(TLDR too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you.This Reader discusses why changing the prevailing political system/scenario demands a shared strategy. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. Intentional political change needs a shared strategy, shared ideas, and a shared understanding on a global scale. Yet within the diversity of the progressive social and political actors the world over we are not yet there. We are not starting from scratch though to eventually get there: In the past, as well as today, socialist and national liberation movements were and have been carrying out the most inspiring political struggles of the past century. Picking up the same line of work, it is urgent to re-consolidate such a cooperative melting pot of dialogue and action since we otherwise risk being smashed in yet another cycle of oppression and exploitation —as well as being caught in the middle of geopolitical struggles determined by the interests of the capitalist superpowers, and not our own.
2. The reality, however, is quickly changing:the prevailing neoliberal system is crumbling …and this crumbling is also going to take us down with it –not because of any of our doing.
3. Throughout this time, it has become clear that the rules of the current rules-based system have been systematically violated by those who could get away with it. Yes, all states are supposed to be equal, but some are definitely more equal than others. Nothing new for you here… Look, for instance, at the asymmetry of bilateral agreements that bind most of the poor countries as subordinate partners to an ever-richer and financialized Global North. Add to this the fact that Investor State Dispute-Settlement (ISDS) claims make Southern governments hostages to vulture investments from which their peoples rarely benefit. Or, if you prefer, look at multistakeholderism, a process of corporate take-over of multilaterals through revolving doors, unregulated lobbying, as well as through ‘strategic’ philanthropy. Such mechanisms allow corporations to sit alongside powerful states to decide on life and death for most of the Global South population.*
*: ‘Global South’ is the name of a struggle, because it has never been able to determine/influence the international structures affecting their people’s wellbeing.
4. For the global progressive forces, holding strong to uphold the pillars of the United Nations alone will, unfortunately, no longer deliver. It is clear that the current international system is unable to deal with the most crucial issues of our times. So, multilateralism, needs to be rebuilt to deliver different results, results that must be grounded on different assumptions and commitments. It is thus about resetting multilateralism.
This is why it is time to think, connect, and organize to build a Global South Front
–“If we listen carefully, another world is not only possible, she’s on her way”, famously said Arundhati Roy.
5. The South comprises the working class born into a debt they never incurred and inheriting a life of struggle. The Global South Front is to be forged precisely to make‘the Souths of Peoples and the Souths of States’ meet and discover what they can become when they march together. It will imply the need to de-Westernize and de-Northernize the Left’s stale political vocabulary, ambitions and strategies. Only then will the Global South Front be able to promote and coordinate the progressive social forces anywhere in the world, i.e., assembling and mobilizing all of those fighting imperialism, value extraction and oppression. Business-as-usual, in this context, means that the North keeps reaping the profits while the South keeps incurring in debt and counting the dead.
6. If the South gets to know and to work with the South, the current conjuncture offers tangible pathways to follow. Contingent to the realization of this potential, however, is the recognition that the power of the Global South is collective, and that only collectively can the South unchain its capacities and its future under its own terms. The need thus clearly is to build a strategic alliance among all countries and peoples that have been oppressed by and excluded from the perks of Western hegemony.
The challenge
–How can we make sure that countries in the South do not simply focus on moving up the development ladder alone?
7. Crucial will be to devise regional cooperative structures that make sure that development is necessarily emancipatory, not extractive and subservient to imperialism. Explicitly incorporating the voices of the South will be far more legitimate if drawn from the lived experiences of those that are and will be mostly affected by the status-quo. It is crucial to respect self-determination, but it is time self-determination is, not only considered a right for states, but also an enforceable right for the peoples.
8. We see domestic elites upholding less and less sovereign projects, instead sustaining the extractive model while selling national assets to transnational capital, comfortably functioning as agents of foreign interests. They accrue benefits from playing this part in international production chains, in the process, making them immensely wealthy.
9. Any serious project for Southern sovereignty must,therefore,reckon with the enemy within: the class struggles that have always been instrumental to the maintenance of dependency, and the local bourgeoisies whose power rests precisely on the perpetuation of privilege and inequalities. In this struggle, the–South-acting-together is a powerful geopolitical and geoeconomic identity, one that in every account needs to be center stage in the building of a liberated future.
10. We note that there is also significant and growing inequality in the Global North and movements and networks there are playing an important role in driving solidarity with the South, away from dogood-ism and towards more radical action. For the Left in the North, it is imperative to develop a more radical understanding of internationalism. For them, as much as for the Left in the South, it is about dismantling Capitalism and Imperialism from the inside out.
11. The challenge thus is to connect these struggles without flattening their specificity, to coordinate without imposing uniformity, to build power from the very reality of the many struggles. It is about building a collective horizon, speaking with a common voice capable of articulating shared interests and shaping political agendas at the national, regional, and global levels.
Bottom line
12. Three interconnected spaces, where the work of building peoples’ power must unfold, are:
- among public interest social movements and civil society organizations;
- within and alongside states and political parties; and
- through networks of thinkers, communicators, and popular educators.
Each alone is but a piece of a mosaic that, together, can forge a common vision and a strategy that is demanded by a Global South Front. These initiatives must be complemented by efforts to set up an intentional and intensive collective political education campaign that allows claim holders to understand past, present and future from a progressive perspective, recovering Southern thought and Southern culture. (excerpted from TNI, op cit https://www.tni.org/en/article/towards-a-bandung-de-los-pueblos)
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