The founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955, is routinely mythologized as a spontaneous uprising of the global South against imperial domination. Twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African states gathered, pledging "abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defence to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers." This was not, however, a gathering of peasant revolutions or proletarian vanguards. It was a summit of post-colonial national bourgeoisies —the class fraction that inherited the colonial state apparatus, its army, its bureaucracy, and its monopoly over extraction of raw materials. Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah: these were not Leninists but nationalist modernizers who sought to replicate the industrial development of the metropole without the social revolution that had produced it. Bandung was a class project masquerading as a geographic one. Its petty-bourgeois leadership—drawn from lawyers, officers, and landlords—needed a foreign policy that reconciled their domestic need to suppress communist insurgencies (e.g., Nehru’s violent crushing of the Telangana uprising) while extracting rents from the Cold War superpowers. The Bandung Spirit was, in essence, the ideology of the comprador elite seeking autonomous space to accumulate capital. This fundamental class contradiction—that the movement’s leadership was anti-imperialist in rhetoric but capital-dependent in structure—doomed it from birth.
Non-Alignment Dissolved Because It Could Not Resolve the Capital Question
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), formalized in Belgrade in 1961, attempted to navigate between Washington and Moscow. But its internal economic logic was incoherent. The Bandung states demanded a "New International Economic Order" (NIEO) at the 1973 Algiers summit, calling for commodity price stabilization, debt relief, and technology transfer. Yet their domestic economies remained dependent on monocrop exports, foreign investment, and IMF structural adjustment. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the NAM lost not a military patron but its principal source of subsidized industrial goods and concessional arms. The movement’s petty-bourgeois leadership could not answer the fundamental question: how to accumulate capital without either socialist planning or full subordination to Western finance. The answer, it turned out, was that they couldn’t. By 1995, the NAM was a hollow diplomatic club; its founding member India had initiated economic liberalization in 1991, joining the IMF’s cap-in-hand queue. The Bandung project dissolved not because of imperialist sabotage alone (though that was abundant, from the CIA’s 1965 Indonesian massacres to Nkrumah’s 1966 coup), but because its class base was structurally incapable of breaking with capitalist accumulation. The national bourgeoisie could not simultaneously lead a developmental state and remain neutral in a world where capital was overwhelmingly Western. Non-alignment collapsed into dependency the moment the Soviet alternative vanished.
BRICS Is Not Bandung Reborn—It Is Capital Seeking New Terms
The BRICS formation—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, expanded in 2024 to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—is routinely sold as Bandung 2.0. This is a category error. Bandung was a movement of the formally colonized. BRICS is a cartel of major capitalist states, several of whom (China, Russia) were never colonized, and others (Saudi Arabia, UAE) are rentier monarchies dependent on hydrocarbon extraction. The core common interest is not anti-imperialism but renegotiation of the terms of capitalist competition. Consider the 2014 BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), capitalized at $100 billion. Its first loans went to Chinese state enterprises building railroads in Brazil and South African coal plants—i.e., extending Chinese surplus capital into new markets, not challenging the logic of extraction. Similarly, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement ($100 billion, 2015) is explicitly designed to stop balance-of-payments crises without IMF-style conditionality, but this does not attack the capitalist structure—it merely shifts the lender of last resort from Washington to Shanghai.
De-dollarization Serves National Bourgeoisies Not Working Classes
The BRICS push for de-dollarization—alternative payment systems like Russia’s SPFS or China’s CIPS, and increased use of national currencies in bilateral trade—is presented as a liberation from U.S. "financial imperialism." In Marxist terms, the dollar functions as the world money of the capitalist system, the universal equivalent through which global surplus value is denominated. The U.S. Federal Reserve’s control over this world money generates seigniorage profits for the U.S. state—estimated at $20-$50 billion annually. But de-dollarization does not abolish the form of money; it merely relocates the site of seigniorage. When China and Russia settle oil contracts in yuan or ruble, the Chinese and Russian state-capitalist classes capture that seigniorage. The result is not a world without financial exploitation but a world where the Chinese national bourgeoisie—through the People’s Bank of China—can issue trade credits and manage exchange rates to favor its own firms. For the working class in the Global South, de-dollarization brings no automatic relief. Whether a Nigerian textile worker is paid in depreciating naira or yuan, the extraction of surplus value continues. Evidence: Russia’s 2022 pivot to yuan-denominated trade did not halt the 20% real wage decline in the same year (Rosstat, 2023). Currency shifts alter the distribution of global surplus among capitalist states; they do not challenge the extraction of surplus from wage labor. The BRICS push is a rearguard action by rising capitalist powers to capture a larger share of global exploitation—a necessary but insufficient step toward any working-class liberation.
Internationalism Beyond the Nation-State Form
Steel-manning the counter-argument: a defender of the BRICS project might cite the 2023 call for a "BRICS labour market" and Brazil’s Lula advocating for a common currency (the "Sur") to shield Latin America from dollar volatility. They could argue that any weakening of U.S. dollar hegemony—even by capitalist rivals—creates space for labor movements to organize transnationally without the veto of Western finance. There is a kernel of truth here: the Soviet Union’s existence, despite its own authoritarian state-capitalism, did provide material support for decolonization and African liberation movements. But the analogy fails. The USSR, whatever its deformations, was a state that had abolished capitalist private property and planned its economy. BRICS states are all committed to private accumulation, wage labor, and commodity production. The NDB funds extractive infrastructure; the BRICS Business Council prioritizes trade facilitation over labor rights. The difference is one of class content, not geopolitical posture. A genuine internationalism—the "proletarian internationalism" Lenin theorized in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)—requires breaking the nation-state form itself, because the state is the political expression of the bourgeoisie. The BRICS project strengthens the nation-state form (China’s "state sovereignty" principle; India’s nationalism) and thus reinforces rather than dissolves the political conditions for exploitation. Working-class internationalism must build below the nation-state: through cross-border logistics strikes (the 2023 Amazon warehouse walkouts across EU zones), migrant worker solidarity networks, and material aid to anti-capitalist uprisings. The Bandung-to-BRICS arc is the history of the bourgeoisie’s search for a stable world order after colonialism. Our task is different: to build a world where no class exploits another, which requires shattering the nation-state form—not reforming its membership fees.
