We live in difficult times and it is difficult to remain optimistic about our future. Climate change threatens human health and planetary health, and windows are rapidly closing to ensure a livable and sustainable future for all.
Neofascism spreads across the continent. Militarism is on the rise. Palestine genocide continues to be livestreamed as the war intensifies from Sudan to Ukraine and Myanmar. Workers are suffering under a global attack on political rights and freedoms.
In short, we live in a world imperialist economy driven by the ever-growing capitalist logic of inequality, poverty and war. You need a different vision.
With this in mind, Progressive International’s Havana Group has launched an action programme on the construction of a new international economic order towards the end of 2024. The programme of action, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974, sought to establish the principle of national and people’s equality, but in combination with US-led resistance to its implementation, was revoked by the debt crisis in the world and the southern part of the world.
Without a doubt, the 2024 Action Programme is a better opportunity. Many global tropical countries have significantly increased their economic and political power over the past 50 years, but the north is shaking by US President Donald Trump’s economic policies pursuing “America First.” American unilateralism may revoke decades of coordinated actions in the global North to maintain its dominant position.
In this context, the updated 2024 programme proposes policies that can break the global North and South developmental gap and provide a “sustainable future” of “shared prosperity around the world.” To achieve these goals, the program identifies five key areas for collective action by Southern governments: climate, industry, finance, technology and governance. Within each area, several objectives are set, followed by implementable measurements for how to get there.
The 31 proposed measures include a mix of old and new, from well-established initiatives to improve trade conditions to new initiatives, such as resource recycling clubs and coordinated development of public digital infrastructures to address waste. The most notable new addition, and not surprising. Here, the program is bold and uncompromising in its objectives, requiring full sovereignty over resources, clean energy abundance, end of economic dependence, ecologically equal exchanges of materials and energy, environmental justice and full sovereignty over Qi candidate compensation.
Taken together, the program’s 31 proposed set of measures can be read as an indication of what late Egyptian economist Samir Amin calls the “link.” For him, the essence of Linking’s anti-imperialist strategy lies in the South, invading from the demands imposed by the North and reorienting towards the priorities, needs and interests of its people.
Amin said the central element of the dense agenda involves industrialisation for mass production within the country, reviving farmers’ agriculture and reaffirming sovereign control over productive activities and economic policies. All of these aspects lie in Progressive International’s Action Programme.
The heart of each of the 31 proposals in the program requires coordinated action across the South to establish various clubs, institutions, networks, frameworks and committees. In this, the program calls for the revival of “uniformity of diversity,” one of the core principles of the Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia in 1955 and attended by 29 Asian and African states to promote a common agenda for colonialism and neocolonialism.
Given the various fault lines between southern regions and countries, it is easy to dismiss all of this as naive optimism. Similarly, it is difficult to see past its centrality to break the division between the north and south and build a more equitable and just future.
There is also the question of whether we can rely on governing political elites to lead us into this new world. The program suggests that it can be done. However, the increase in acquisition of states and ruling classes through logic and demands through the accumulation of capital and the development of global capitalism can pose a great challenge.
In many cases, dominating the elite acts as both a promoter and a beneficiary of this trend. The government of the Global South is not just a victim of illness in the northern capital. In many cases, they are actively involved and effectively benefit from recreating the existing global capitalist order.
The previous challenge is not to wait for salvation from the enlightened ruling class, but to build the economic and political power in our home of what the home historian and revolutionary Walter Rodney called “working people.” Self-organised peasants and workers have historically played a major role in the struggle for liberation against anti-capitalist politics and colonial times and imperial conquest.
Today, six in ten workers worldwide are accepted into informal employment, up to nine of the 10 workers in the world in the world’s poorest countries. To reflect this reality, labor organisation must go beyond formal wage employment and include informal and self-employed labor, as well as reproductive labor.
Collective prosperity that flourishes within a new international economic order once again depends on the crucial role that the workforce and general forces have a broad understanding of. Without this, the excess of global capital and violence, the poverty and inequality that these breed will never be constrained.
The views expressed in this article are the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.