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| the CPB's Rob Griffiths and Andy Brooks |
by Andy Brooks
New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks took part in a seminar on China’s diplomacy and building a community with a shared future for humanity at the Chinese embassy in London in February. This is his contribution to the discussion.
The key issue of the 21st century is what kind of world do we want and how are we going to build it. It revolves around peace. The struggle to abolish nuclear weapons is crucial for the survival of humanity and eliminating the causes of war is central to averting a Third World War. That is why communists have always understood that the struggles for peace and socialism are indivisible. The Chinese communists are striving to achieve lasting world peace, so that all countries can enjoy a peaceful and stable external environment and their people can live a happy life with their rights fully guaranteed to build a world that is free from fear and enjoys universal security. China’s perspective is based on the concept of ‘one country, two systems’ and the principle that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’. But the most aggressive sections of the American ruling class now at the helm in Washington clearly believe in “one world, one system” and that nuclear war is, under certain circumstances, entirely winnable.
This is the era of the “global village” and “globalisation”. But what does that actually mean? It clearly means different things to different people.
For China and the other countries of the Global South it means working together to build a universally beneficial and inclusive economic global system that meets the common needs of all countries, especially the developing countries, and properly addresses the development imbalances between and within countries resulting from the global allocation of resources.
In America, however, globalisation simply means US hegemony. Some call it the “new world order” – others the “American dream in the 21st century” but there’s nothing new about the American dream of world domination.
US imperialism and it lackeys destroyed the Yugoslav federation and the Libyan Jamahuriya. It fans the flames of war in Ukraine and the Middle East, blocks the return of Taiwan to its Chinese homeland and prolongs the unhappy partition of many countries including Cyprus, Kashmir and Korea. US imperialism has, indeed, established its hegemony over Western Europe – forcing British, French and German imperialism to accept the model of subservience imposed on Japan by US imperialism in 1945.
This is what the Americans call the “free world” and “rules-based” order. But the “freedom” they recognise is that which allows the big corporations to exploit and plunder and the only rules are Rudyard Kipling’s rules of the jungle. But the dreams of the bourgeois elites who talked about the ‘end of history’ and a new golden age of capitalism that they said would inevitably follow the collapse of the Soviet Union died on the streets of Baghdad and the hills of Afghanistan.
Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance and now imperialism is on the defensive. The Palestinian Arabs keep up the fight against Zionist aggression. Cuba, Iran and the DPR Korea stand firm in the face of the US blockade and the people of the Donbas remain steadfast in resisting the Nato-backed Ukrainian onslaught.
Capitalism is in the throes of a deep crisis. The slump that began in 2008 continues without any sign of real recovery while China and the Global South build an alternative economic and political system based on mutually advantageous terms and equal shares for all.
Some 85 per cent of the world’s population live in the Global South – the ‘developing’ world that is still largely excluded from the international institutions set up by US imperialism after the Second World War with the support of the weaker imperialist forces who rely on American might to defend their global interests now that their colonial empires have long gone.
The people of the Global South are sick and tired of the fact that the Americans and their minions in Western Europe have economically dominated the world for decades, forcing and imposing transactions in dollars with the fear that failure to comply with US directives would result in economic and financial sanctions or even “regime change” à la Iraq and Libya.
Now new structures like the BRICS bloc are challenging the old imperialist system of oppression and exploitation. The BRICS bloc, named after Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa who set it up some 15 years ago, has become a pivot for the Global South in the struggle to end the economic and political stranglehold of Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
BRICS is open to helping countries develop, as well as promoting investment and trade without strings or preconditions. BRICS is fighting against the concept of a new Cold War and opening the possibility of building a fairer and more equitable international economic order from which the world can benefit. The BRICS bloc is helping to build the multi-polar world that will put an end to the American dream of the “new world order” and world domination. No wonder Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have applied to join the group. Many more will follow in the future.
A new world is indeed possible but it’s not the European Union or the hell-hole of the United States. It’s the world being built now in People’s China and the new institutions of the Global South that offer an even playing field to all countries to trade and peacefully resolve disputes to build a better future for everyone on the planet.
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