The BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, resulted in the historic expansion of the

block. With six new members, will the BRICS be able to mount a formidable challenge to the dominance of

Washington and Wall Street over international finance and diplomacy.

What does this mean for working people everywhere in the global south and in the global north?

We need a new system. We need a new society. We need to demand that which may have sounded

impossible even a few weeks ago,

but is not only realizable, but an imperative necessity. We are excited to have Professor Richard Wolfe join us again for our regular weekly segment,

where we talk about the biggest stories related to the economy, the state of the working

class, and the crimes of big business. I'm your host, Brian Becker. The Socialist Program

brings you content multiple times each week thanks to the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash

the socialist program. We appreciate all of your support and encourage you to become a patron

today if you enjoy listening to this show. Richard Wolfe is the co-founder of the organization

Democracy at Work, the author of many books.

The latest being the sickness is the system when capitalism fails to save us from pandemics or itself.

You can check out all of his work at R-D-Wolf.com.

That's R-D-W-O-L-F-F.com. Professor Wolf, welcome back. Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here.

Thank you. We told our audience last week when we were talking mainly about huge wave of defaults

on car loans and what that might mean for the economy. At the very end, we started to talk

about BRICS, which was just starting its meeting, its 15th summit in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The topic on the agenda, and we mentioned it, but we didn't know what the outcome would be,

is that a number of countries, a great number

of countries had applied to become BRICS members. And the outcome now is clear. Six new countries

...