Currency of the Colonized, Currency of the Free: BRICS, Dollar Decay, and the War for Monetary Sovereignty

Disarming the Language of Empire: Excavating the BRICS Currency Narrative

On June 21, 2025, the Times of India published a story on the upcoming BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro. The article presents itself as a neutral business report, calmly explaining that member states are “intensifying” trade in national currencies while continuing to “differ” on the possibility of a shared BRICS currency. Diplomats are quoted affirming that BRICS is not an “anti-West” coalition. India’s representative says talks of a unified currency remain in “very early stages.” Russia and Brazil chime in with restrained optimism. The piece closes on a note of technocratic consensus: things are proceeding, slowly but surely, within the rules of polite diplomacy.

But this is not diplomacy—it’s economic warfare masked in press release formalism. The Times of India article functions as a velvet-gloved act of cognitive warfare: a tranquilizer shot into the bloodstream of public perception. It is not what the article says, but what it refuses to confront, that reveals its class allegiance. There is no serious engagement with the systemic violence of dollar hegemony—no mention of SWIFT sanctions, frozen reserves, or financial chokeholds. Just the gentle purr of “ongoing discussions.”

Owned by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL), India’s largest media conglomerate, the Times of India operates as a management organ for both domestic and transnational capital. BCCL’s longstanding partnerships with Reuters, AP, and various Western business outlets ensure that its editorial tone aligns closely with the needs of investors and policymakers, not workers or sovereign nations. The anonymous TOI Business Desk format is not a style—it is a class position. The voice of the managerial caste, whispering assurances into the ears of global finance.

This article deploys a classic imperial toolkit:

• Euphemism as sedation: Describing active de-dollarization by 40% of the world’s population as “early-stage discussions” is like watching a dam crack and calling it condensation. The phrasing isn’t analysis—it’s anesthesia.
• False equivalence: The article collapses the distinction between “local currency trade” and a “common currency,” obscuring the tactical immediacy of one and the structural ambition of the other.
• Performative neutrality: By emphasizing that BRICS is “not anti-West,” the piece enforces imperial comfort. Resistance to financial domination is framed not as survival, but as suspicious disobedience.

And most critically, the article omits the very architecture of imperial finance: no mention of BRICS Pay, CIPS, or the growing shift toward yuan- and ruble-based transactions. No engagement with how sanctions regimes and currency seizures have turned the dollar into a global weapon. This is financial piracy, and the Times acts as its quiet accomplice.

In this world, where a U.S. Treasury memo can collapse a nation’s healthcare system, journalism like this is not harmless. It is the ideological airstrike before the sanctions hit. The narrative drone that clears the sky for the real ones. It may not shout—but in its silence, in its omissions, it participates in a system of global subjugation. This is the press arm of hyper-imperialism—and its target is meaning itself.

The Cracks in the Bloc and the Chokehold of Empire

At first glance, the Times of India’s article delivers a few useful facts—BRICS states are expanding trade in national currencies, and discussions around deeper monetary integration are ongoing. But beneath the surface lies a fault line: a sharp material contradiction within the bloc itself. BRICS was never ideologically unified. It is a coalition born of imperial overreach, not revolutionary consensus. And some members are still trying to ride both horses.

India and Brazil, for example, maintain deep institutional ties to the Western financial order. Their central banks, sovereign wealth strategies, and trade policies remain entangled in dollar-dominated structures. India’s comprador bourgeoisie, represented by firms like the Adani Group, maintains lucrative links to Western capital and governance institutions. Brazil’s major export conglomerates—such as BRF S.A.—similarly depend on U.S.-linked investment and trade mechanisms. Their cautious posture toward a BRICS currency isn’t just diplomatic—it’s defensive. They fear that de-linking from imperial finance might cost their elites more than it liberates their populations.

Contrast this with the positions of China, Russia, and Iran—nations forcibly ejected from the imperial core’s economic circuits. Russia has been cut off from SWIFT. Iran has endured decades of siege warfare in the form of sanctions, producing triple-digit inflation and collapsed public services. China faces systemic containment through measures like the CHIPS Act, blacklists, and financial weaponization. For these nations, multipolarity is not a slogan—it is material survival. They are not asking for permission. They are building parallel lifelines.

These divergent material positions—between those engineering financial rupture and those hedging within the system—are the battleground on which BRICS’ future will be fought. But empire itself is accelerating the contradictions. The United States has turned the dollar into a tool of siege. Through sanctions, SWIFT cutoffs, and reserve seizures, Washington wages financial piracy against sovereign states. The consequences are catastrophic. In Venezuela, blocked funds have starved hospitals. In Afghanistan, U.S.-held reserves have left millions without food or medicine. These are not economic policies—they are acts of war.

The shift toward local currency trade is therefore not some technocratic maneuver. It is insurgent economic self-defense. Already, China and Russia conduct over 90% of their bilateral trade in yuan and rubles. India has used rupees to buy Russian oil. Even African states are moving— West African banks are integrating with China’s CIPS system, bypassing SWIFT altogether. These are not symbolic gestures. They are real-time exits from imperial command.

And yet, the contradictions persist. Egypt, the UAE, and Brazil avoid openly confronting dollar dominance. Their central banks remain wired into IMF circuits. Their oligarchies prosper from partial obedience. For them, BRICS is a hedge against volatility—not a weapon for emancipation. But pressure is mounting. Washington’s posture is making neutrality untenable. The Tricontinental Institute calls this era hyper-imperialism: a time when the imperial core, losing control, lashes out with volatile violence.

The Rio summit may not deliver a BRICS currency. But the real movement is happening below the summit table. The dollar system is no longer just collapsing—it is being abandoned. Some elites pretend it can still be reformed. Others are welding new circuits in real time. BRICS remains a contested terrain. But every currency swap, every CIPS node, every bilateral settlement outside SWIFT is a crack in the edifice. And through those cracks, a new sovereignty is struggling to breathe.

From Monetary Hedging to Revolutionary Rupture

What the Times of India frames as diplomatic footnotes—policy hesitations, early-stage discussions, diverse positions—are, in reality, the tremors of a tectonic shift. This is not about currencies. It is about power. At stake is the future of how value moves through the world, and who gets to control it. The polite phrasing of “local currency trade” belies the radical potential of the project: a gradual dismantling of the dollar’s global chokehold, forged not through slogans or summits, but through coordinated acts of economic insurgency.

For decades, the U.S. dollar has functioned not just as currency, but as imperial infrastructure. Every barrel of oil priced in dollars, every SWIFT transaction routed through New York, every IMF loan denominated in greenbacks has reinforced the coercive power of U.S. empire. This is financial warfare by other means—less visible than drones, but equally lethal. The shift by BRICS toward local currencies, however fragmented, represents a collective refusal to be strangled.

The trigger for this insurgency has not been ideology, but imperial behavior. When Washington froze Russia’s $300 billion in reserves, when it looted Afghanistan’s sovereign wealth , and denied Venezuela access to its own gold, it sent a message to the world: your savings are not safe. Your participation is conditional. Obedience is the price of liquidity.

That is why China is aggressively expanding its CIPS network across Africa and Asia. It is why Russia, under siege, has linked its SPFS system to regional banks. It is why African and Gulf states are joining yuan-based settlement systems rather than begging the IMF. These shifts are not yet revolutionary, but they are building the scaffolding of a dual and contending financial order.

The contradictions within BRICS must be understood dialectically. India and Brazil may hedge—but the very empire they fear confronting is already undermining their food security, currency stability, and fiscal autonomy. Their caution is not permanent. It is a phase within a deepening contradiction between the needs of capital and the sovereignty of nations. And history shows: pressure is a teacher.

Working-class and peasant nations are not passive observers. They know what it means when grain is bought in rubles, or when CBDCs bypass U.S. banks. These are not elite parlor games. They are class trenches. Every local-currency trade chips away at a system that once dictated who eats, who lives, and who dies.

For those of us in the imperial core, the lesson is clear: BRICS is not a spectacle. It is a front in the global class war. The Western media’s obsession with “lack of cohesion” or “premature optimism” are not observations—they are pleas. Pleas to slow the collapse. Pleas for the empire to hold. But the cracks are spreading.

This moment demands clarity. The dollar is a financial war machine. Sanctions are its missiles. SWIFT is its radar. IMF reforms are its psy-ops. And BRICS, however fractured, is striking at its weak points. These are not reforms. They are revolts. Not because they are perfect, but because they are necessary. And when the door finally swings open, the colonized world will not knock. It will walk through—carrying the weight of five hundred years, and the possibility of something free.

Strike the Chokepoints, Build the Future

There is no neutral ground in a financial war. The U.S. dollar is not just a currency—it is a weapon, a system of control, a chokechain on the neck of the Global South. And every time a nation breaks a link in that chain—by trading in its own currency, by joining CIPS, by refusing SWIFT—something changes. Not just for elites in summits, but for farmers in Ethiopia, for oil workers in Venezuela, for students in Iran who can’t access medicine because Washington says so. This is not abstraction. This is class war.

We stand in ideological unity with the forces inside and outside BRICS who are pressing for rupture. Not reform. Not balance. Rupture. With every sanctioned nation that refuses to starve. With every bank that dares reroute a transaction outside the imperial grid. With every worker who understands that sovereignty isn’t a flag—it’s food on the table, medicine on the shelf, currency that doesn’t collapse at the whim of some white-collar warmonger in D.C.

Revolutionary forces must take this moment seriously. This is not 2009. The dollar isn’t invincible. The imperial order is cracking. The signs are everywhere—from African banks joining CIPS to record-breaking ruble-yuan oil trades. We are witnessing a live experiment in economic liberation. It’s not finished. It’s not perfect. But it’s happening. And we have a role to play.

First: educate. Run political education sessions that trace the financial empire—from Bretton Woods to BRICS Pay. Show how the dollar became a weapon. Show how it can be dismantled. Map the chokepoints. Name the banks. Expose the SWIFT regimes. Draw the line between sanctions and starvation.

Second: agitate. Flood media and social networks with counter-narratives. Build propaganda that celebrates sovereignty. Show the people that there is no freedom without control over currency, credit, and capital. Use memes. Use music. Use zines. Use graffiti. But get the message out: dollar dependency is death.

Third: organize. Support mutual aid networks that experiment with barter, local currencies, crypto alternatives, and cooperative banking. Build relationships with international solidarity movements resisting sanctions—from Syria to Sudan, from Nicaragua to Zimbabwe. Link struggles. Coordinate action. Target the banks, not just the bombs.

Fourth: disrupt. Wherever possible, expose and confront the institutions that enforce financial imperialism. From U.S. Treasury-backed NGOs to IMF offices to corporate bank branches—revolutionaries in the imperial core must make it politically and materially costly to uphold the architecture of coercion.

The financial war is already underway. The only question is: whose side are you on? In this moment, silence is complicity. Hesitation is collaboration. And neutrality is a myth. To fight for sovereignty, for dignity, for life itself, we must stand shoulder to shoulder with those who strike the chokepoints, who reroute the flows, who weld the bars of empire’s cage shut—from the inside. Because liberation isn’t declared. It’s built. Transaction by transaction. Grain by grain. Strike by strike.