neoliberalism

By Peoples of the Global South - Foreign Policy in Practice, February 9, 2023

An appeal to leaders, institutions, and our brothers and sisters

More than two years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic—and now alongside the catastrophic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a “new normal” has emerged. This new global status quo reflects a worsening of various crises: social, economic, political, ecological, bio-medical, and geopolitical.

Environmental collapse approaches. Everyday life has become ever more militarized. Access to good food, clean water, and affordable health care has become even more restricted. More governments have turned autocratic. The wealthy have become wealthier, the powerful more powerful, and unregulated technology has only accelerated these trends.

The engines of this unjust status quo—capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and various fundamentalisms—are making a bad situation worse. Therefore, we must urgently debate and implement new visions of ecosocial transition and transformation that are gender-just, regenerative, and popular, that are at once local and international.

In this Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the South, we hold that the problems of the Global – geopolitical – South are different from those of the Global North and rising powers such as China. An imbalance of power between these two realms not only persists because of a colonial legacy but has deepened because of a neocolonial energy model. In the context of climate change, ever rising energy needs, and biodiversity loss, the capitalist centers have stepped up the pressure to extract natural wealth and rely on cheap labor from the countries on the periphery. Not only is the well-known extractive paradigm still in place but the North’s ecological debt to the South is rising.

What’s new about this current moment are the “clean energy transitions” of the North that have put even more pressure on the Global South to yield up cobalt and lithium for the production of high-tech batteries, balsa wood for wind turbines, land for large solar arrays, and new infrastructure for hydrogen megaprojects. This decarbonization of the rich, which is market-based and export-oriented, depends on a new phase of environmental despoliation of the Global South, which affects the lives of millions of women, men, and children, not to mention non-human life. Women, especially from agrarian societies, are amongst the most impacted. In this way, the Global South has once again become a zone of sacrifice, a basket of purportedly inexhaustible resources for the countries of the North.

By Howie Hawkins and Federico Fuentes - Links, January 28, 2023

Howie Hawkins is a retired Teamsters union warehouse worker, the US Green Party 2020 presidential candidate and an ecosocialist. Together with a range of other leftists, socialists, unionists and academics, he recently helped set up the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US). Hawkins spoke to Federico Fuentes about the initiative and the challenges of building solidarity with Ukraine while opposing US imperialism.

Could you tell us a bit about how and why the Ukraine Solidarity Network came about, and what the fundamental aim of the network is? What practical solidarity does the network plan to carry out?

The Ukraine Solidarity Network was initiated at a meeting at the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago in early September. We convened following a talk on “Ukraine, Self-Determination, and Imperialist War” by Yuliya Yurchenko of Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), a democratic socialist organisation in Ukraine. Though initiated by socialists, we agreed to build a broader network of people to support the Ukrainian people’s national liberation struggle. Our fundamental aim is to build moral, political and material support in labour and social movements for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s invasion and their struggle for independence, democracy and social justice. We want to nurture links between progressive labor and social organizations in Ukraine and the United States.

Public education is an immediate priority. We want to counter the narratives of significant parts of the old left and the peace movement in the United States who have decided that if the US is sending arms to Ukraine, they must automatically oppose that support. Given the vicious history of US imperialism, that stance may be understandable. But a one-size-fits-all conclusion is not justified without a critical examination of each conflict. Would these people have opposed US military aid to the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War because it came from the US imperialist state? Or the military aid the US gave to the Soviet Union in World War II? Or the US arms and special forces the US sent to the Viet Minh resisting the Japanese invasion during that war? In the case of Ukraine, the knee-jerk conclusion of no US aid to the Ukrainian national liberation struggle reveals a US-centric colonial mindset. It sees US imperialism as the cause of what they call “the US proxy war on Russia.” It renders the Ukrainians invisible. Ukrainian perspectives on the causes of the war and why they want arms for self-defence are ignored, including the views of progressive trade union, socialist, anarchist, feminist, LGBT and environmental movements in Ukraine.

The Ukraine Solidarity Network wants to be a voice on the US left that opposes all imperialisms — Russian as well as US — and supports the right of historically colonised and oppressed nations like Ukraine to self-determination and to self-defence against aggression. We are concerned that those on the US left who oppose aid to Ukraine and, in some quarters, openly support a Russian victory, are alienating progressive- and peace-minded people in the US and internationally from the left.

While US military and economic support for Ukraine currently has wide support in the political centre and left, it is fast eroding in the Republican Party. The US right admires Putin’s authoritarian strongman rule and his conservative Christian, ethnonationalist, patriarchal, anti-gay, anti-trans and climate change-denying policies and pronouncements. US aid to Ukraine will be challenged by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives when the next round of funding is considered later this year. By next fall, far-right “peace” candidates, who will campaign on cutting aid to Ukraine and redirecting those military resources to Pacific deployments against China and Mexican border deployments against migrants, are likely to gain traction in the Republican presidential primaries. I hope the Ukraine Solidarity Network will have a significant influence on the Ukraine debate in US politics with a progressive perspective that support’s Ukraine’s self-determination and opposes both Russian and US imperialism.

By Kenny Stancil - Common Dreams, January 27, 2023

A new manifesto calls for building "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century" in which "our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality."

An international coalition made up of more than 200 trade unions and progressive advocacy groups on Thursday published the Santiago Declaration, a manifesto for "a complete overhaul of our global economic system."

The undeniably anti-neoliberal document proclaiming that "our future is public" is the product of a meeting held in Chile—the "laboratory of neoliberalism" where Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago acolytes' upwardly redistributive economic model was first imposed at gunpoint by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military junta.

From November 29 to December 2, more than 1,000 organizers from over 100 countries gathered in Santiago and virtually to germinate a left-wing movement against "the dominant paradigm of growth, privatization, and commodification."

"We are at a critical juncture," the manifesto begins. "At a time when the world faces a series of crises, from the environmental emergency to hunger and deepening inequalities, increasing armed conflicts, pandemics, rising extremism, and escalating inflation, a collective response is growing."

"Hundreds of organizations across socioeconomic justice and public services sectors—from education and health services, to care, energy, food, housing, water, transportation, and social protection—are coming together to address the harmful effects of commercializing public services, to reclaim democratic public control, and to reimagine a truly equal and human rights-oriented economy that works for people and the planet," reads the document. "We demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative, and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society."

By staff - Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, December 2022

This TUED Working Paper was written to inform discussion at the launch of “TUED South” meeting that took place in Nairobi, Kenya, during October 11th-13th, 2022.

In the weeks following the meeting, it was revised to reflect the discussions that took place. The Nairobi meeting occurred at a time of geopolitical turbulence due to the war in the Ukraine. In many countries, energy has become front page news as prices rise and the major economies rush to secure new sources of gas, coal, and oil. Energy-related anxieties have been accompanied by growing concerns about climate change. The year 2022 produced several headline-making extreme weather events, with devastating floods in Pakistan and in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province together claiming the lives of more than 2,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands of poor people homeless. Europe’s record-breaking heatwave and wildfires killed 16,000 people, and China’s summer produced a heatwave more severe than any in recorded history.

Today it is widely recognized that the impact of climate change on the poorest countries is already more severe than it is for the richer countries, and that inadequate public services are contributing to its many damaging effects.

In 2019 the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights noted “hundreds of millions will face food insecurity, forced migration, disease, and death.”

Climate change is a huge threat to jobs, livelihoods, and security to workers everywhere. But it is the working class and poor people of the South who will be hit the first and the hardest.

Download this document (PDF).

By Sun-Chul Kim, Seungmin Ryu, Sandra Van Niekerk, and Tom Reddington, et. al. - KPTU, KCTU, and Public Services International, November 17, 2022

Strengthening quality public services in the Global South should be a key priority ofinternational climate finance. Important lessons can be taken from the COVID-19 pandemic. To protect people from the deadly virus governments of all persuasions have had to take back control of privatised public services and rein in international supply chains designed to maximise profit.

This study aims to assess the degree to which international climate finance strengthens universal quality public services in developing countries. It focuses on the case study of the Green Climate Fund to assess whether the concerns of workers and communities have been heeded.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By staff - Trades Union Congress, September 27, 2022

Commenting on the announcement today (Tuesday) by Labour leader Keir Starmer of proposals for a new publicly owned energy champion called Great British Energy, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said:

“This is a big, bold move that will cut bills and secure our energy future.

“This new national energy champion can provide high-quality jobs to every corner of the UK.

“And it’s about time the public shared in the profits of British energy.”

Editors note

- TUC report ‘Public ownership of clean power: lower bills, climate action, decent jobs’: A recently published TUC report set out an approach for the creation of a publicly owned national energy champion. The report is here: https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/public-ownership-clean-power-lower-bills-climate-action-decent-jobs

By R.C. Smith - PhD Dissertation, September 1, 2022

Oil and finance have long played central roles in defining how the global economy has developed and this is especially true of the modern neoliberal economic system. One factor of their relationship that is often unexamined is how oil industry profits and liquid capital influence the developments of finance. Understanding their relationship during the modern period first requires understanding this petrocapital cycle, how it influences economic development, and the ways that its rise to prominence in the 1970s transformed the global capitalist financial system.

We are living in a world that has been shaped by the demands of oil and finance. Under the neoliberal capitalist order these two sectors enjoyed central roles in setting the pace of the global economy. Shocks in the price of oil, as recent events like the record-high oil prices experienced following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine have reminded us, tend not to stay confined to the fuel pump and radiate throughout our economic system. One particular avenue of influence that is often not seen but is widely felt is the reinvestment of oil profits in global financial markets. This question was first thoroughly examined in Mahmoud el-Gamal and Amy Myers Jaffe’s Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold which traced the relationships that formed the endogenous petrocapital cycle, which is the reinvestment of the profits reaped by oil exporters in financial markets and how this changed global credit and financial markets. The Real Oil Shock builds on their earlier work by digging deeper into the birth of this process in the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. It will do this by examining how OPEC’s windfall capital fundamentally changed financial markets, practices, and the creation of money.

What The Real Oil Shock is examining is not a new phenomenon in economic history. The human experience abounds with instances where dramatic redistributions of wealth and resources created significant changes in the existing social and economic order. An excellent example comes from the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Exploitation of gold, silver, and other precious metals in the Americas provided the Spanish monarchy with an enormous windfall of liquid capital. This was spent by the Spanish monarchy on projects of the state, fighting wars, and expanding their influence in Europe. This put increasing quantities of Spanish doubloons in circulation outside of domestic markets. Spanish gold had become the capital for Dutch, English, and French merchants for financing their own commercial, industrial, and colonial enterprises whose activities were the foundation of early modern capitalism in Europe.

Download this document (link).

By Olivia Weeks and Marc Edelman - The Daily Yonder, August 26, 2022

Marc Edelman is a writer and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College. In his work, academic and otherwise, Edelman investigates what he terms the underdevelopment of rural America. In a 2021 paper entitled “Hollowed out Heartland, USA” he writes “Rural decline is not simply the result of deindustrialization spurred by free trade, the farm crisis, or automation and robotization. Since the 1980s, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize the assets present in rural zones, whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes, or stores located in towns and malls.” In the wake of the fiscal austerity agenda enacted by financial and political elites in the late 20th century, the vast majority of the wealth created in America’s countryside “has accrued to shareholders in corporations and financial institutions headquartered in a handful of distant, economically dynamic urban centers.” The financialization of the American economy, especially in those places furthest from economic hubs, can be extremely opaque. But its repercussions – many of which are often seen as causes and effects of backwardness and small-town decline – are all around us.

We discuss the destabilizing effects of such uneven development, the parallels between rural and urban landscapes of decline, and the political choices that sacrificed rural prosperity to urban agglomeration, below.

By Sean Sweeney - New Labor Forum, July 18, 2022

How can the world end energy poverty in the Global South and simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change? In 2021, 860 million people had no access to electricity. [1] Today, a third of all humanity lacks access to reliable power. Roughly 2.6 billion people heat their homes with polluting fuels and technologies, and using traditional stoves fueled by charcoal, coal, crop waste, dung, kerosene, and wood.2 The majority of families in the Global South are today able to turn on an electric light—and therefore have “access to electricity” for at least some hours in the day—but for many that is as far as it goes. For other basic needs, dirty and perhaps life-threatening energy continues to be the norm.

The urgency of providing energy to the great numbers of people in the Global South who lack it runs headlong into the necessity to divert climate disaster by reducing worldwide carbon emissions. It is this challenge that sits at he center of current debates on “sustainable development.” For some years, the standard answer from the climate policy world has been the following: the Global South is well positioned to “leapfrog” the phase of centralized energy and jump feet first into the transition to modern renewables, in the same way as mobile phones have proliferated in the developing world without first having to install traditional land-line infrastructure.3 Whereas large nuclear, coaland gas-fired power stations and hydroelectric dams take years to build, by comparison wind, solar, and battery technologies are small, easy to install, and, the argument goes, increasingly affordable. Rural communities without electricity can set up stand-alone “micro- grids,” so there is no need for traditional transmission and distribution grids which are expensive and inefficient. The Global South—which refers broadly to Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the developing countries in Asia—is blessed with so much sun and wind, there is no reason why energy poverty cannot be consigned to history relatively quickly.4

That is the good news. The bad news is that it is not happening, and there are few signs that it will.