BRICS Summit: China, Africa, Russia and the 23 New Applicants
The Socialist Program with Brian Becker
The Socialist Program
4.7 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As world leaders from the Global South convene in South Africa for the BRICS Summit this week, the West is watching closely. 23 countries have applied to join Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in the grouping, which is focused on trade and development in their regions — typically dominated by colonizing powers in Europe and the United States. Where is BRICS headed and what unifies the grouping?
Brian Becker is joined by Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, member of secretariat of Pan Africanism Today, researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, member of No Cold War, and host of the podcast The Crane: An Africa-China podcast coming from the DongSheng News collective.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The worldwide media attention is focused right now on South Africa at the BRICS meeting. |
| 0:10.0 | Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and many other countries of the global south are meeting together. |
| 0:19.0 | Have we entered a new era of global politics? |
| 0:22.6 | We need a new system. We need a new society. We need to demand that which may have sounded |
| 0:29.2 | impossible even a few weeks ago, but is not only realizable, but an imperative necessity. Welcome to this week's episode of The Real Story on the Socialist Program. |
| 1:02.8 | I'm your host, Brian Becker. |
| 1:05.0 | Today we're talking with Mikhella Nondo Erskag. |
| 1:08.3 | She is a member of the Secretariat of Pan-Africanism Today. She's a researcher at |
| 1:14.8 | Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. She is a member of No Cold War and the host of the |
| 1:22.4 | podcast, The Crane, an Africa-China podcast coming from the Dongshang News Collective. |
| 1:29.3 | Mika, welcome back to the Socialist Program. |
| 1:32.3 | Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to join. |
| 1:35.3 | Thank you. Mika, as I mentioned, you know, the BRICS countries and BRICS is a fairly new association of major emerging countries in the global |
| 1:46.6 | south, Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa. They're meeting in South Africa. This is their |
| 1:52.6 | 15th summit. World media attention is focused very heavily on the meeting. And even though |
| 2:00.7 | the BRICS countries say all of them, they go out |
| 2:04.3 | of their way, or I think most of them at least, go out of their way to say, we are not the anti-hegemonic |
| 2:11.7 | contradiction or negation of the G7. We are not a counterpole. We are not that. We are just emerging countries |
| 2:20.9 | from the global south that have something in common with each other. If you look at the media |
| 2:26.9 | coverage from most of the G7 countries, meaning the countries of Western Europe, Japan, and the |
| 2:32.8 | United States, the media attention is treating |
| 2:35.9 | this Brick's summit and the Bricks formation as an enemy. Why do you think that is? |
... |
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