How to interpret these inspiring words, by one of the most eloquent, prolific exponents of Global South politics and economic development, Vijay Prashad?
The New Bandung Spirit is about Industrial Development “… The original [BRICS] members – Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa – came together in 2009 in response to the US housing market’s subprime crisis that signalled to them the end of the United States as the buyer of last resort for their goods and services. Talk of South-South cooperation in the decades before 2009 had not been taken too seriously; but after the financial crisis morphed into a long period of low growth rates, impacted deeply by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it became clear that South-South trade might be the way out for the large economies of the Global South. It made sense to expand the BRICS with the addition of the major energy-producing countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) as well as large economies in their regions (Egypt, Ethiopia, and now Indonesia)… Indonesia will host a low-profile event to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference in June. The ‘Bandung Spirit’ is not being widely advertised these days, partly because of the lingering internal problems among Global South states. It seems far more logical to simply allow the contradictions of the present to generate their own new spirit, with the fight to establish sovereignty over a nation’s resources at the center of this new mood.”
There are some good and some bad arguments in this passage. Consider, in the pages below, an extended rewrite of those words, given that there are obviously correct observations (repeated verbatim in bold –and see Prashad’s full analysis here), together with what I see as incorrect or misleading assertions. The latter may create the impressions that BRICS leaders are opponents of neo-liberal corporate dominance; that Indonesia as host for Bandung’s 70th anniversary is appropriate; and that its new president Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo is potentially an ally of progressives who desire cleaner extractive-sector policies, to properly industrialize.
Prashad wrote the passage above and with his usual charisma, reiterated the points orally on George Galloway’s Mother Of All Talk Shows on April 19:
Prashad: “Ever since the collapse of the Western economies because of the subprime economic crisis, there has been a resurrection, in a way, of the countries of the Global South, led by China. And this has created a new kind of spirit. It’s not the same as Bandung, I don’t think we should be naive or nostalgic about it. There is definitely a new mood in the Global South. It’s not a repeat of Bandung, but it’s important for us to remember Bandung in order to understand the developments taking place nowadays.” Galloway: “Amen to that. Does BRICS in any way represent something of the spirit of Bandung? It’s a collection not only of poor countries of course. Some of the richest countries in the world are now members of BRICS. But is it informed or moved by the same kind of spirit? Prashad: “You see, it’s really interesting, George because in 2007-08 there was this major financial crisis in the United States and in Europe, and these countries really have never recovered from it. This financial crisis was deepened by the COVID pandemic and then further by the war in Ukraine. It’s not really recovered. You can see that the Trump tariffs are going to hurt a little bit, if he puts them back into effect for Europe and other places. But it’s not like Europe has had a boisterous growth rate for the last decade or so. It’s been in really bad shape. For this reason, countries like India, China, Indonesia and so on decided, ‘Look we can’t rely on Europe and the United States to buy our goods and services. We’re going to have to start selling to each other.’ And that was the impetus in 2009 for the first BRICS meeting. Ever since then the BRICS has largely talked about trade: increasing trade South to South. This has been very important. The Belt and Road Initiative from China is very much a part of this.”
In contrast, I argue below, notwithstanding Prashad’s unparalleled experience in global-justice advocacy, he runs the risk of raising expectations and promoting alliances that will set back international and local progressive politics. One false hope is that Prabowo – formerly the son-in-law of Soeharto during the notorious dictator’s last five years of rule – can and will revive the spirit of Bandung. Other unrealistic expectations are Indonesia adopting a constructive version of what’s termed ‘resource-nationalism’; or ‘industrial development’ emerging merely from the predatory corporate extraction of the world’s largest nickel reserves (by the likes of the notorious Brazilian multinational corporation Vale), often opposed by local residents; or the BRICS keeping progressive promises of South-South trade, based on past performance.
In reality, the bloc’s corporations mainly act as leading Global-South facilitators of a super-exploitative economic order – achieved through ‘global value chains’ and neo-liberal multilateral institutions – and in these ways are sub-imperial allies of the West. This role is likely to extend to new forms of service to Donald Trump. His paleo-conservative isolationism runs contrary to footloose U.S. firms’ desired neo-liberalism, yet Trump appears intent on restructuring world trade, as will be clear in deals with 75 countries which earlier this month were ‘kissing my ass.‘
The deals will soon result in yet more privileges to favoured corporations thanks to Washington’s tariff treats. An example of South African ass-kissing was Pretoria’s presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya last month disclosing to the New York Times: “One option under consideration is to increase cooperation between the two countries on gas, with the United States getting more access to gas exploration in South Africa and South Africa sourcing more of its gas from America.”
Today in South Africa, large-scale – albeit still mainly speculative – offshore licenses are held by French (TotalEnergies), British (Shell) and Brazilian (Lula-backed Petrobras) oil companies plus local allies. Methane gas is 85 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period. Hence its dangerous extraction from the world’s second-most fierce ocean currents is widely opposed by South Africans who have protested on Atlantic and Indian Ocean beachfronts more than 100 times since late 2021 (No wonder we read of Magwenya’s ‘option’ disclosure first in a New York City rag, as it’s not up for discussion locally.)
Indeed, consistent with Trump’s broader agenda, just as the ratio of trade to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell during the 2010s across the world, led by the BRICS, another terrible feature of the bloc’s inability to manage its own versions of predatory capitalism became clear to those committed to Palestine liberation who would dare simply look at the data: BRICS corporations began acting as important economic and military supporters of Israel’s apartheid managers and genocidaires. All these factors undercut optimism about the BRICS rebooting Bandung.
The new BRICS spirit is actually about deindustrialization and deglobalization
Originally, four BRIC founders – Brazil, China, India and Russia – “came together in 2009 in response to the US housing market’s subprime crisis that signalled to them the end of the United States as the buyer of last resort for their goods and services,”as Prashad recalls. Starting in 2011, South Africa was added to the annual talk shops. In 2015, a BRICS New Development Bank was inaugurated for mainly project loans, although in 2020 general balance-of-payments support was also extended.
This was a new phenomenon, to be sure. “Talk of South-South cooperation in the decades before 2009 had not been taken too seriously,” recounts Prashad, both because so many poor countries were largely exporters of raw materials, and because of the main middle-income economies’ own 1995-2001 debt crises. Those crashes left them even more Western-dependent, and it was the the resulting financial turbulence ‘contagion’ that catalysed the initial 1999 meeting of G20 finance ministers.
During the two decades before the 2008-09 world financial meltdown, BRICS economies had rapidly globalized their commerce, measured by trade/GDP. Three of the original BRICS economies stand out. First, from 1994, the end of South Africa’s apartheid-era trade sanctions and protective tariffs rapidly raised the trade/GDP ratio from 36% to a 2008 peak of 66%. Second, Russia’s 1998-99 GDP collapse left its trade/GDP ratio especially high (70%, up from 47% in 1997), due to the denominator’s crash, and confirmed its economy’s role in the 21st century mainly as a primary-commodity supplier of oil, gas, fertilizers, metals and minerals.
And third, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, as the U.S. and Europe continued deindustrializing. Its trade/GDP soared from 33 to 65% in the seven years to 2006. The world’s largest factories soon shifted to the east coast of China, creating a global value chain in which Western corporations controlled the bulk of surpluses via branding and intellectual property rules, distribution systems, marketing and finance. Other imperial privileges were associated with Wall Street, U.S. Big Tech, the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board, and the Pentagon.
That way, China’s middle men in manufacturing and extractive industries were welcome to dig and process the poorest countries’ depleted raw materials; paid for with a pittance, and with extensive environmental damage, land theft, massive displacement and appalling working conditions in the mines (such as Congolese child labor), leaving the non-renewable resources now no longer available to future generations. Even Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 2016 condemned the way Chinese firms and local military allies had plundered $13 billion of diamonds, leaving just $2 billion for state coffers.
In China, meanwhile, the outsourced productive operations of Western firms came to rely not only upon predatory raw material extraction by Chinese mines, but also upon extremely cheap labor – due to the banning of independent trade unions, added to the hukou migrant labor system (similar to apartheid’s albeit not racialized) – and extremely weak safety, health and environmental regulation.
Still, Prashad is absolutely correct insofar as, after the peak moment of both world and BRICS economies’ trade/GDP in mid-2008, the subsequent global economic crisis reflected degraded forms of U.S., UK and European financialization. However, instead of a 1929 crash and subsequent Great Depression, the G20 emerged as a network of leaders – invited to Washington in October 2008 by U.S. President George W. Bush – which could fuse the local and international interests of both the imperial and sub-imperial powers.
BRICS join G7 in financialization via the G20
The upgraded G20’s first emergency task was simple: ensuring that even more extreme bank-centric policies – new ‘Quantitative Easing’ money printing, low-interest loans, regulatory laxity and International Monetary Fund recapitalization – were coordinated in order to bail out, first and foremost, Western financiers.
At the time, South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel led a ‘Committee on IMF Governance Reform’, whose report – adopted by the G20 in April 2009 – gave the IMF nearly $1 trillion in additional financing powers, ensuring not only Western financial stability, but also that the IMF then also became a much more useful tool for BRICS lenders.
The bloc’s banks were also becoming increasingly exposed to the poorest countries, a feature that became acute after the 2014-15 crash of commodity prices and then during and after Covid-19 (e.g. with South African banks across Africa, Russia’s corrupt VTB Bank in Mozambique, and Chinese state banks nearly everywhere, not so much as conscious ‘debt trap’ policy but as the logical result of dependency relations).
In March 2009, elite panic generated an imperial/sub-imperial fusion – in turn requiring Manuel’s intervention on behalf of the IMF – as was obvious at a meeting of G20 finance ministers. According to the IMF, they nervously concluded that the U.S.-catalysed financial crisis was highly contagious:
“Capital account pressures are intensifying for many emerging economies, amidst a contraction in cross-border lending. Some governments may have to support domestic corporates unable to raise financing to fulfill their rollover needs. Emerging economy banks, especially in emerging Europe, may need to be recapitalized in view of prospective losses. As the crisis prolongs, an increasing number of emerging economies will find room for policy maneuver becoming increasingly limited.”
The result was an April 2009 G20 leadership decision in London: to back the IMF to the hilt by endorsing Manuel’s plan. The increasingly financialized class structures of the BRICS were now integrally intertwined in the Bretton Woods Institutions and New York credit rating agencies, leaving most of the BRICS as much greater investors in the IMF during its 2010-15 fund-raising, at the expense of poorer countries which lost voting shares (e.g. Nigeria and Venezuela by 41% each).
In order to recapitalize the IMF, China’s share of ownership and voting rights rose by 37%, India’s by 23%, Brazil’s by 11% and Russia’s by 8% from 2010-15, and hence the IMF could brag in early 2016 that Manuel’s ‘reforms’
“reinforce the credibility, effectiveness, and legitimacy of the IMF. For the first time four emerging market countries (Brazil, China, India, and Russia) will be among the 10 largest members of the IMF. The reforms also increase the financial strength of the IMF, by doubling its permanent capital resources.”
(As for Manuel, after leaving Pretoria in 2014 after 20 years of Cabinet service, he immediately became deputy chairperson of Rothschild South Africa and then chair of the country’s largest insurance company. And last month he was given responsibility within the G20 for running a ‘high-level panel’ to address Africa’s new debt crisis – which like most G20 initiatives this year, will likely produce nothing durable given U.S. sabotage.)
The BRICS leaders’ decision to join – not fight – the Bretton Woods Institutions via the G20 and IMF recapitalization also left its New Development Bank (NDB) culpable: in 2016, the financier’s conservative president, KV Kamath, signed a deal with the World Bank for “co-financing of projects; facilitating knowledge exchange … and facilitating secondments and staff exchanges”.
Because the NDB relied upon raising dollar and euro financing in the Western markets, it became so vulnerable to New York credit ratings agencies that on March 3, 2022, its leaders halted lending to Moscow (a 20% owner!) due to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s imposition of financial sanctions, immediately following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Talk of the BRICS leading the search for an alternative (‘de-dollarization’) was repeatedly squelched, especially at the bloc’s 2023 Johannesburg summit.
The BRICS’ role within increasingly unequal and unsustainable global capitalism was amplified during the 2010s, as “the financial crisis morphed into a long period of low growth,” according to Prashad. Without massive Chinese infrastructural investment, growth would have been even lower. And as China balanced exports with internal spatial expansion, the world experienced declining trade/GDP rates, especially following the demise of the 2002-14 commodity super-cycle once Beijing took its foot off the investment accelerator pedal.
Until 2014, high mineral and fossil fuel prices empowered Brazilian, Russian and South African primary product exporters – and generated new extractive-industry investment waves – but likewise the commodity super-cycle represented an extremely dangerous ‘development’ strategy, partly because of price volatility. Moreover, in addition to prolific local pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, these economies’ main sources of natural wealth – non-renewable natural resources – were often being depleted at a more rapid rate than reinvestment in industrial capital or education.
After the 2014-15 commodity price crash, the world economy was, as Prashad puts it,“impacted deeply by the COVID-19 pandemic” (emanating from China but, first, allegedly spawned in U.S. ‘gain of function’ research on behalf of Big Pharma, banned in the U.S. by the Obama regime, as too dangerous). Logistics crises and lockdowns required yet more G20 Quantitative Easing and coordinated fiscal boosts.
Global economic volatility was then amplified in a spectacular 2020-22 commodity price boom and then bust (aside from gold – which has kept SA trade/GDP very high). The subsequent crash was caused by rapid U.S. Fed interest rate hikes that bankrupted once-thriving countries, worsened by the impact of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine on energy and food prices.
Unfortunately, for those hoping, as Prashad suggested, that “South-South trade might be the way out for the large economies of the Global South,” from 2009 it became clear the opposite was the case: declining trade/GDP ratios led by the BRICS would drive not only the subsequent decade’s deglobalization process (i.e. with the five economies’ trade/GDP ratios falling faster than the world average). In addition, excessive Chinese manufacturing output also catalysed Beijing’s 2010s Belt & Road Initiative (termed ‘going out’), which aimed to displace the massive overcapacity that had emerged, hence further deindustrializing the large economies of the Global South.
To illustrate, China’s ratio of manufacturing/GDP also fell from 32% in the early 2010s to 26% today, reflecting not only the economy’s balancing, but also vast industrial capacity now lying idle. The rapid relative decline of Brazilian and South African manufacturing began in the 1990s as trade liberalization undercut their economies’ inefficient output. But for Russia, the most pronounced manufacturing/GDP drop occurred as oil and gas prices encouraged more early-2010s investment in the extractive industries and, like many formerly-balanced midde-income capitalist economies, a ‘reprimarization’ shift into commodity exports.
Ultimately, four of the original five BRICS registered consistent declines from mid-1990s manufacturing/GDP highs of between 18-24% to current levels of just 13%. And if base metals like steel and aluminium were excluded from this category – as should be the case, because zapping minerals with fossil-fueled electricity is closer to ‘extractivism’ than to genuine manufacturing – these ratios would fall even faster.
BRICS expansion = more rapid ecocide
Meanwhile, whether in G20 heads-of-state meetings or UN annual climate summits, the difficulties transcended the management of immediate crises in world capitalism, starting with bailing out Western banks in 2008. Increasingly from 2009, another longer-term legitimacy crisis occurred when citizenries and poor countries made demands for effective global climate regulation. Starting with the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, the G7 and BRICS together sabotaged progress in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In this context, as Prashad notes, “it made sense to expand the BRICS” – setting aside the (spurned) 2023 invitation to Saudi Arabia, whose application was ‘frozen’ by Moscow in late 2024 as Riyadh turned towards Trump’s incoming regime – with the successful 2024-25 “addition of the major energy-producing countries” (Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Indonesia) “as well as large economies in their regions (Egypt and Indonesia).”
This move confirmed the fusion of G7 and BRICS interests when it came to three core climate management disputes: avoiding sufficiently deep emissions cuts to avoid extreme-weather catastrophes; admitting the adverse impact of past emissions (running the risk of liability for climate debts); and privatizing the air so as to promote bankers’ (chaotic) carbon markets and offset schemes as replacements for genuine climate action much less climate justice.
At the BRICS’ summit in Kazan, Russia last October, there was the appearance of rapid BRICS membership growth, as another nine ‘partners’ applied and joined, including oil-addicted Nigeria and gas-addicted Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (although Algeria, Turkiye and Vietnam did not accept their invitations). The others in the partner category are Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Malaysia, Thailand and Uganda. Yet notwithstanding spectacular economic self-harm by the Trump regime – to be followed by Washington’s even more extreme destruction of neo-liberal multilateralism, beyond his quitting United Nations climate, health and Palestine-aid agencies – the BRICS’ promised alternative multipolar strategies are not apparent.
The great potential for BRICS leading an overdue global de-dollarization – transcending minor local currency utilization (in situations where trade is fairly well balanced) – is most urgent. So too would be offering genuine alternatives to existing multilateral financial institutions (e.g. a still-hiding Contingent Reserve Arrangement meant originally in 2015 to compete with the IMF); substantive reforms (not merely voting seat rearrangements) of Western-dominated finance, investment and trade multilateralism; and revivals of intra-BRICS trade.
But all appear muted. Tragically, the day he was fired by Marco Rubio, on March 14, South African Ambassador to the United Nations Ebrahim Rasool told a webinar,
“I really think that we must avoid the things that cocks a snoot at the USA: de-dollarization. Not even China is speaking any longer about de-dollarization. Russia certainly isn’t speaking about de-dollarization, because not only is that a performative issue at this moment. It’s not practical. It does not economically make sense for us to even breathe that, and certainly will invoke the kind of punitive immediate measures that would come.”
The G20’s ‘think tank’ (T20) team in South Africa is led by the South African Institute for International Affairs, traditionally a sub-imperialist institution funded by local capital (e.g. the Oppenheimers – who then switched to the Brenthurst Group) and European embassies. Its main expert on international finance, Danny Bradlow, told the same webinar,
“I think the discussion on de-dollarization in BRICS, to be blunt, is a complete pipe dream… the important role of the dollar is just too significant for us to imagine that with any in the foreseeable future that role could collapse completely. There is no real substitute. The next closest currency is the euro which is less than half the role that the dollar plays. The Chinese currency is important and growing but it’s still got a long way to go.”
So in spite of all the reasons to unite against the U.S., the BRICS summit in Rio in early July will probably confirm this self-imposed helplessness. As Prashad complained to Galloway,
“It’s only very slowly that these countries have developed, let’s call it what it is political confidence to criticize the West. I mean let’s face it George, about 80% of world military spending is spent by the United States and its NATO allies: 80%. Even the toughest countries in the BRICS, okay Russia, China, they fear the wrath of the United States. Iran fears the wrath of the United States. The United States is a reckless, decadent powerhouse in the world, you know, it is capable of destroying cities like a barbarian as it destroyed Baghdad as it basically has underwritten the destruction of Gaza, the genocide in Gaza. So these countries understand the military power of the United States is formidable in that sense. They have not yet had the confidence to push a strong political agenda. This is what differentiates the current rise of the BRICS from the Bandung Spirit. It’s really economics that’s in the lead, not politics. At Bandung, it was politics in the lead, not economics. So I’m looking forward to the time now when countries like China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, will be much more politically clear and inform the West that the West’s decadent policy framework is no longer going to be actually acceptable, not only to these countries but to the world’s peoples.”
Bandung hype and hopes – dashed by Prabowo’s politics
Hear, hear. However, Galloway and Prashad probably know that the newest BRICS member – Jakarta, which joined in January 2025 – is not ready or willing to challenge the excesses of Western capitalism, or even the single most destructive symptom of its geopolitical and military decadence: the U.S.-UK-EU Axis of Genocide against Palestine. Yet, as Prashad alerts, “Indonesia will host a low-profile event to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference in June.”
One obvious reason to keep it low-profile is the distinction between Sukarno in 1955 and current leader Prabowo Subianto. In his Bandung welcoming speech, Sukarno pointed out:
“the ‘Life-line of Imperialism.’ This line runs from the Straits of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan. For most of that enormous distance, the territories on both sides of this lifeline were colonies, the peoples were unfree, their futures mortgaged to an alien system. Along that life-line, that main artery of imperialism, there was pumped the life-blood of colonialism. And today in this hall are gathered together the leaders of those same peoples. They are no longer the victims of colonialism. They are no longer the tools of others and the playthings of forces they cannot influence. Today, you are representatives of free peoples, peoples of a different stature and standing in the world… Perhaps now more than at any other moment in the history of the world, society, government and statesmanship need to be based upon the highest code of morality and ethics… We can demonstrate to the minority of the world which lives on the other continents that we, the majority, are for peace, not for war, and that whatever strength we have will always be thrown on to the side of peace.”
After Sukarno’s overthrow by Soeharto (also spelled Suharto) in 1967, accompanied by the murder of nearly a million Communist Party supporters of Sukarno, the leader of Indonesia today is Prabowo – Soeharto’s 1980s son-in-law. In that period, as Amnesty International reminded in late 2024, army general Prabowo “organized gangs of hooded killers to terrorize and subdue civilians associated with the [East Timorese] independence movement. And he allegedly participated in one of the bloodiest events of the Timor war: the Krakas massacre, in which 300 Timorese – mostly civilians – were hunted down and killed.”
As a result of the atrocities, Prabowo was fired even by the Indonesian army and banned from visiting the U.S. And today, in spite of the country’s ruling-class reform rhetoric, according to University of Melbourne human rights scholar and former Jakarta Post columnist Ary Hermawan, “Prabowo’s rise to power has accelerated the ongoing gutting of what is left of Indonesia’s Reformasi institutions, including the expanding role of the military in the government. This is not only because the new president has authoritarian tendencies, but also because his (almost inevitable) election victory reflected the general will of the oligarchy.”
Given that “Prabowo seems to have the know-how, and, more importantly, the personal determination, to recreate a socio-political order that closely reflects Soeharto’s” and thanks to “the dominant oligarchic faction that supported him, including powerful coal oligarchs,” Hermawan continues, a facilitative state company was created on February 25:
“Danantara, which answers directly to Prabowo, is a superholding company that will manage major state-owned enterprises, with an investment arm that is expected to manage US$900 billion worth of state assets... the coal oligarchs are entirely behind Prabowo’s ambitions to make Danantara the country’s economic locomotive… Prabowo’s decision to finance the sovereign wealth fund through sweeping austerity measures that have slashed the national budget for public services has sparked concerns of unbridled political corruption. His government aims to cut $44 billion and channel $20 billion of it to Danantara.”
The Indonesian state’s facilitative relations with its for-profit extractive industries has generated substantial popular opposition, notwithstanding the risks of even peaceful protest. More than 150 cases of deep resistance are documented in the invaluable EJ Atlas, including the predatory role of Indonesian mining houses in the Philippines. In Indonesia itself, specific cases of sustained anti-nickel activism documented at EJ Atlas include
- the Morowali Industrial Park in Central Sulawesi, the largest nickel-based industrial area;
- the Konawe Industrial Park “being developed without consent from the local community”;
- Karonsi’e Dongi indigenous women’s protests against Vale’s mine in Sorowako, Sulawesi;
- campaigns on Obi Island by fisherfolk and local residents because “fisheries are declining and health is deteriorating in Kawasi since the local nickel mining and smelting project started dumping waste in the sea”;
- the Delong Nickel Industrial Area in Sulawesi causing “social, environmental, and labor complaints and violent protests”;
- the Weda Bay Industrial Park in North Maluku where activists have “raised environmental, social and health concerns, including the displacement of indigenous communities, and faced a number of protests related to nickel mining and processing”; and
- in Southeast Sulawesi, “since 2007, the Wawonii residents have resisted large-scale industrial mining on the island. Protests have been violent and met by police repression. Some permits have been revoked.”
To his credit, Prashad concedes that Indonesia’s “industrial development has its own problems. High-Pressure Acid Leach (HPAL) technology creates significant environmental and social problems, raised by communities that live beside the smelters. Part of the development process will have to include improvements in the HPAL technology, and it will have to require that part of the benefits from the nickel sales go to the people who live above the mines and beside the factories.”
Yet thanks to Prabowo’s decades-long repression of environmental and social justice activists, reforms appear to be heading in reverse. It is therefore misleading for Prashad to conclude that “Indonesia attempts to peacefully develop its economy by exerting its sovereignty over its own raw materials – as per the Bandung Spirit.”
Indeed some of the greatest economic violence emanates from climate catastrophes, and Indonesia is one of the world’s top five historic emitters. Jakarta’s stated intention in 2024, to close 151 operating or under-construction coal-fired power plants by 2040, was recently revoked. Only the leading BRICS powers China and India are adding more coal-generated electricity to their grids – and especially to corporate ‘Special Economic Zones’ – more rapidly than Indonesia.
Prabowo’s own brother, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, is the Indonesian climate envoy to the UN, and 11 days after Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, he commented, “If the United State does not want to comply with the international agreement, why should a country like Indonesia comply with it?”
And who would even notice? After all, late last year Carbon Tracker rated Jakarta’s ruling class as among the world’s most carbon addicted, even with its Paris ‘commitments’:
“Indonesia’s progress in transitioning to a low-carbon economy remains limited, with little meaningful change across critical sectors. Power generation and industry remain heavily reliant on coal, while demand for palm oil continues to be the primary driver of widespread deforestation and land use sector emissions. Indonesia’s overall rating remains ‘Critically insufficient.’”
Yet more economic violence can be felt in Indonesia’s exports, especially from its massive palm oil plantations. They not only cause deforestation and thus lower sequestration of CO2; the oil is also fed into the world’s most unethical economy, Israel’s. In spite of Indonesia’s status as the world’s largest Muslim country, Prabowo has strong ties to Tel Aviv and as defense minister arranged to buy Israeli weaponry, supporting normalized relations with Netanyahu’s regime.
Indonesian exports to Israel soared over the past five years, especially during 2023-24 – from 2022 levels of $77 million to $277 million last year – and imports also rose dramatically, from less than $38 million in 2023 to $50 million in 2024.
The potential for even tighter Indonesian relations with the genocidaires was welcomed at the neo-conservative Atlantic Council in Washington, where researcher Daniel Samet was sufficiently confident in late 2024 to remark how,
“Indonesia scarcely hides its desire for better ties with Israel. Earlier this year, Jewish Insider reported that the two countries had prepared to normalize relations in October 2023, but Hamas’ assault on Israel derailed their announcement. The reporting followed years of speculation that Indonesia and Israel might strike a deal. Their doing so would be a boon to Israeli security and prosperity.”
All this evidence suggests that like the BRICS in general, its latest member from Indonesia is doing the opposite of the original spirit of Bandung, at least as articulated by Sokarno. Instead, this period – in which Indonesian mimicry of Trump occurs at the highest level of the state – harks back to the dreaded Soeharto’s corporate-fascist dictatorship.
New mood, but by and for whom?
So it’s probably best, as Prashad regretfully concedes, that “The ‘Bandung Spirit’ is not being widely advertised these days.” Partly this because the ‘New Bandung Spirit’ appears mainly as a ruse, if not a quasi-cult – just like the BRICS’ oft-stated commitment to (supposedly non-neo-liberal) economic reforms, given the reality of the bloc’s deindustrialization, deglobalization and self-interested financial bolstering of IMF power.
Together these failings can be explained, as Prashad does, “partly because of the lingering internal problems among Global South states”, which in my experience in Zimbabwe and South Africa, typically require talk-left distraction mechanisms offering a vague hope for the future, so as to walk right even faster.
Witness activist disappointments with the promising (Pretoria-led) Hague Group commitments to end military fuel supply and transshipment to the Israel Defense Forces on January 31. But the same month, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa’s ultra-tycoon brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe – a 23% co-owner of Glencore’s Israel-supplying mines – sped up coal shipments to Israel, which even an April 3 Palestine solidarity protest at his African Rainbow Minerals head office hasn’t halted.
Although such ‘lingering internal problems’ are not specified, they obviously include BRICS ruling classes’ obsequious relations with the hegemon, if South Africa’s ‘kissing Trump’s ass’ by offering him offshore meth-gas is any indication.
Back in 2017, Prashad suggested we need “a great deal more translation into our current period to assess whether the BRICS states – with their separate tempos – are sub-imperial in Marini’s sense. They are certainly not imperialist states.”
Agreed, but many BRICS corporates are without a doubt, vital appendages of imperialism, if one follows the broader logic of profit transfer from, say, African mines to Chinese factories to Western consumers. It’s obvious that the imperial center captures the vast bulk of surpluses in the process, and sub-imperial Chinese workers are victimized by labor exploitation, even while their employers amplify unequal ecological exchange with their own mineral suppliers.
And all this is aided and abetted by multilateral institutions, which is why the BRICS repeatedly plead with the G20 to continue supporting the IMF and WTO, even in the Kazan Declaration last October:
“We reaffirm our commitment to maintaining a strong and effective Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced IMF at its center… We reaffirm our support for the rules-based, open, transparent, fair, predictable, inclusive, equitable, non-discriminatory, consensus-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its core.”
Without considering such multilateral-imperialist collusion by the BRICS, and without doing that overdue translation of unequal exchange (both labor values and ecological assets) concepts and accounting into our current period, and without incorporating the other factors discussed above, Prashad’s Tricontinental team introduced the idea of ‘hyper-imperialism’ centered on the U.S. Pentagon last year, and incorrectly concluded “Objectively, there is no such thing as sub-imperialism … (such concepts are subjective deceptions that cloud over the factual realities).”
Still, unity within the global left is vital and so, to agree with Prashad, given the adverse balance of forces “It seems far more logical to simply allow the contradictions of the present to generate their own new spirit” than to expect the new Bandung spirit to flower.
But there must be an alternative to both Western imperialism and BRICS sub-imperialism, and such an alternative necessarily would, as Prashad concludes,“fight to establish sovereignty over a nation’s resources at the center of this new mood” – a fight which typically involves anti-extractivist movements’ battles against both the West’s and the BRICS’ mining, plantation, fishing and especially fossil-fuel corporations, and their promotion of multilateral neo-liberalism while cutting side deals with the paleo-con Trump regime.
But for that, we need a truly new mood deserving of a genuine Bandung revival, one not reliant upon the likes of Prabowo and the other nine BRICS members’ heads of state and their allied oligarchs.
