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A march in defence of public water in Santiago, Chile

Development has been co-opted. A development manifesto today would prioritise

aid spending, and call for more efficient production and more markets, leading to
increased growth, trade and private sectors. It would be an appeal to Western states,
neoliberal Southern governments and rich philanthropists.
For too long progressive thought has played along with this vision, fearful that
anything else will only empower a UKIP-style little Englander backlash. But if we
want to reenergise a real movement for global justice, we need to confront
development, and replace it with our own vision for a world based on equality,
solidarity and democratic control.

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Attempts to eradicate poverty without fundamental social change have failed.

Focussing on inequality can be a more political way of looking at the injustice that
the poor suffer. And challenging inequality first means redistributing the worlds
wealth.
Aid is not only much too small to change anything, but the very concept is
embedded in unfair power relations that create inequality in the first place.
Lets ditch aid and in its place build a system of global taxation. To begin redressing a
history of exploitation of people and planet, this flow from global North to South
needs to be much greater and, vitally, not under the control of donor states, any more
than income tax should be under the control of the rich.
Instead funds should be run democratically, and used to help build up decent welfare
states, sustainable public transport systems, environmentally friendly energy access
for all. The radical states of Latin America have already formed funds which could
serve as a model.
Redistribution is urgent, but it isnt enough in isolation. We also need to restructure
the global economy to eliminate the vast inequality that makes redistribution
necessary.

Current development efforts entirely misunderstand poverty. For instance,

introducing capitalist relations into non-capitalist societies, breaking peoples
relationship to the land and their resources, can radically increase spending power
while at the same time standards of living plummet.
Poverty is better thought of as a lack of resources from food and land to energy and
technology. And here, the central issue is who controls the worlds resources.
Current development thinking stresses providing access to resources for the poor.
But this fails to challenge power relations which allow the elite to monopolise global
resources. For instance, you can help provide access to food by giving the poor
vouchers to purchase it from the rich, or by helping them market the resources they
need to the rich to purchase. All this is quite compatible with the increasing
concentration of ownership.
The concept of food sovereignty emerged in opposition to this way of thinking. It
states that control of food is vital to a more equal society. Food sovereignty also puts
an emphasis on small-scale farmers producing organic food responsible to social
need not profit. It necessitates widespread land reform. And it is already working

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many millions of people are fed in this way.

Similar principles can be applied to other resources like energy: allowing
communities to control their own energy supply, eventually within national and
international frameworks, can produce both more sustainable and more socially just
electricity.

In this vision, we dont rent the worlds resources, we own them. In order to meet
societys needs in a just way, we need to promote collective ownership. But we also
need to challenge some notions of state control, which is often too far removed from
ordinary citizens to be able to serve peoples needs. It also depends on taking control
of the state as a first step, a major problem when so many Southern elites are
neoliberal in orientation.
More democratised forms of public ownership can arise by maintaining or
reintroducing common land, cooperatives or democratic local authority ownership.
This is happening in many places, including on our own doorstep in Germany for
example, local energy companies are gradually returning to public ownership. From
Paris to Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam to Cochabamba, water utilities have been
renationalised in the last 15 years.
We need to use public ownership as a means of providing finance, which should also
be seen as a public resource. We need to move away from forms of microcredit
which introduce smallscale capitalist relations and notions of debt and replace it
with publicly controlled financing, using the wealth that is currently thrown at
financial markets by, for instance, pension funds, resource wealth and local authority
revenues.

Public control does need to happen at a bigger level too and the nation state cannot
be simply written off if the majority of the world is to gain access to resources.
Thinkers like Samir Amin have long stressed the need for Southern countries to
de-link from the international economy. This is not a form of economic isolation but
a means of withdrawing from economic relationships that are based on inequality.
The problem for many Southern countries is not a lack of integration into the global
economy, as too many development experts believe, its rather that they are
integrated on deeply exploitative terms.
Countries must use their own resources to build a better society and economy, and

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prioritise regional trade, de-linking internal prices from the world market, and
freeing themselves from control by international institutions such as the World Trade
Organisation (WTO).
This process of both de-globalising (more correctly dewesternising) and regional
integration is currently being realised in Latin America, where countries like Bolivia,
Ecuador and Venezuela are recreating regional institutions to replace the roles of the
World Bank, WTO, International Monetary Fund and the dollar as a world currency.
New institutions, like the Bolivarian trade agreement ALBA, are based on principles
of complementarity and redistribution from rich to poor. They show how challenging
power goes from the local (for example movements against land concentration) to the
national (nationalisation and regulation of resources) to the international.

There is a tendency for anyone critical of the current free market system to be told to
go and live in North Korea. It is certainly true that liberalisation has been a disaster
for scores of African, Latin American and Asian countries forced into these policies.
But there should not be a cast iron rule that we should always trade or always protect.
Indeed the problem is that the concept of trade liberalisation has been elevated
beyond any social goal, as a good thing in itself. While there is a sophisticated system
of governance for world trade, there are virtually no ways of enforcing human rights
or social rights as an international level. We need to construct an international
system which is precisely the reverse. The realisation of rights and freedoms for
people and communities as well as survival of the planets ecosystems needs to be
preeminent and enforceable.
Trade liberalisation as currently constructed is not about selling goods and services
to each other, but about reinforcing an unequal power relationship, symbolised by
the monopolisation of resources by giant corporations. But under a different system
of rules, trade can help small farmers, producers and manufacturers.
Any project for global justice needs to immediately disband corporate monopolies
by taxation, undermining limited liability, imposing maximum size and wage
differentials. But the point of this is not to introduce a mythical form of truly free
market, but to give support and space to more democratic means of
organising society.
These ideas are first thoughts on how we might construct a manifesto for global justice. We
welcome comments and debate at www.globaljustice.org.uk/manifesto

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Nick Dearden is the director of UK campaigning organisation Global Justice Now. He was
previously the director of Jubilee Debt Campaign

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