Real allyship in an age of collapse – supporting anti-imperialism

A year ago, the co-founder of the activist group Extinction Rebellion joined me in Glastonbury Town Hall to mark the launch of Breaking Together and put it in the context of a liminal space that environmental activism had entered. A year on, an edited version of Gail Bradbrook’s talk is featured in the May/June issue of Resurgence Magazine. In that time, have been impressed by how Gail has been exploring forms of international solidarity for an era of disruption and collapse. That is because it can be easy to turn inward, either by arguing over agendas that will probably never win power in the West, or trying to prepare one’s own community for further decline and disruption. I don’t disparage such a focus, but it can lead to a lack of attention to the wider world, and how we influence it. Or might do if we tried. Therefore, I’d like to share with you a recent blog from Gail where she offers reflections on solidarity with the revived anti-imperialism movements in Africa. Comments are welcome below. Thx, Jem

The leadership able to bring about a “Just Transition” – how we join our global family to unplug the death machine. By Gail Bradbrook.

As Europeans, MEPs and movement founders, we are honoured to have been invited to support a delegation study visit to the Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger). We have found common cause with our family in the Sahel; here’s why we believe this matters immensely to you too.

Many of us in western climate justice movements agree that a ‘just transition’ enabled by degrowth and decolonised economics is necessary and requires system change. Change to a system where all people have their basic needs met, where we have the dignity of decent work, where  nature is regenerated by our activity and where the mineral resources needed for modern technologies are obtained with consent, with minimal harm and are shared equitably. How can we bring this about?

After years of extractivism, exploitation and excretion, our climate and ecological systems are entering tipping points which will very likely collapse the current civilisations in the global north. Indeed it is argued that this collapse has already started; it shows up in the unaffordable living costs and deep inequality. There is an attempt to divide and rule, with increasing authoritarianism, hatred towards minorities and racism. Europeans are increasingly stressed and the mental health of all of us and especially our young ones is in crisis. They are being left with decimated public services, indebtedness and little chance of securing meaningful work that will allow them to pay for the basic needs in life. The way is being paved towards full fascism and states of constant war. For our family in the Global South, this is nothing new. The destruction coming home to roost is founded in centuries of colonial exploitation and enslavement, well expressed by many Global South intellectuals over the years such as Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, Arundati Roy and Amitav Ghosh. 

We need to face the fact that the existing system will not choose a just, sustainable, decolonial, degrowth economics, despite our best efforts to encourage it. This system consolidates vast wealth and power in the hands of those with the least interest in making real change. There’s a story that runs amongst climate and nature activists that goes “If only we can wake up enough people to see how bad things are and get them to join us on the streets, then we can force the government to make the changes that are needed.” Alongside it runs the following line (and we admit some of us have also tokenistically thrown this into media interviews) “And those that suffer the most in this crisis are those that have done the least to create it…”

The problem with this narrative is that it centres Europeans as the saviours of the day and positions our family in the Global South as passive victims. Worse still, it isn’t a credible theory of change. Waking people up to the mess we are in, making demands and slowing down the destruction are all useful things to do, but not enough to win the big change that is needed. Capitalist, colonialist, consumerism is a self organising system driven by the rules of debt based finance. The foundations of domination and control have been around for millennia so the system functions like a kind of “artificial intelligence” with inbuilt mechanisms for self protection. Where are the levers to help this crashing system crash with less harm? How do we recognise this system’s mechanisms for self perpetuation and protection, if you like its “immune response” so that we can make more effective counter moves together?

Who is in a position to lead a genuinely Just Transition?

What if we change the story to one where we look to our family in the Global South for leadership (for example the pioneering climate leadership in Colombia under Gustavo Petro and Francis Marquez? What if Global South countries started to refuse imperialist forces and processes that extract their lithium, cobalt, gold and so on for peanuts; and instead insist on fair prices? Wouldn’t that be the obvious way for a just transition to begin? Jason Hickel points out, the people of the Global South generate roughly 80 percent of global wealth through their labour and natural resources, but receive only about 5 percent of the economic benefits; the rest flows to industrial nations, of which the US takes the lion’s share. Extractivist plunder of the Global South is not only deeply unjust, it also fuels the nature destroying economy of the Global North. The dominance of OECD countries has created a rigged, one-power (mono polar) global system of divide and rule. But this is changing.

And what if, instead of endless calls for odious, extractive debts to be cancelled, there were countries who were willing to face the consequences of refusing to pay these debts? And we were ready to defend our siblings in this stance? These kinds of moves would be of historic and economic significance. Especially when they involve the creation of sovereign money as a liberation from extractive currencies, as described by Senegalese Economist Ndongo Samba Sylla. Jason Hickel suggests this is an effective path to not only decolonising the Global South but to spurring necessary degrowth in the Global North. 

So a just transition could be led by Global South countries rising up and throwing off the yokes of neo-colonialism, controlling their own resources and refusing to pay debts.  Well that moment is happening –  and it is time we paid attention. The peoples of West Afrika are rising up with the help of military leaders. Niger aims to charge a fair market price for their uranium resources (France has been paying peanuts) Burkina Faso repudiates colonial debt. Civil society in Mali is calling for Debt audits and non-payment. Niger has defaulted on $519m of debt payments. The Alliance of Sahel States is also discussing starting its own currency- this is hugely significant moment. 

What if we could turn our attention to these and other communities in the Global South who have been resisting this existing system’s power for centuries and who are currently participating in powerful uprisings? They are throwing off the unjust debt burdens and seeking their sovereignty, in a way that has the power to deny the existing system its finance materials and energy. They have the potential to pull the lever that will help hospice the existing system, making space for the just transition to viable systems we all know are necessary.

Our task now is to support the pulling of this lever, by upholding these Global South communities of resistance and making our common cause together. We call this “glocal linking” – where we get ourselves in good enough shape to make relationships, community to community and find ways to support each other in our struggles, especially through collective programmes addressing miseducation (PRALER is helping to organise this). 

Global North movements have to focus on meeting the collapse of our unsustainable way of life, with degrowth in mind, building sufficiency based cooperative economies, in which our basic needs are met by ourselves. This means being aware of and countering the “immune responses” of imperialism, and choosing to side with our siblings in the South, building peoples to peoples internationalist solidarity. (Here are some FAQs to help). These imperial immune responses  are attempts to maintain the status quo and include:

• The silence or misinformation surrounding Global South uprisings – let us celebrate and share positive views of what is happening on the ground
• The killing of revolutionary leaders and installing puppets – let us fully understand that actions are taken with our taxes and in our name to kill and depose progressive leaders
• Evoking the “Russian Bogeyman” – any association with our named bad guys is used to discredit a regime, without looking at the wider context. Here is a powerful interview with the interim President of Burkina Faso- Ibrahim Traore in which he outlines the reasons and  necessity for the various alliances and relationships that they have. (For the avoidance of doubt we are not endorsing any of the toxic patriarchs running the world at the moment).
• Hold the West up as the bastion of sanity and civilisation for others to follow – in reality no one ought to follow the extractive economic models of the Global North nor the fake democracy that covers over the neoliberal authoritarianism we are subjected to through media capture and more. 

This doesn’t, though, simply leave us here cheering on struggles elsewhere. Might we play our parts in helping colonialist consumerism have a good death and build what might be able to replace it? What if we participated in economic strikes here too, in solidarity such as refusing to pay the sewage component of our water bills. We have some serious organising to do within our communities, to prepare as best we can for the escalating collapse. This includes scenario planning, developing alternative institutions and local forms of democracy. A significant part of the work is helping each other come to terms with the ending of this way of life. How can we catch each other and our communities as things fall apart? How can we mitigate for the descent into authoritarianisms’ depravity?  Might we notice that our luxury lifestyles are built off the backs of others, off extraction from the Global South and genocide, off ecocide and the depletion of Earth, in bankrupting our children’s future? These times call for humility, for apology for our complicity, for finding our way back into life and our global human family. 

The insane systems of finance power can be met by internationalist, unified people’s power. As things fall to pieces, let us look with fresh eyes at that which we can restore, regenerate and co-create. We are the younger siblings of our family in the Global South. As Vanessa Machado de Oliviera says, it is time for us to grow up and show up.

Dr. Gail Bradbrook – Extinction Rebellion Co Founder and member of XR-Being the Change leadership facilitation team and Robin Ellis-Cockcroft – Extinction Rebellion Youth Co Founder and member of XR-Being the Change leadership facilitation team and PRALER coordination committee are joining as allies the PARISC delegation. 

Other delegation supporting Europeans include:

• Clare Daly MEP, Ireland
• Mick Wallace MEP, Ireland
• Jeremy Corbyn MP, UK
• Nils Agger, PRALER coordinating committee, Sweden
• Tobias Mueller, POPLAR Scholar activist network, Germany

You can find out more about the delegation study visit and the follow up connecting of community to community, in this press release, FAQs and the following channels:

Official website  / Facebook  / X : @pariscsocials / Instagram : @pariscsocials / TikTok : @pariscsocials  / YouTube : PARISC TV  / WhatsApp Channel : Pan-Afrikan Reparations Internationalist Standing Conference (PARISC).

Your help is appreciated to:

• Amplify and share about this delegation study visit
• Sign this letter in support of the Alliance of Sahel States 
• There will be follow up solidarity actions proposed following the study visit.
• Get involved in PRALER – the Planet Repairs Education Revolution to link to struggles across the world and decolonise politics.
• Follow and share PARISC socials above.
• Support the PARISC crowdfunder.

Gail’s talk a year ago:

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