Cyril Ramaphosa and BRICS representatives, Johannesburg, August 2023, photo, PM’s Office India

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Hope in Bleak Times: the Global Order is Changing for the Better

by Phil Hall

BRICS has declared sovereign equality a core principle. The bloc explicitly rejects the Western-dominated “rules-based order,” instead demanding urgent reforms to the United Nations Security Council, including permanent seats for India, Brazil, and South Africa. It asserts members’ right to maintain non-aligned or independent positions on contentious issues like Ukraine and Palestine.

Thinkers like Walter Rodney, Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Eduardo Galeano, Celso Furtado, Raul Prebisch, Ha-Joon Chang, and others long ago exposed how forced dependency on the Western capitalist metropolis was a kind of post-colonial, neocolonial economic warfare. The Brandt Report was an early attempt by a post war western leader to acknowledge North South inequality.

In answer to this, development equity forms another pillar of the BRICS agenda. The bloc opposes the IMF’s austerity policies and the structural inequalities that are an intrinsic part of the World Trade Organisation’s framework. To counter this, BRICS has established the New Development Bank (NDB), which has approved $32 billion in infrastructure financing without punitive conditions; a $100 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) to cushion against financial crises; and mechanisms supporting state-led industrialisation and trade in local currencies.

Between 2015 and 2023, intra-BRICS trade in local currencies surged from 12% to 28%—a prelude to bypassing the dollar as the universal global trading currency. The bloc champions peaceful coexistence, contrasting its approach with NATO’s regime-change wars in Libya, Iraq, and Syria, and its use of Ukraine as a proxy. BRICS security priorities focus more on counterterrorism, cyber stability, and independence.

Chile: A Case Study in Western Regime Change and Economic Domination

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The human costs of Western economic hegemony were laid bare in Chile’s 1973 coup. Following Pinochet’s US-backed takeover, the IMF mandated the privatisation of over 300 state enterprises (banks, utilities, mines), the slashing of tariffs protecting Chilean industry from 94% to 10%, the elimination of capital controls, and 20% cuts to public spending. The results were catastrophic.

Poverty rates rose sharply from 20% in 1970 to 45% in 1985, infant mortality increased, and 50% of pensioners fell into poverty after the pension system was privatised.

By 1989, foreign interests controlled 45% of Chilean banks, while copper exports comprised 80% of total exports, a textbook case of enforced dependency. This “shock therapy” blueprint was later exported all over the world, to places like Argentina (1976), Nigeria (1986), and post-Soviet Russia, by the hatchet men acting on behalf of the corporate-controlled metropolises of capitalism in Washington and London.

The BRICS Alternative

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In contrast, the BRICS New Development Bank’s (NDB) $32 billion portfolio prioritises Global South needs; 42% of funds go to transport projects, compared to the World Bank’s 28%. Combined with the $100 billion CRA, this represents a compelling alternative, attracting new members like Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE. BRICS consists of eleven member states (Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia) but 20 more countries have applied and 40 more have expressed interest in joining the organisation.

Beyond finance, BRICS fosters technology transfers like the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite, local currency energy deals (such as India-Russia oil trade in rupees), academic collaboration through 56 research institutions, and media counter-narratives via the BRICS Media Forum—with many more emerging initiatives.

These actions, now taking effect and helping to establish a new regional and multipolar world, represent the culmination of decades of Global South resistance and solidarity. Examples include Cuba’s support for Angola’s MPLA and Vietnam’s defeats of France and the US. But it also represents the increasing attraction of non-alignment and the fulfilment of the 1955 Bandung Conference’s non-aligned vision. Regional blocs like the African Union resisted NATO’s intervention in Libya, and CELAC opposed the US embargo of Cuba.

At the centre of BRICS’ influence and success is the enormous manufacturing power that China—a central partner in BRICS—possesses, along with its over $1 trillion in global infrastructure investment. China, now in close alliance with the Russian Federation (the largest country on Earth, with vast resources and emerging as a foremost military power), anchors this transformation.

Yet Western pushback continues through regime-change operations in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, Georgia, Bolivia, Venezuela, and even in European countries like Romania; attacks on Iran (a rich and strategically important BRICS member); increasing bellicosity toward China in the South China Sea; and the renewal of arms supplies to Ukraine. The manipulation of civil society through well-funded NGOs, media distortion, and financial pressure are all weapons in the arsenal deployed in an attempt to maintain hegemony and sabotage BRICS.

But crucially, it should be stressed that BRICS is not merely oppositional. It offers a constructive framework addressing existential challenges faced by all members of the Global South for many years, and a way to tackle serious problems that face the entire world, from climate change to AI governance and the reduction of conflict and inequality. As the old order breaks down in violence and corruption, the contours of a fairer system are emerging—and we should welcome and support it.

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Bibliography

Amin, S. (1976). Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. Monthly Review Press.

Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Monthly Review Press.

Galeano, E. (1971). Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press.

Prebisch, R. (1950). The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems. United Nations.

Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.

Brandt, Willy, et al. North-South: A Programme for Survival. MIT Press, 1980

BRICS New Development Bank. (2023). Annual Report 2022-2023.

BRICS. (2025, July 6-7). Joint Declaration of the 17th BRICS Summit. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

IMF Archives. (1980s). Chile: Economic Reforms and Structural Adjustment Programs.

African Union. (2011). Statement on NATO Intervention in Libya.

CELAC. (2014). Declaration on the US Embargo Against Cuba.

Bandung Conference. (1955). Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference.

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Phil Hall was born into an ANC family in South Africa. The family was forced into exile in 1963 after his mother was imprisoned and his father banned. They relocated to East Africa, where his parents continued their activism and journalism. In 1975, after a period living in India, they journeyed overland back to the UK, eventually settling in Brighton.

Phil pursued a broad education, studying Russian, Spanish, politics, economics, literature, linguistics, and English grammar and phonology. His path led him to live and study in Spain, in the USSR (Ukraine), and later in Mexico, where he married and started a family. Over the next decade, Phil and his partner balanced activism with work before relocating to the UK—a move initially intended to be permanent.

However, professional opportunities took him to Saudi Arabia and then the UAE, where he spent ten years before returning to the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in Britain, he founded Ars Notoria Magazine and, alongside fellow humane socialist Paul Halas, launched AN Editions, a small venture dedicated to publishing thoughtful, progressive and exciting new books.