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The sovereign development of the South poses a fundamental threat to capital accumulation in the North. This was experienced first-hand by the revolutionary political movements that, in the mid-20th century, succeeded in ridding themselves of their colonial occupiers in several parts of the Global South. The most oppressed and exploited peoples of the world had not only succeeded in politically liberating themselves from the most powerful imperial forces in history; they also dismantled the colonial economic system, reclaimed their national productive capacities and realigned them around their own development needs. The New International Economic Order, proclaimed in 1974, signalled the defeat of the old imperialist order in the face of goals of national economic sovereignty that also achieved high rates of growth and rapid improvements in human welfare.

However, when the South produces and consumes in its own interest, its labour and resources are not so easily appropriated by foreign capital. And so, the core countries would not tolerate this for long: they responded with overwhelming force, overthrowing democratically elected leaders—such as Mossadegh in Iran, Sukarno in Indonesia, Lumumba in the Congo or Allende in Chile—and using the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) as their enforcers. The objective was clear: roll back the national sovereignty of the South, prevent sovereign industrial development and ensure that cheap labour and resources continued to be available for appropriation by the North.

Photo_ Anabella Salem

To achieve this, the IMF and WB imposed structural adjustment programmes throughout the Global South, privatising national industries. Power over economic policy was thus transferred from Southern parliaments to bankers and technocrats in Washington and London. Public investment, public employment, public services, subsidies and any other means previously intended to protect domestic producers were brutally slashed.

The Global South, the Lifeblood of Global Capitalism

The Global South fuels global capitalism. It provides 80% of the land and productive resources and 90% of the labour that powers industries around the world. Contrary to what we have been led to believe for centuries, the Global South is not poor: it has absolutely massive productive capacities. However, this wealth does not deliver national development and human welfare in the South itself; rather, it is organised for the purpose of consumption and accumulation in the countries of the core. Global capital has ensured that the nations of the South are consigned to subordinate positions in global supply chains dominated by Northern corporations. Consequently, the wages of its workers are squeezed to levels of bare subsistence, if any.

Virtually all of the world’s consumer technologies are produced in the Global South, drawing on the labour and resources of peripheral countries. The same is true of the garments and fabrics that nurture the fashion brands from Madrid to Milan, or the parts that make up cars and aeroplanes. Not to mention raw materials like coltan, lithium, copper, coffee, tea, bananas, cotton, rubber, cocoa, or timber. The list goes on. And there is an added problem for the South. All thesnete resources—and also their labour—are consistently cheap in comparison to prices in the North. This forces the countries of the South to export vast quantities of their resources to the global North just to retain access to imports.

These South-North net transfers of value are often referred to as “unequal exchange”, and amount to more than $10 trillion a year, represented in Northern prices. As if that were not enough, roughly half of all materials consumed in the global North are procured from the South in this manner. In other words, the North continues to prosper at the expense of the South on a staggering scale. The North consumes the South and reaps the benefits, while communities in the South suffer the social and ecological costs.

This imperialist world order has been in place for 500 years. The ecological collapse we are now witnessing, as well as the genocide currently being committed in Gaza, are both a symptom and a reminder of the appalling violence of this prevailing order.

If we are to devise strategies to meaningfully address the root causes of the ecological crisis we face, it is critical that we understand the present in the context of world history. A brief review of this historical perspective, as outlined above, leaves no doubt that the current world order is unjust and immoral and that a new anti-colonial revolution is needed to provide real answers to the worsening crises of our time.

The Anthropocene Is Not to Blame

Any sensible observer today knows that we are heading towards disastrous ecological breakdown. The scale of environmental degradation is grave, yet the mainstream analysis of this crisis, and what to do about it, is woefully inadequate. We are quick to point the finger at the Anthropocene, but this is just another way of deluding ourselves: it is not humans per se who are causing this crisis. Ecological collapse is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and capitalism, in turn, is heavily intertwined with colonial dynamics. It is not human beings as such who have caused the destruction of their own planet, but their dominant form of economic and political organisation.

The disproportionate impacts of climate change at a global scale illustrate these colonial dynamics perfectly: the countries of the North are responsible for around 90% of the total cumulative emissions exceeding the planetary safety limit—i.e. the emissions that cause climate breakdown. By contrast, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are jointly responsible for only about 10% of total emissions. Moreover, we can say that most of the countries of the Global South have not contributed at all to the crisis, as they have not exceeded their shares of the planetary limit.

However, the vast majority of climate change impacts already affect and will continue to affect the territories and biodiversity of the Global South. Figures reflect the magnitude of this injustice: The South suffers 80-90% of the economic costs and damages caused by climate change, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. The future scenario is even more daunting as, under current climate policy, we are heading towards about 3°C of global warming. This means that 2 billion people in the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially higher mortality risk; that droughts will destabilise agricultural systems and cause several global grain reserves to vanish; and that hundreds of millions of people will be forcibly displaced from their homes.

We must remember that all this is not the effect of humans as such, but of the capitalist system, which is profoundly undemocratic. While at the political level, we can at least occasionally elect candidates, everything to do with the production system or the economy is far removed from even the shallowest illusion of democracy. Production is controlled by big business, commercial banks and the 1% who own the vast majority of investable assets. It is them who determine the dynamics of capital. In other words, they decide what to produce and how to use our collective labour and the resources of our planet.

And the problem is that, for capital, the aim of production is not to satisfy human needs or to achieve social and ecological goals, but to maximise profits. This is precisely why there is too abundant investment in the production of fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons; while there is a massive lack of investment in crucial areas such as renewable energy, public transport and regenerative agriculture. This is a perverse model that encourages investment in the most profitable products, while the less profitable ones suffer from chronic underinvestment even though they are of vital importance to society. A clear example is renewable energies, which are cheaper than fossil fuels but have much lower profit margins—because they are less conducive to monopolistic power. This explains why, although the world is already on fire, investment continues to flow into fossil fuels.

Climate Change as the Outcome of Atmospheric Colonisation

Not only is there a colonial pattern to the climate imbalance described above—the North destroys and pollutes, the South suffers the worst consequences—but, taking it a step further, we can say that climate degradation is in itself a process of atmospheric colonisation. The atmosphere is a common asset on which we all depend for our very survival, and the world’s major economies have appropriated it for their own profit. This phenomenon, which responds to colonial ideology, is having increasingly devastating consequences for all life on Earth, but especially for the Global South. When we say that this crisis is an “existential crisis”, we mean that it directly threatens the very existence of humanity. Do we need more arguments to make it clear that it must be stopped?

The ruling classes, at least, do not seem to have grasped it yet. In 2015, the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5°C or “well below” 2°C, while observing the principle of equity. To meet this target, high-income countries with extremely high per capita emissions would have to achieve extremely rapid decarbonisation, something that is not happening at all. At the current rate, even the best-performing high-income countries will take, on average, more than 200 years to bring their emissions to zero.

Tackling the climate crisis is not really complicated, since we know exactly what needs to be done. The problem is that we are not doing it, and that we can never do it under capitalist logic. This is an irrefutable truth, and we must insist on it: the climate crisis cannot and will not be solved within capitalist frameworks.

Exchanges beyond Imperialism

One of the main problems that global South countries face is that they are heavily dependent on foreign capital. They rely on foreign capital in order to obtain imports from the core. They also rely on foreign capital in order to mobilize production domestically. As long as this arrangement remains in place, Southern countries are under pressure to export their resources and labour to the core, on unequal terms, which drains them of wealth and perpetuates their underdevelopment. Southern countries must break free from this system.

We must remember that states are currency issuers, and this makes national currencies a strategic tool for the countries of the Global South. Instead of relying on foreign capital, states can issue national currencies to mobilise labour and resources, even to immediately recruit and train large numbers of unemployed citizens—guaranteeing them a living wage—, mobilising their workforce to boost universal public services and national development projects. There is no limit to the state’s ability to finance projects whose inputs can be paid for in national currency. And there is another piece of good news: as long as it does not exceed the productive capacity of the economy, this can be done without creating inflationary pressure.

More specifically, to avoid scenarios in which public investment runs up against the limits of domestic productive capacity, it is necessary to either increase the productive capacity—which public investment can help to achieve—, or reduce private demand for productive forces. This means cutting the purchasing power of the rich and introducing credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors. In addition to averting inflation, this would allow us to get rid of particularly harmful and polluting sectors such as the ones we mentioned above: fossil fuels, SUVs, and fast fashion, among others.

In addition to the national currency, the Global South possesses other demonstrably effective tools to invest in sovereign industrial development: economic planning, public investment, public works, agrarian reform, industrial policy and nationalisation. These are all strategies that Southern governments can implement head-on to restore their productive capacities, organise them according to national needs, and work their way up the value chains.

This is not to say, naturally, that the Global South will become emancipated from imports, but it is possible to reduce the dependence currently choking their economies into exchange rate inequality and foreign debt. Moreover, regional planning can multiply the opportunities offered by this alternative type of trade, free from the major world powers: Latin America may collectively decide, for example, that one country should focus on producing pharmaceutical inputs while another does so with computers, motor vehicles… etc., so that key technologies are available to all countries in the region, without forcing each of them to build up industries “from scratch”.

An alternative strategy to curtail imports from the core countries is simply to limit them, to the extent it is possible, to key capital goods that cannot be obtained elsewhere and that can be used in developing sovereign domestic industries. In addition, Southern governments should also aim to move up the value chain by, for example, moving from merely exporting raw materials to processing their resources; or even manufacturing intermediate goods and finished products.

Environmental Strategies and Policy Proposals

As we have argued above, capital is driven by profitability, so we can never rely on it to deliver the so-called energy transition. Only through public planning can we achieve the necessary investment in renewable energy, public transport and other decarbonisation strategies.

Public planning is currently the main political solution to the rampant ecological crisis we are suffering because it means redirecting resources that have so far been diverted to serve the interests of capital towards socially and environmentally essential objectives. It is, in a way, a socialist ecological strategy since it involves achieving democratic control of the means of production. We could say that it is also a revolutionary ecological strategy since it involves waging a struggle for the national economic liberation of the Global South.

As we discussed at the beginning of this article, this battle has already been fought in other periods of history, and from those precedents, we know that the economic sovereignty of the countries of the South can be achieved gradually: with decisive steps towards a coordinated industrial policy, with regional planning and by improving their multilateral bargaining positions, the peripheral countries can gradually disengage themselves from the imperial powers.

The future demands we reach clarity and consensus around this fact: ecological planning cannot be achieved without sovereign control over national productive forces. The sovereignty of the Global South, in other words, is a prerequisite for a true ecological transition.

To guarantee this public planning, this public production of public goods, countries have the ability to issue national currency to mobilise the productive forces required for each of these objectives, as mentioned before, but they also count on many other tools to guide the economy around needs rather than profit. Here are the three tools that seem the most useful in achieving such a transformation:

First, the universal adoption of the Fossil Fuels Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the main limitation of the Paris Agreement by focusing squarely on the goal of reducing the fossil fuel industry through a binding annual schedule. Its objective is to do this in a way that is fair and just: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, Global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy to meet their development needs, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe off-ramp that prevents economic instability.

Second, Global South negotiators must demand a much faster decarbonisation of the global North, consistent with their fair share of the remaining carbon budget.

Finally, the provision of substantial resource transfers to the Global South. This follows the same logic as the previous point: The global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, and thus, it owes compensation to its southern counterparts for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes on them. Our research shows that this is set to reach 192 trillion USD between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion USD per year. Conveniently enough, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.

Conclusions: Solidarity and Sovereignty for the South and from the South

As argued throughout this text, Western economies are entirely dependent on Global South production. About 50% of all materials and goods consumed in the Global North are net appropriations from the South. This cannot be defined as other than a travesty of justice, and we must keep in mind there is only one alternative: for the governments of the Global South to unite and collectively harness the specific forms of power available to them within the world system. Let them use the fact that the North actually needs them, to pressure and compel central states into taking more radical steps towards decarbonisation and climate justice.

Let us also not be naïve: Western governments will not voluntarily agree to any of this. It is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people. But that is precisely why the Global South must assert its own strength. The struggle for its liberation is the real agent of a global and historic transformation that can save our generation.

Imagine what would happen if the countries of the South had sovereign control over their own productive capacities. They could immediately end the scourge of poverty, deliver nourishing food for all, decent housing, clean water, health care, public transport and universities. However, economic sovereignty also brings with it the ability to plan environmentally, rapidly decarbonise the economy, and regenerate the earth. This is of critical importance: economic sovereignty in the South is the only way to end the ecological crisis.

So how do we get there? Internationally, by demanding multilateral reforms. By abolishing structural adjustment, unpayable debts, the World Bank and the IMF. By establishing a fair and democratic mechanism within the United Nations to manage international finance. And at the national level, with industrial policy, public employment and all the other policies mentioned above, the countries of the South can delink from the imperial core and move towards sovereign development. These are not utopias: they are achievable changes, and they can be accomplished in a matter of years—not decades.

Lastly, South-South solidarity and regional cooperation are absolutely indispensable in this endeavour. Southern states must cooperate to leverage their power as producers of primary commodities, upon which the core economies are totally dependent, to secure more favourable terms of trade.

But they must also brace themselves for the reaction of imperialist powers, which will in no way facilitate this pending “second stage” of decolonisation. Neither can we wait for change to come from the top: we must begin to build political movements that understand and navigate the crossroads we are at.

We can stand by the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns to the ground, or we can dare to unite and set a new course for human history. For the peoples of the South to reclaim their economic sovereignty is the first step towards that horizon.

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