We live in difficult times, and it is difficult to remain optimistic about the future. Climate change threatens human well -being and planetary health, and the window to ensure a habitable and sustainable future for all is quickly closing.
Neo -fascism is spreading on the continents. Militarism is increasing. Genocide in Palestine continues to be live while war is enraged from Sudan to Ukraine and Myanmar. Workers suffer under a world assault on their political rights and freedoms.
In summary, we live in a world imperialist economy that continually reproduces inequality, poverty and war and is driven by capitalist logic or accumulation in constant expansion that is pushing us towards planetary collapse. We need alternative and fast visions.
With this in mind, the Havana Group of Progressive International launched its action program on the construction of an international new economic order towards the end of 2024. The launch was scheduled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its homonym. The action program, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, sought to establish principles for equality between nations and peoples, but was undone by the crises of oil and southern debt, combined with resistance directed by the withs.
Arguffy, the 2024 Action program has a better opportunity. Many countries in the South Global have significantly increased their economic and political power in the last 50 years, while the north is underway by the economic policies of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, in search of his “first America.” American Unilaterism may well undo the coordinated action of decades of the Global North to maintain its dominant position.
In this context, the 2024 updated program proposes policies that can break the division of development between the north and the global south and offer a “sustainable future” or “shared prosperity worldwide.” To achieve these objectives, the program identifies five main areas for collective action by governments in the south: climate, industry, finance, technology and governance. Within each area, several objectives are established, followed by implementable measures on how to get there.
The 31 proposal measures contain a mixture of the new and the new efforts of a long time ago to improve trade terms, to new initiatives, such as resource recycling clubs to address waste and coordinated development of a public digital infrastructure. The new more notable addition, and without surprise, is the weather. The program is bold and uncompromising in its objectives, demanding the total superior of resources, the abundance of clean energy, the end of economic dependence, the ecological exchange of materials and the eultural repair and the climate.
Tasks together, the set of 31 program measures can be read as a suggestive road map for what the late Egyptian economist Samir Amin called “Delwing.” For him, the essence of the anti -imperialist strategy of delete is in the south, which break the demands imposed by the north and reorient towards the priorities, needs and interests of their peoples.
Amin pointed out that the central elements of an agenda of delights would lead to industrialization for mass production of domestic goods, reviving peasant agriculture and reaffirm sovereign control over productive activity and economic policy. All these aspects are in the Progressive International Action Program.
The center of each of the 31 proposals programs is the need for coordinated action throughout the south to establish a variety of clubs, agencies, networks, frames and commissions. In this, the program is asking for a rebirth of the “Unit in Diversity”, one of the central principles of the Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia in 1955 and attended by 29 Asian and African states to promote a common agenda against colonialism and neocolonialism.
It is easy to rule out all this as a naive optimism, given varoose failures between regions and southern nations. Likewise, it is difficult to see beyond its centrality to break the north -sur divides and build a more equitable and fair future.
There is also the Wheter issue that we can trust that governing political elites to take us to this new world. The program suggests that we can. However, the growing capture of the State and the ruling classes for the logics and demands of capital accumulation and the development of global capitalism can raise an important challenge.
Often, guiding elites function as promoters and beneficiaries of this trend. The Global South governments are not only, or necessarily, mere victims of the evils of the capital of the North. In many cases, they actively participate and the material benefit of the reproduction of the existing global capitalist order.
The task ahead is not to wait for the salvation of the illuminated ruling classes, but in the construction in the home the economic and political power of what the Guyanés historian and revolutionary Walter Rodney called the “working people.” Self -organized peasants and workers have historically played papers in anti -capitalist policy and liberation struggles against colonial and imperial subjugation.
Today, six out of 10 workers worldwide are in informal employment, increasing nine out of 10 workers in the poorest countries in the world. To reflect this reality, the labor organization must go beyond formal salary employment to include informal and independent labor, as well as reproductive work.
Any group that flourishes within a new international economic order once again will defend itself on the determining role played by labor and popular forces, widely understood. Without this, the excesses of global capital and the reproduction of the thesis of violence, impoverishment and inequality will never be construction.
The opinions expressed in this article are typical of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
