China refuses dramatic confrontation over Venezuela, it’s protecting this hard-won positional advantage. Rescue is a liberal fantasy! Trump would LOVE China to break the Western Hemisphere taboo (the Monroe Doctrine). We don’t want that. If China were practicing “dirty realpolitik” we would be seeing it perform coercive “protector” politics, not otherwise. And this makes the BRICS alliance all the more important!

It would be a dirty realpolitik if China was trying to win imperialism’s game. Realpolitik has no concept of negation of the negation. It only knows adjustment. The ethical structure is “immanent”, not performative. This is the key historical point. China’s ethics are expressed through rules of engagement with history. Do we want China to win imperialism’s game or outlive the dirty game itself?

I’m not being a cynic. This is class calculus at the level of the world-system. We are communists, we drag down the heaven from clouds and nail it to the material history. Keep marching, it is always obvious only as an “after the fact”.

Lastly, I would like to show you a 17-minute video by a geopolitical analysis which claims that far from “deciding” to invade Venezuela, the CIA, the Neocons and Trump were trapped by a strategic plan laid out by Russia and China that was three years in the making. While the United States in a case of imperial overstretch will be preoccupied with Venezuela, the Chinese will consolidate their power in the Pacific region, including Taiwan and North Korea. Here is the video:

Conclusion

I began this article with the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro as a way to take stock of the power and limitations of BRICS as an alternative to Western imperialism. Then I placed Western imperialism in the world-historical context of the history of capitalism to show:

• the collapse of the United States as the latest capitalist hegemon and
• the rise of China.

Then I suggested that in today’s world the regional federation of BRICS expresses a transference of the world economy from the West to the East and that BRICS might be the future of the world economy. My dream for BRICS included the following:

• nationalism as a political force that fights against economic globalization;
• nationalization that fights political imperialism;
• support of industrial capitalism as opposed to finance capitalism whether that system is socialist or capitalist;
• support of surplus value invested in technological innovation as opposed investment in military aggression and
• a new concept of the political spectrum which unites left and right against political centrism.

I closed my article with three skeptical arguments about BRICS. One is the failure of Russia and China in the past and present to come to the aid of Syria, Palestine, Libya and Venezuela. The other defends Chinese anti-imperialism against a romantic kind of anti-imperialism and says China cannot jeopardize it gains and that other states, even socialist ones have to fight their own domestic battles. The last video presents the power of two countries within BRICS: China and Russia. They have developed a political and economic strategy to trap the United States and limit its capacity to undermine their BRICS projects.

I am sure there are many other international dynamics between the East and the West that are not covered in my three examples. So what else needs to be said? Are there more cynical arguments against the power and reach of BRICS? Are there even more optimistic outlooks based on facts that are about BRICS than my dream? Your comments are most welcome. Reply at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.