Frontline Activists Chart the Alternative Blueprint to the Current Economic System of the 1%

6 September 2024

Eight decades after its beginning, the so-called global rules-based order has dismally failed to keep its promise of world peace, security, and shared prosperity.

Global agencies including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have gained notoriety for dysfunction, implementation of anti-people policy frameworks, and collusion with multinational capital interests. At the State level, much of the Global South is caught up in a self-reinforcing cycle of inequality and repression while the affluent, industrialised West continuously slips into Far-Right extremism, the prospect of nuclear war with Eastern rivals, social unrest, and economic turmoil. These excesses have deprived the majority of access to basic social amenities and reduced governments into barons of (especially multinational) corporate interests.

This state-of-affairs has necessitated varied, widespread citizen-led initiatives intended to combat inequality and injustice in its various shades and manifestations.

Students at university campuses, farmers in rice paddies, workers across many sectors, young people living under repressive regimes, religious clerics, feminist movements, and online content creators amongst many others have participated in or led mobilisation and organising efforts to pushback against the concentration of wealth, power, and influence in the hands of minority elites at the national and global levels.  

Predictably, ruling classes have responded with smear campaigns, (attempted) co-optation, harassment, misinformation, disinformation, interference in electoral processes, and actual violence.

The Fight Inequality Alliance resolutely stands with the millions of citizens who are acting individually and collectively as part of the 99% to force a reinvention and creation of a new economic system that serves everyone, not just the wealthy few.

This is the spirit in which the ongoing Fight for Alternatives Global Assembly has been convened at the fabled University of the Philippines, in the country’s capital, Manila—with representation from over twenty four (24) countries. Our collective ambition is to create a blueprint for an economic model that replaces neoliberalism, and builds economies and societies of dignity, justice and sustainability.

Accordingly, over the course of several days of themed sessions, and plenary discussions on issues including jobs, climate justice, people and planet-centred economic models, civil liberties and rights, debt cancellation, food security, and the urgency of reasserting the place of young people in managing public affairs, four issues have gained currency, namely:

1. Mobilising and organising against inequality through social movements is a viable alternative that provides citizens with the ability to sustainably confront the State’s and global elite’s routine of repression as a tactic and strategy and demand democratic governments that serve the people.
2. The case for alternatives to public (and international) affairs management should be heeded as a means to avoiding yet more instability and outright conflict that are simmering, if not already boiling, in several countries and regions.
3. More emphasis should be applied to relying on or developing cross-cutting (i.e., intersectional) analyses that incorporate the various dimensions of these issues so as to arrive at comprehensive solutions for seemingly intractable problems.
4. On account of their decisive numerical majority, exposure, and energy, young people should be meaningfully placed in the driving seat of their generations’ destinies because the fate or future of their (and our) shared home rests in their hands.

Lidy Nacpil, Coordinator of Asian People’s Movement on Debt & Development said: “Across the world, people are suffering from the effects of inequality caused by historical and continuing exploitation from colonialism to neoliberalism. The challenges Global South people face can only be addressed by breaking free from the systems that benefit only the few and exploits the well being of people and the welfare of our planet.

“We need to expand and strengthen our movements of resistance and alternatives to compel governments to deliver on responsibilities. We must end the rule of elites and corporations to end poverty and inequality and achieve political, economic, gender and climate justice.”

Farooq Tariq, Fight Inequality Alliance Pakistan said: “Inequalities in Pakistan are at historical heights because of the IMF conditionalities on a new loan to Pakistan. A lot of new areas including a General Sales Tax and other indirect taxes, mean the poor are paying for the luxurious lifestyles of the rich. We demand that we tax the rich, not the poor.” 

Spokespersons:

1. Lidy Nacpil, Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development 
2. Mputa Ngalande, Fight Inequality Alliance, Zambia
3. Juanita Francis Bone, Mujeres De Asfalto, Ecuador
4. Farooq Tariq, Fight Inequality Alliance, Pakistan
5. Jenny Ricks, Global Fight Inequality Alliance 

Contact: Akshay Tarfe - akshay.tarfe@oxfam.org/ +918767980522 or Jon Robin Bustamante Robin.Bustamante@oxfam.org.ph /  +63 (02) 8929 4470

Notes to editors

About Fight Inequality Alliance

We are a growing global movement organising and mobilising to counter the excessive concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small elite. We are building a just, equal and sustainable world.

We unite a wide range of social movements, grassroots and community based organisations, civil society organisations, trade unions, artists and individual activists from across the world who share a vision and purpose in fighting the structural causes of inequality together.

We will achieve this by building people power from the grassroots to the global and acting together to create systemic change. We are mobilising in over 40 countries across the world. We build the strength of our national alliances. We leverage our collective voice and demands nationally, regionally and globally so that the demands and actions of people on the frontlines of inequality are driving change.

Action plan

On the strength of the above backdrop, the FIA and its constituent array of like-minded member organisations have agreed upon a plan of action and, in pursuit of its objectives, resolved to:

1. Redouble advocacy efforts towards the enactment and enforcement of a global wealth tax. This is directly connected with our overarching mission of closing the gap between the richest and the deprived rest of the world.
2. Maintain ongoing mobilisation towards debt cancellation with no conditionalities, for especially the poorest countries that have contracted odious loans.
3. Continue imploring and working with relevant institutions to allocate adequate funds to essential public services like healthcare, education, and water.
4. [In addition to the above commitment,] sustain calls for the return of States to their duties and obligations towards citizens as duty bearers in upholding their part of the bargain in the Social Contact. This is as opposed to the commonplace neoliberal model that has hollowed out States and reduced them into shells, whose vacuum has dangerously been filled by private, profit-motivated players.
5. Support efforts towards the codification and implementation of decent work standards and commensurate living wages as bare minimums for all forms of employment.
6. Work with partners and allies towards securing the objectives of the food security movement through protecting smallholder agroecology-oriented practices from the onslaught of mechanised commercial agricultural (biotechnology) corporations.
7. Advance the cause of climate justice through training, campaigns, lobbying, knowledge generation and dissemination on the primary questions of Loss and Damage, mitigation, and adaptation—particularly insofar as the interests and perils of the Global South are concerned.
8. Beyond the aforesaid economic issues, apply ourselves to questions of past and continuing political and historical injustice such as the occupation of Palestine by Israel, genocide against the Congolese, indigenous Australians, the Uighurs, and the Rohingya, ecocide in the Amazon, corporate interference in Latin American political affairs, reparations for the Slave Trade, to name a few.
9. Stand in solidarity with like-minded actors, be they movements, associations, or organisations, wherever they may be across the world to call on global institutions to stop policies fueling inequality and climate change and respond to the rights and wellbeing of people and planet.