Centuries of colonisation and exploitation, including slavery, human trafficking and trade, genocide and the undermining of sovereignty have established the current state of vulnerability in Latin American, African and Asian regions. The colonisation mindset continues today through the pursuit of the neo-liberal socio economic model. This is driven exclusively for the benefit of individual and corporate profit, accumulation and infinite growth, and is highly dependent on extractive industries like fossil fuels, logging, industrial agriculture and fisheries, the majority of which take place in the South to feed the North. Natural resources are turned into the private profits of distant corporations and the super rich, with little benefit in return for local people. Indebtedness and dependency - a hangover from colonial days and a way to enforce control - means that national or local governments are obliged to support and promote this model.

The capitalist system and extractivism began more than 500 years ago with the conquest and colonisation of America, Africa and Asia. The design of the colonial model (which includes extractivism, the plundering of resources, and human exploitation, mostly driven by private corporations) is such that even after the abolition of slavery and the achievement of independence by previous colonies, the system of plunder remains, thinly veiled as “development” and “progress”.

These extreme inequalities reinforce a divisive social hierarchy, on a national level led by their elites as well as in global North-South relations. The majority of ‘developed’ countries are net importers of nature while the ‘developing’ are net exporters of nature. As a result, this model is at the centre of serious tensions and social protests as it is the foundation for a system leading to an increasing concentration of power amongst the wealthy, corruption of that power, and the devastation of ecosystems and societies.

As contemporary thinker Yuval Harari puts it, capitalism is ”a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order”. It is the most successful religion ever invented and has used the greatest conqueror of all time: money, a psychological construct that works by converting matter into mind. The power of money is its ability to create universal trust and its convertibility: “money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively. ” (*1)

Yet capitalism needs other conditions to thrive: growth, credit and reinvestment. Growth is an invention of modern economics. For most of history the economy stayed much the same size. The growth we have witnessed in the last couple of centuries could only have occurred thanks to a new system based on trust in the future: credit. Money has its limitations and can only be exchanged for things that are tangible and exist in the present. Modern economics and capitalism changed this by creating another physiological construction that assumes the future will be more abundant than the present, opening up the opportunity to build and consume based on future income.

There have been credit booms over the course of several millennia, but it was only during the age of European colonisation that the need for capital and credit increased. This era was defined by the Scientific Revolution(*2) which led to a new - utilitarian - view of nature, and the idea of progress, that if we invest resources in research, things can improve. This notion was the driver of European imperialism. Last but not least, the key to the success of capitalism was a revolutionary idea identified by the 18th century economist Adam Smith in his book Wealth of the Nations: profits must be reinvested in order to produce more profits, which need to be reinvested to produce even more profit. This gave birth to the infinite growth paradigm and the famous invisible hand, the idea that by increasing private profit, entrepreneurs were also increasing collective wealth and contributing to the overall prosperity of society. This somehow validated the notion that greed and becoming rich was good for the collective.

(*1) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari
(*2) Scientific Revolution

After WWII, two centuries after the Wealth of Nations was published, most of Europe was in recovery mode. The old colonial order could not be maintained. Between 1945 and 1960, three dozen new states in Asia and Africa achieved autonomy or outright independence from their European colonial rulers. This was mostly a protracted process, peaceful and orderly in some cases, and in many others, independence was achieved only after a lengthy revolution (*1).

The New Deal had just been signed in the US and Keynesian ideas such as employment for all and curbing the market were leading the reconstruction. The war state became the welfare state. Yet it was during this time that the idea of neoliberalism (capitalism) was conceived. In April 1947, forty western academics and business leaders met in a village in Switzerland, founding the Mont Pelerin Society which would become the leading think tank of the 20th century. This was the beginning of the neoliberal resistance to the socialist supremacy of the time. The seeds of the free market as a solution to everything were planted there and then. Hayek, an Austrian philosopher convened that first meeting of minds and held the presidency of the think tank until 1970, when the economist Milton Friedman took over. It was then that the Society started to spread its capitalist ideas and thrive, using the mainstream media to get to politicians. Yet at the time, the idea of the free market was still that: an idea.

And then an opportunity arrived. In October 1973, the oil crisis exploded, inflation went through the roof and western economies entered a deep recession. Friedman and his followers had a solution ready to kick in and politicians were ready for it. The rise of neoliberal capitalism to the top began with Reagan and Thatcher as its most prominent proponents. Their rise to power in the 1980’s saw the start of a new era, one that prevails today, where economists are the leading thinkers of the West and influence the rest of the world. In less than 50 years, an idea once dismissed as radical and marginal had come to rule the world (*2).

It was also in the second half of the twentieth century that the notion of development evolved to stand like a powerful ruler over nations. The post-colonial era prepared the path for Western imperial power over the world. The era of development started with Truman back in 1949 when he referred to more than half of the world’s population as coming from ‘underdeveloped areas’ in his inaugural speech. It was the first time that the term ‘underdevelopment’, which would later become a justification for power, both international and national, was proclaimed from a prominent political stage. This speech launched the era of “development” to follow on from the colonial era, to be joined by globalization some forty years later.

The idea of “development” is defined as follows:

• All nations seem to advance in the same direction, in the name of progress. Imagined time is linear, moving only forwards or looking backwards.

• The leaders of this idea, the developed nations, show the “undeveloped” countries the way. The world is now ranked simplistically into rich and poor nations.

• The development of a nation is measured through its economic performance, according to GDP (gross domestic product).

• Actors who push for development are mainly experts in governments, multinational banks, and corporations.

(*1) Decolonization of Asia and Africa, 1945–1960
(*2) Utopia for realists, Rutger Bregman

In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was over and globalization - understood as development beyond nation states - began. Economies, culture and lifestyles started to be increasingly determined by global forces. The global middle classes began to grow in number, shopping in similar malls, buying high-tech electronic goods, watching the same movies and TV series and following the same fashion and cultural trends. For years development was perceived as the promise that eventually all societies would close the gap between rich and poor and benefit from industrial civilization. Billions of people have made use of the ‘right to development’. This mantra has been reinforced by an international network of institutions including INGOs. Institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) continue to bow to the idea of development-as-growth, while the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and most NGOs attempt to counter this by emphasizing the idea of development-as-social policy.

Capitalism then began to spread across the world during the 1980s at the hands of Reagan and Thatcher, who famously declared that “there's no such thing as society”. The scene was also set by the 1976 publication of “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins which serves as a moral and ideological justification for selfishness and individualistic mindsets as simply following "nature", now widely discredited although it continues to be promoted today, with serious consequences for the world. Driving instability and inequality was a deliberate policy in the US and the UK, when work life in the 1970s was made more unstable in order to drive the new profit culture of the ‘80s. Later on, in the 1990s, an acceptance of huge executive bonuses was manufactured, while more recently inequality was pinpointed as a business opportunity before the crash in 2008 of the biggest bank in America, as a way of making money from a more divided society. This inequality isn’t only within these Global North countries, globalization has imposed this on the rest of the world to maximise profits.