Introduction
In September 2024, in a special ceremony run alongside the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, the Havana Group of the Progressive International launched its Program of Action on the Construction of a New International Economic Order (hereafter, the Program).1 The Havana Group, representing a collective of scholars, parliamentarians, policymakers and diplomats, describes the Program as ‘a handbook for an insurgent South in the twenty-first century, with measures that combine clarity and audacity to drive sustainable development in turbulent times’ (Progressive International 2024, 3). The launch was timed to mark the 50th anniversary of its predecessor, the New International Economic Order (NIEO). An outcome of Third World organising, the NIEO was a set of proposals adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974 as both a declaration and programme of action seeking to overturn the Bretton Woods system that had managed international economic relations in the interests of the North since the mid 1940s (United Nations General Assembly 1974a, 1974b).2
The original 12-page document set out principles for equality between nations, including full and permanent sovereignty over natural resources, regulation and control of transnational corporations, and redress to the imbalances of international trade. Far from ushering in a new order, however, the 1970s proved a stark reminder of the solidity of the existing order and the difficulty of pursuing peripheral development in a global capitalist economy designed to serve Northern interests (Radley 2023, 28). The oil and Third World debt crises, combined with the resistance of the US and its closest allies to any efforts to implement the NIEO through the UN system (Akinsanya and Davies 1984), led to its eventual demise and laid the foundations for the rise and spread of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005).
Across the decades since its collapse, the principles enshrined in the NIEO have remained a lodestar for Third World developmentalist ambitions, and the document’s adoption by the UN a major reference point for anti-colonial, anti-imperialist Third Worldism. At its core, as with its predecessor, the updated 2024 Program presents itself as an anti-imperialist development strategy. Taking as its starting point imperialism as ‘a global system of surplus value extraction through unequal exchange between the North and the Third World’ (Bush 2024, 358), the Program seeks to counteract this system by breaking the developmental divide between North and South. The preface describes the Program as:
a set of clear and concrete proposals for shared institutions and coordinated actions that Southern governments can take immediately, collectively, and unilaterally to transform the global economic architecture in the service of peace, justice and shared prosperity. (Progressive International 2024, 3)
In what follows, it is argued that while the Program provides a set of (mostly) concrete, considered and urgent proposals to counteract the drivers of North–South inequities, its overall coherence and viability are undermined by insufficient attention to capitalism and capitalist social relations, and an absent appreciation of peasants and workers as both conceivers of and contributors to development and anti-imperialist politics.
A roadmap for delinking
The Program is uncompromising throughout in its condemnation of the role played by colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism in the production and reproduction of uneven North–South relations. The first line of the preamble sets the tone, decrying ‘the inequities of the existing international economic order, structured by centuries of imperial conquest and colonial domination, designed to drain wealth, talent, and opportunity from the world’s South to its North’ (ibid., 7). It continues to highlight, among other examples, how the global ‘green transition’ is reproducing ‘the same colonial dynamics that first caused the crisis’ (ibid., 8), how the Investor–State Dispute Settlement system ‘is one of the purest forms of neocolonialism today’ (ibid., 32), and how ‘the legacies of colonialism have left many Southern nations with under-resourced states and limited capacity’ (ibid., 34).
To counter these forces, the Program identifies five major areas for collective action: climate, energy and natural resources; industry, labour and international trade; money, debt and finance; technology, innovation and education; and governance, multilateralism and international law. Within each area, as with its predecessor, several objectives are set out followed by several implementable measures for how to get there ( Table 1 ).
Program of Action on the Construction of a New International Economic Order.
| Action areas | Objectives | Measures |
|---|---|---|
| I. Climate, energy and natural resources | Full permanent sovereignty | Resource export clubs |
| Clean energy abundance | Global ecological emergency | |
| The end of dependency | Common framework for extraction | |
| Ecologically equal exchange | Energy authority of the South | |
| Environmental justice | Farming framework | |
| Climate reparation | Seed bank network | |
| Circularity strategy | ||
| II. Industry, labour and international trade | Common but differentiated rules | Commodity buffer stocks |
| Balanced terms | Southern content requirements | |
| Fair, stable prices | Procurement clubs | |
| Feminist economies | Value chain coordinator | |
| Rights redistributed | Southern labour commission | |
| Race to the top | Southern trade alternative | |
| III. Money, debt and finance | Monetary multilateralism | Payment systems for South |
| Financial insubordination | Alternative currencies | |
| Disarmed interdependence | Multilateral credit ratings | |
| Abundance, not austerity | Debtors’ clubs | |
| Debt redefined | Tax framework | |
| Fiscal justice | Southern development banks | |
| Sovereign remittance services | ||
| IV. Technology, innovation and education | Knowledge decolonised | Research and development |
| Education democratised | Public digital infrastructure | |
| Data solidarity | Accreditation and training | |
| Technological sovereignty | Health regulation agency | |
| Ecological harmony | Sustainable innovation incubator | |
| V. Governance, multilateralism and international law | Sovereign equality | Eradication of investor–state dispute settlement systems |
| Legal integrity | Unified disarmament agenda | |
| Democratic multilateralism | Southern legal services | |
| Dialogue and diplomacy | Disobedience for democratisation | |
| Southern unity | Southern fun for social protections | |
| Coordinate universal jurisdiction |
Source: Progressive International (2024).
The proposed measures contain a mix of the old and the new, from long-established efforts to address declining terms of trade by establishing resource export clubs, to new initiatives such as addressing waste through resource recycling clubs and the coordinated development of a public digital infrastructure. The most notable new addition, and of no surprise, is climate. A sense of the bold and uncompromising nature of the Program’s demands can be gleaned from the six objectives listed under the first area of action on climate, energy and natural resources: full sovereignty; clean energy abundance; the end of dependency; ecologically equal exchange; environmental justice; and climate reparation.
It is beyond the scope of this article to go into much detail on any one measure but, as a collective, they can be read as a suggestive roadmap for Samir Amin’s (1990) anti-imperialist strategy of delinking. Intended not as a path to autarky, as commonly misunderstood, the essence of delinking for Amin was for the South to break from the demands imposed by the North and reorient strategy and policy towards the priorities, needs and interests of its people. In what transpired to be his final year before his death in 2018, Amin noted that while not intended as a blueprint, industrialisation for the mass production of domestic goods, the revival of peasant agriculture and reasserting sovereign control over productive activity and economic policy would all constitute core elements of a delinking agenda (Zeilig 2017). All these elements can be found in the Program. After ‘development’, of all the concepts and terms deployed in the document, ‘sovereign’ and ‘sovereignty’ are the most frequently used. Here, the Program draws on the language of the original NIEO, laying out the demand for full and permanent sovereignty in all its guises (monetary, energy, technological, resource, food, digital and so on) ‘as a fundamental constituent of [the] right to self-determination’ (Progressive International 2024, 8). By taking this unequivocal stance on the sovereign imperative to advance national and regional development in the South, the Program provides an unflinching riposte to imperialist encroachment in any form. As with Amin’s elaboration of delinking, the Havana Group is also cautious to distance the Program from any idea of providing a blueprint, describing it instead as ‘a living document … to be amended and adapted to the conditions of the peoples and nations that seek to implement its measures’ (ibid., 3).
In addition to its anti-imperialist positioning, two major threads run through the proposed set of measures. The first is the call for coordinated action across the South. The Program proposes countering the North’s dominance in the global economy by setting up clubs (for resource exporters, buyers, debtors and producers), networks (for seed banks, value chains, trade and research), frameworks (for tax, extraction and farming), agencies (for health and credit ratings) and commissions (for labour), among other initiatives. In all of this, the Program is calling for a revival of ‘unity 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 oppose colonialism and neocolonialism, eventually leading to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 (Wiegratz et al. 2023, 931). While it would be easy to dismiss this as naïve optimism given various fault lines between regions and nations of the South, it is difficult to see past its centrality to breaking the North–South divide. As Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, a Co-General Coordinator of Progressive International, has argued, the North’s continual engagement in coordinated action to maintain its dominant position – with the recently formed US–European Union critical minerals buyers’ club a case in point – underlines the necessity of the Program’s emphasis on similarly coordinated action in the South (Gandikota-Nellutla 2024).
The second thread is the need for investment. Investment is called for across the board: to develop productive capabilities, to support small-scale farming, to establish Southern development banks, to expand a public digital infrastructure, to grow sovereign wealth funds, to promote Southern educational institutions, to disseminate critical healthcare and medical technologies. The list goes on. In this, the Program recalls the ‘big push’ development strategies of the mid twentieth century that were cast in a similar mould, calling for heavily interventionist states across the South to control high levels of investment, drive industrialisation and remove structural blockages to development such as lack of capital, lack of skills, lack of technology and unequal international trade.
Given the scarcity of resources, inputs, bureaucratic capacity and investable funds in much of the South, some reflection on which investments or measures to prioritise above others would have been valuable. The only implicit guidance relates to full and permanent sovereignty, singled out as a ‘precondition’ for achieving the shared prosperity and sustainable development to which the Program aspires. Such prioritisation is especially (but not only) important in instances where measures might lie in tension with one another or seem contradictory. Given ‘labour repression is the basis of late industrialization everywhere’ (Amsden 1990, 18), for example, how to navigate the tension between the proposals to promote industrial productive capacities and value chain integration with the proposal to enshrine minimum wages and labour standards across the South? Having gone as far as to identify 31 ‘clear and concrete proposals’ (Progressive International 2024, 3), some discussion in closing – however preliminary and contingent – on where to start and why would have brought some clarity and coherence to those seeking to act on its recommendations.
Capitalism, class and labour
While presenting itself as anti-imperialist, the Program’s overall coherence and viability suffer from insufficient attention to capitalism and its associated class and labour dynamics. While the ills of Northern capital are foregrounded throughout, capitalism itself – as a historically constituted mode of production and set of social relations founded on exploitation – is mostly left out, absent when decrying the inequities of the existing order, when (briefly) considering the question of labour, and when discussing the climate emergency and global ecological collapse.
One explanation might be that the Havana Group has conceived the Program as part of the formulation of broad alliances and strategies required for ‘a longer-term process of constructing a socialist alternative for the populations of [Asia, Africa and South America]’ (Amin 2017, 151). Such a logic would follow from the Program’s emphasis on identifying a set of measures ‘that Southern governments can take immediately’ (Progressive International 2024, 3). Yet in the absence of any mention or discussion of capitalism or possible socialist alternatives, it is difficult to draw any other conclusion than that the new order the Program envisions will be capitalist in form, at least in its construction and initial realisation.
This raises some difficult questions. With 2024 the first year that breached the 1.5°C warming threshold above pre-industrial times (Al Jazeera 2024), how capable is global capitalism of responding to the climate emergency and ecological breakdown within the ever-narrowing window of time available? And how well equipped is a capitalist world order to deliver on the Program’s ambition of breaking the North–South divide and ushering in a future of ‘shared prosperity’ and ‘sustainable development’ for all?
The following passage from the conclusion to Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’s (2015, 279) How the West Came to Rule provides helpful orientation:
The conquest, ecological ruin, slavery, state terrorism, patriarchal subjugation, racism, mass exploitation and immiseration upon which capitalism was built continue unabated today. Th[is] violent past … was therefore not merely a historical contingency, external to the ‘pure’ operation of capital, or a phase of ‘incompleteness’ out of which capitalism emerged or will emerge. Rather, these practices and processes are ‘constitutive’ in the sense that they remain crucial to capitalism’s ongoing reproduction as a historical social structure.
Or, more succinctly still, ‘capitalist expansion … is contradictory, uneven and brutal’ (Cramer, Sender and Oqubay 2020, 14). In other words, capitalism is inescapably exploitative, immiserating, polarising and environmentally destructive.
In an economic order based on the endless expansion and accumulation of capital, the major hope that capitalism can be restrained to stay within the earth’s planetary boundaries lies in the belief that economic growth can be decoupled from environmental degradation. While certain production processes are becoming cleaner and more resource-efficient, global growth remains tied to growing ecological footprints. As the European Environment Bureau’s 2019 report Decoupling Debunked concluded:
not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown, but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future. (Cited in Kallis et al. 2020, 10)
And while regulation is capable of taming some of capitalism’s most violent excesses, the Program’s visions of ‘shared prosperity’ (Progressive International 2024, 3), ‘even’ (ibid., 26) and ‘sustainable’ (ibid., 2) development and trade relations that ‘end the race to the bottom and ignite a new climb to the top’ (ibid., 19), are incompatible with the working logics of a capitalist economic order.
Importantly, the incompatibility between the Program’s aspirations and the economic order it is working within applies at both the domestic and international levels. Incorporating capitalism’s associated class dynamics questions the viability of breaking the North–South divide without first breaking with the existing economic system. Analysing the dynamics of contemporary imperialism, Amin wrote that in the wake of globalisation ‘a dominant superclass’ has been installed above the local ruling classes and the subordinate classes and status groups, ‘sometimes that of “neo-comprador” insiders, sometimes that of the governing political class (or class-state party), or a mixture of the two’ (Amin 2015, 30). Crucially, for Amin, ‘The great majority of comprador states in the South (that is, states in the service of their comprador bourgeoisies) are allies, not enemies’ of US imperialism (Amin 2015, 33).
Since the turn of the century, in nations where this dominant superclass includes the governing political elites, it has become increasingly embedded within state-led processes of capital accumulation. Over the last few decades, ‘Governments across the world have increased their role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital’, including as an investor and shareholder (Alami and Dixon 2024, 7). Today’s state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth funds and development banks increasingly exist as what Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon term ‘state–capital hybrids’, infiltrated by and beholden to private sector interests and constituting in and of themselves ‘major engines of global capitalism’ (Alami and Dixon 2024, 9). This has been actively promoted across the global South by what Daniela Gabor has termed the Wall Street Consensus, whereby institutional investors and their asset managers have sought ‘to reorient the institutional mechanisms of the state towards protecting the political order of financial capitalism’ (Gabor 2021, 431). Here, Gabor argues, the state – in the South as in the North – is enlisted to derisk asset classes, ensure steady cash flows for investors and reengineer local financial systems in the image of US market-based finance ‘to allow portfolio investors easy entry into and exit from new asset classes’ (Gabor 2021, 431). The increasing capture of the state by the logics and demands of capital accumulation and the development of global capitalism has been a defining feature of the early twenty-first century, with in many instances governing political elites functioning as both promoters and beneficiaries of this trend. Governments of the global South, then, are not only – or not necessarily – mere victims of the ills of Northern capital, but in many instances actively participate in and materially benefit from the reproduction of the existing order.
Acknowledging these class dynamics carries significant implications for the Program’s overall feasibility as well some of its individual measures. Writing in a recent editorial for Africa Is a Country on why we should be critical of the notion that the intergovernmental organisation BRICS3 represents a global counter-power to US-led imperialism, Will Shoki (2024) argued:
To be sure, inspired political leadership from the Global South’s governing elites that tries to level the playing field of global capitalism would be a good thing. But the lesson of history is that we cannot depend on our elites rising to the occasion and being catalysts for change … Therefore, building an equitable society at home is a necessary step in building an equitable international order. Unless we build the economic and political power of the working class, broadly defined, the excesses of global capital will never be constrained.
In support of his view, Shoki argued that the US dollar’s position at the top of a global currency hierarchy has as much to do with the interests of transnational elites, or Amin’s ‘dominant superclass’, as it does with projecting US hegemony:
The dollar’s present centrality does not come from the priorities of US national security or interests. Rather, it is rooted in the preferences of private actors in the global money market that mediates between financial institutions, political and business elites, and states … While the dollar system has undoubtedly had a disproportionately negative effect on developing countries, the main fault lines that emerge from the dollar system are along class, rather than national lines … The dollar system thus facilitates and fuels the power of elites who have an interest in maintaining the status quo … As long as domestic inequalities are not resolved at the expense of these elites, the dollar will remain hegemonic. (Feygin and Leusder 2020, cited in Shoki 2024)
Given these class dynamics, how workable is the Program’s call for Southern coordination to erode the US dollar’s singular power by developing currency alternatives? Here, the Program’s intentional decision to delimit its scope to North–South relations reaches its limits, leaving it unable to incorporate an understanding of how domestic inequalities can function to reproduce both core–periphery relations and, in the terminology of Amin, the subordinate classes and status groups to the benefit of a dominant superclass. To return to Shoki once more, building an equitable society at home would appear a necessary step in building an equitable international order.
Yet the terrain of domestic inequality and class analysis is largely unchartered by the Program, which hopes instead for precisely the ‘inspired political leadership’ of the South’s governing elites that Shoki refers to. Class gets just one mention, under the objective of clean energy abundance to minimise ‘inequalities of nation, class, and exposure to harmful externalities’ (Progressive International 2024, 8). Inequality (or inequalities) features just five times, once when citing from the original NIEO, once (and again) in relation to clean energy abundance, once on the inequalities of ecological unequal exchange, once on the inequalities of natural endowments, and once on labour market inequalities. In other words, there is almost no treatment in the Program of class or domestic inequality. Özsu’s (2023) reflection that the original NIEO’s ‘relative indifference to questions of intra-state distribution rendered it vulnerable to charges of elite capture’ appears to apply just as well to its 2024 reincarnation.
Indeed, through its general approach of invoking politicians, state officials and experts to establish and lead clubs, networks, frameworks, commissions and so on, the Program belongs to what Benjamin Selwyn (2016) has conceptualised as elite development theory. Located somewhere in between Selwyn’s categorisations of statist political economy and Marxist modernisation, the Program represents an elite-led conception of social change which ‘contributes to the continual (re)framing of the poor as passive beneficiaries of elite policy, and legitimates [their] economic exploitation’ (Selwyn 2016, 781). This is reflected at times in the Program’s somewhat NGO-like discourse, in which peasants are to be ‘empowered’ and vulnerable populations ‘protected’. It is also reflected in the lack of consideration to and space for peasants and workers within the construction of the new world order.
To be sure, neither are entirely absent from the Program. For the peasantry, there is a call to develop ‘a coordinated policy framework for small-scale, cooperative and family farming in order to defend food sovereignty, promote sustainable agroecological practices, and sustain crop diversity across the South’, to be supported by the establishment of a network of seed banks (Progressive International 2024, 11–12). For workers, labour regulations and protections are proposed for the extractive industries, ‘collectively determined by state, labour, and civil society leaders’ (ibid., 10), and there is a proposal to establish ‘a transnational labour commission in order to halt the race to the bottom and defend against the exploitation of Southern labour’ (ibid., 18). Here, the idea is to bring ‘workers, employers, impacted communities and national governments’ together by productive sector, facilitating ‘a form of collective bargaining in contexts where traditional labour unions have been weakened or cannot easily function’ (ibid.).
Much of this is, of course, urgent. Poor labour standards in the extractive industries and the negative and often devastating impacts of extraction on affected communities are well documented (Marshall 2015), as are the contemporary challenges of trade unionism (Engels and Roy 2023) and the pervasiveness of highly oppressed, exploited, unprotected and insecure forms of work across the global South (Selwyn 2017; Ahmet Tonak 2019). Major Southern thinkers on contemporary imperialism, capitalism and the peasantry, such as Sam Moyo, Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros, have similarly pointed to small-scale farming, agroecology and food sovereignty as central components to ‘wresting global agriculture, land and other natural resources from the predatory logic of monopoly-finance capital and of submitting them to the logic of autonomy, equality and democracy’ (Moyo, Jha and Yeros 2015, 40), and to the broader national sovereign project of liberation from imperialism and neocolonialism (Ajl, Ayeb and Bush 2023).
What is missing in all of this, and across the Program as a whole, is the sense of a ‘labour-centred’ approach to economic and political restructuring, where labour-centred ‘refers not only to the distribution of gains from development in the interest of labour, but also to the central participatory and determining role of labour in the process’ (Ashman, Newman and Tregenna 2020, 179). While the Program is stronger on the former, it has little to say on the latter. Despite the historic role of self-organised peasants and workers in liberation struggles and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialistic politics (Amin 2017), the determining role of labour and popular forces does not emerge as foundational to and a precondition for collective flourishing within a new international economic order, with the Program opting instead for enlightened governing elites to lead the way.
Moreover, leaving capitalism to one side makes it easier to write about taking action to defend against the exploitation of Southern labour, but more difficult to conceive this possibility on a practical level in an economic system that depends upon this very exploitation for its reproduction. As Max Ajl (2023) has written, earlier policies and efforts to make peripheral capitalism tolerable and developmentalist, of which the original NIEO was a part, ‘foundered on internal contradictions’, including the ‘domestic super-exploitation’ of Southern labour. Through its general silence on capitalism, these contradictions remain unresolved in the revived Program.
Hard on imperialism, soft on capitalism
What to make, then, of the Program as a strategy to break the North–South divide? Across its 31 proposed measures for coordinated action, it seeks to revive the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist Third Worldism embodied by its 1974 predecessor. Steadfast in its insistence on the imperative of full, permanent sovereignty as a precondition for any collective flourishing, it succinctly highlights the major drivers of inequity and injustice across the North–South divide. Further, it provides a set of (mostly) concrete, considered and urgent proposals for how these can be remedied within the framework of coordinated action between peoples and nations of the South. Its overall coherence and viability is damaged, however, by failing to go beyond a focus on how to bridge the developmental divide between North and South, to a more fundamental examination of capitalism. Such an examination requires placing exploitation and class relations centre stage alongside North–South dynamics. Incorporating an analysis of capitalism reveals the limits to and tensions within and across some of the Program’s stated aims, objectives and measures. It also highlights the Program’s tendency to see labour as a passive recipient of protections and regulations, neutralising the historical role of peasants and workers as both conceivers of and contributors to liberation struggles and anti-imperialist politics.