ABSTRACT
The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc had, from the early 2010s, offered the world hopes of reforming the world economy, to end Western domination of neoliberal multilateral institutions and to embrace multipolar perspectives on global power. Their reform strategies were pursued in various Bretton Woods and United Nations summits and were advertised as transformative, ‘from above’, at annual BRICS leaders meetings. To support this interpretation, each country’s intelligentsia, civil society and business networks were mobilised ‘from the middle’, generously subsidised by their foreign ministries and other state agencies. However, contradictions in the reform strategy were overwhelming, even before the shift to extreme conservativism in Brazil, and social tensions in each society remained profound. Hence it is important to recognise social resistance and the alternative ‘BRICS-from-below’ approach, no matter how weak it often appears. Networks ‘from below’ resist the myths of South–South collaboration against the West, expose the reality of BRICS ‘subimperialism’ and advance a ‘commoning’ approach to politics among community, labour, health-advocacy, environmental, feminist and youth activists. That approach has the potential to internationalise, towards genuine eco-social transformation. If it fails, devastating processes within world capitalism will be amplified by the BRICS, threatening humanity and even planetary survival.
