On: What to know about the SCO, the summit billed as a counterweight to US influence

They gather in the mountains and call it a counterweight. Twenty-five years of communiqués, and what is the balance sheet? Not a bloc of solidarity but a marketplace of rivalries wearing the costume of one.

Capital has never respected a single flag. When one hegemon’s grip loosens, the others do not abolish the grip - they compete for it. China’s corridors reach south and west; Russia sells what it has left; India plays every table at once. The SCO is not an alternative to the logic of expansion. It is the same circle, drawn by different hands. The markets must grow, the resources must be secured, and the peoples beneath those mountains are the terrain over which this is negotiated - never the negotiators.

And here is what disgusts me most: each government at that table jails its own socialists. Each one calls its critics foreign agents. A “counterweight” to Washington that reproduces Washington’s methods down to the last surveillance file is not a counterweight. It is a mirror. The test is simple and they all fail it: what happens to the worker who strikes in any of their territories? What happens to the dissenter inside their own congresses?

I hear the word “multipolarity” and I reach for my pen with anger. Multipolarity of empires is not the goal; it is only a quarrel over the spoils. The genuine counterweight has never been assembled in a summit hall. It assembles itself - in the strike no official called, in the factory floor where the rank and file move before the party permits them. That is where the new world is born, and none of the men in Kyrgyzstan will send delegates there.

Twenty-five years. Let them celebrate. The century belongs to neither of their flags.