17 July 2014
The SACP welcomes the formation of the BRICS Bank from the BRICS summit held this week in Fortaleza, Brazil, by the five member states Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. We also welcome the first regional office that will be based in South Africa. We believe that the establishment of the BRICS Bank is a world-reconfiguring event which should bring about positive results and serious consequences in the character of the international context. The move to establish the BRICS Bank and the development opportunities that we stand to benefit expose the sheer dislocation from reality, of the naysayers who were against South Africa joining the group. The establishment of alternative financing for development and crisis conditions clearly reaffirm our government`s developmental programme.
Most importantly, the BRICS Bank must serve as a progressive alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank not only to South Africa, but to the African continent as a whole and other parts of the world that have suffered from colonialism and continue to suffer under Western imperialism. The BRICS Bank must provide a counter-hegemonic weight to the failed Washington Consensus, which is anti-democratic, and has brought about misery in the lives of the billions of people world-wide through neoliberal globalisation, including through "Structural Adjustment Programmes" and the endemic crisis of the dominant mode of production - capitalism.
A word of caution: The BRICS Bank must be democratic, and behave differently as opposed to the US-European dominated IMF and World Bank. By imposing lending conditionalities in the form of the neoliberal policy regime, the IMF and the World Bank have liquidated democracy and its conditions, national policy sovereignty and the right to self-determination in many countries. While an alternative, the BRICS Bank should not mean abandoning the just struggle to transform the pre-existing international system and pre-existing institutions to become democratic and serve the people of the world as a whole.
The SACP will intensify its Financial Sector Campaign to achieve transformation in this sector locally, and will continue its international activism in the struggle to bring to an end the unjust, merciless and perilous international financial system.
Issued by the SACP
National Spokesperson:
Alex Mashilo
Mobile: 082 9200 308
Office: 011 339 3621