“Viendo pasar el cadáver de los BRICS,” by Josué Veloz Serrade, originally appeared on La Tizza on 15 September 2026. What follows is the English translation of a revised version of the same article for Communis.

“Multipolarity has long since ceased to be a politics and has become merely a messianic expectation of the collapse of the other. Hence, the BRICS New Delhi Declaration can afford to omit the name of the one who is about to perish; in that theology, that name is already among the dead.”

— Josué Veloz Serrade

“[…] it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by.”

Second Declaration of Havana: From the People of Cuba to the Peoples of the Americas and the World, 4 February 1962

“A Budapest daily criticizes Che Guevara, a pathetic and, it seems, irresponsible figure, and applauds the Marxist stance of the Chilean [Communist] Party, which takes a practical approach to practice. How I would love to come to power, if only to unmask cowards and lackeys of every stripe and rub their filth right in their snouts.”

Ernesto Che Guevara, Bolivian Diary, 8 September 1967.

There are documents that are simply read, and there are documents that are dissected like autopsies. The final declaration of the most recent BRICS summit held in New Delhi on September 12 and 13—with the participation of its founding members, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, joined by six other countries, including Iran—belongs to the latter category. I read it from cover to cover—it seemed almost endless—like someone searching for the cause of death on a death certificate, but I found nothing but a blank space the size of a hemisphere.

Otherwise, the document covers everything: trade, finance, governance, climate, and—as its crowning touch—agreements on joint efforts to promote… medicinal plants. The cooperative herbal medicine as the horizon of integration. I went through page by page, getting closer and closer to the disheartening conclusion, convinced that after so much rhetoric on paper—not even the faintest or most muted shadow of anything resembling a tiger—what mattered most would finally appear: concrete and encouraging measures. I found a catalog. The declaration wasn’t empty; in fact, it was full of everything else except what I was looking for.

The Missing Name

The list of names mentioned there speaks volumes. The name “Gaza” appears, wrapped in solidarity. The name “Cuba” appears, enveloped in solidarity. “Israel” appears, with name and surname. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also mentioned; the only thing missing, for the sake of impartiality, was for Palestine to have been listed as the aggressor as well.

What is missing from the discussion of these crises is the name of the agent of the violence that the document claims to want to contain: the United States of America, today more than ever “the great enemy of humankind,” as Che wrote. The text does allude to the blockade against Cuba and condemns the imposition of unilateral sanctions; but when it comes time to identify the party responsible for the escalation, its name vanishes.

One can speak page after page about conflicts that must be avoided, about lines that must not be crossed, about multilateralism and multipolarity, without ever uttering the name of the one who provokes or stokes those conflicts or who crosses the boundaries of all rights. We already know the trick: the age-old habit of refusing to name the aggressor, only to end up speaking in the passive voice. Conflicts that must be avoided. By whom? Boundaries that must not be crossed. By whom? The party responsible or the one who makes amends: by all accounts, neither.

The document takes the form of a retreat. The victims are named with the precision of obituaries, but the name of the perpetrator is conspicuously absent, floating like a kind of repressed signifier that structures the entire text through its very absence.

Mentioning the victim without naming the perpetrator of the violence cannot be considered a denunciation: such a mention, on its own, is reduced to a charitable act.

A Phantom Declaration

 I confess that I waited until the end. I thought: after so much rhetoric on paper, that the conclusion will offer four concrete measures that give substance to all this measured, timid verbiage.

I tried to draft them, in advance, in my own head:

1. A humanitarian corridor protected by forces from those BRICS countries that are willing and able to do so for the benefit of the people of Gaza, and a protection force in southern Lebanon against further Zionist bombings. I found myself falling into the very same trap I criticize the motley crew that makes up the BRICS: decoupling power from will. There is nothing that China—or Russia, or India, or even Brazil for that matter—wants to do that it cannot do, no more and no less than the United States: the limit is neither military nor financial nor technological; it is mental—the most absolute lack of political imagination.

2. A legal proceeding and compensation claim that establishes the United States’ responsibility—and holds it accountable—for attacks against civilian populations in Iran and other flagrant violations of international law.

3. A demand for the immediate release of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, captured by U.S. forces on January 3 and illegally and ostentatiously transferred to the United States.

4. A fleet carrying sufficient quantities of oil, protected by the navies of several BRICS countries, setting sail for Cuba; and an alternative financial mechanism that allows the Caribbean nation to access global trade flows on equal terms.

That, for starters: minimal gestures to signal that we are truly dealing with a new pole of power. I reached the end of the declaration. None of the four appeared. Neither they nor anything resembling them.

Let’s examine what those four measures I propose would have in common.

First, all four would force us to utter the absent name. Two of them would have to name it directly as the responsible party or the accused, and the other two could describe the effects of its actions, but in no case could any of the four be formulated without saying “the United States.”

Second, all four come at a cost—ships, planes, weapons, military protection, international courts, alternative financial arrangements—and solidarity that costs nothing is not worth nothing; it is worth much less.

Third, the four concern themselves with the victims that the document does name—Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba—and turn the declaration’s virtuous words into actions: protect, prosecute, demand, guarantee.

The declaration names the victims; the measures would have defended them. Naming is not the same as defending. And what comes of a bloc that knows only how to name?

The Omitted Facts

The most serious issue is that the summit was not without an agenda. It was convened to discuss resilience in a context marked by the dispute over control of Venezuelan oil and by a war against Iran that escalated once again while negotiations were still underway.

U.S. intervention in Venezuela’s oil sector not only undermines Venezuela’s sovereignty but also has ominous repercussions for the sovereignty of the entire region. And if U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil is viewed in conjunction with the war against Iran, a power structure emerges that the New Delhi Declaration should have questioned, at the very least. The relationship between these two events is not proven by their mere simultaneity. That is why it is even more troubling that the document does not even question it.

Those things—exactly those—were what the document needed to name. None of them appear with the political precision the situation demands. Instead, the term “resilience” appears: that is, the attitude of someone who adapts to a fait accompli. “Resistance” is the attitude of someone who refuses to accept it. The word “resilience” was chosen because “resistance” could no longer be uttered. Resilience can also bend or fold without breaking. So let us speak of resilience and sign off with a clear conscience and in peace.

The Two Alibis of Patience Without Anger

Two alibis underpin this engineering of inaction. The first is called strategic retreat. A euphemism designed to mask a phased surrender. Its mechanics are simple: every red line the predator crosses is redrawn—once that ground has been ceded—with solemn dignity. It’s called a retreat because backing down without saying you’re backing down sounds better.

The BRICS were never a military alliance. They are not bound by any common defense clause. Their caution is structural. I concede this point entirely. I do not reproach the bloc for not having its own army. I reproach it for reveling in the vocabulary of a supposed pole—boundaries, multipolarity, order—and refusing to use it in the imperative when the time has come. The four measures on my imaginary list—in my personal declaration—did not amount to an agenda external to the Declaration; they were the translation, stricto sensu, of the document’s own words. A pole that does not set boundaries is a market. What was buried at the Delhi summit was not the trade forum, but the very claim to be a pole. Let us begin to counter what appears to be the new disease of our time: polomania.

The second alibi is called decline. Not a month will pass, not even a week, without a substantial analysis appearing to reaffirm that the United States is a power in decline. This theory is the perfect excuse for retreat: if the predator is dying on its own, there’s no need to name it, confront it, or risk anything; all one has to do is wait, with the patience of an heir, for the inheritance of the one who is about to die.

Multipolarity has long since ceased to be a politics and has become merely a messianic hope for the other’s collapse. That is why the New Delhi Declaration can afford to omit the name of the one on the verge of perishing; in that theology, that name is already among the dead.

The genre boasts half a century of failed obituaries. As early as 1987, Paul Kennedy was announcing America’s decline. The decline is real. It is measured by the share of global GDP: a drop from around forty percent to less than a quarter over the last six decades. But hegemony over a hemisphere can be exercised with much less—all it takes is a navy, the dollar, and a sanctions-imposing machine. The declining power has just kidnapped the President of Venezuela and seized its most precious resource. Its decline is a matter for 22nd-century historians; its power is a matter for this afternoon.

The exception that put a ventilator on a patient in a self-induced coma

If the BRICS have not yet been buried, it is not due to the merits or the virtues of the Declaration. It is because Iran did not adopt as its own doctrine—on the day it was invaded—the stratagem of strategic retreat that dominates the document… and the organization itself. Of the bloc’s members, Iran is the one that, at this juncture, has taken the idea that sovereignty demands a response capable of halting imperialist greed the furthest; it is the one that has taken the rhetoric of a multipolar order seriously through its own actions.

If the rotating presidency were a measure of who truly sustains the bloc, the chair would have to be moved to Tehran. The bloc is practically living on borrowed time. It thrives on the tension between what it proclaims and what it actually is willing to do, between its presumptive alternative stance and its pompous banality. How long can a bloc sustain itself on the faith of those who do not profess it?

While half the planet is drafting the obituary of a power that refuses to die, at the summit no one wanted to sign the death certificate of a promise that has already perished. That is the corpse that has passed before us, and not the one everyone is looking at; not that of Washington, which analysts have been mourning for half a century, but that of multipolarity as a promise. Dead from nominalism. Dead from passivity. Dead—sad to say and confirm—from medicinal plants.

Don’t despair, readers, if this month and the next are filled with in-depth analyses of the decline. I’ve already mourned it. Sometimes I find myself thinking that by the time the United States finishes its decline, we’ll all be dead. And our corpse will be that of the promise no one dared to defend.

Feature image: Germaine Kruip, A Possibility. Photo by Duncan Elliott. Courtesy of Manchester International Festival via Art Review.

Josué Veloz Serrade