Snapshot

The Global South is not a place, but a way of talking about a diverse set of struggles: the uprising of the planet’s people against neoliberal policies, at least, and against the capitalist system, at most.

But down here, down

near the roots

is where memory

omits no memory

and here are those

who defy death for

and die for

and thus together achieve

what was impossible

that the whole world

would know

that the South,

that the South also exists

— Mario Benedetti, “El Sur también existe.”

Origins

The Global South emerged as a full-blown category in the 1980s, the final decade of the Cold War, when the Third World project had largely vanished and the Global South came forward as its inchoate successor.

The Global South is not a place.

These protests have produced an opening that has no easily definable political direction.

In response to the neoliberal attack on the social world of the world’s poor from the late 1970s onwards, protests broke out from Caracas (1989) to Seattle (1999). These protests heralded the slogan Another World is Possible. The term Global South, used in different forums with various degrees of urgency, referred to the demands of these protests to end the theft of the commons, the theft of human dignity and rights, and the undermining of democratic institutions and the promises of modernity. It is the name for the protests against neoliberal policies that produce an unequal world.

What are these policies? Pushed by the IMF and the World Bank, these policies used the Third World debt crisis and the problem of insufficient municipal revenue in the former colonies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas to push for cuts to social services, a transfer of social wealth to the private sector, and the forcing open of vast areas of human life to the commodity process. Water was no longer to be a common resource, but would be owned, bottled, and sold. Education became a commodity, not a right. So did health care. Conditions of life for the world’s billions deteriorated. The end result: Five multi-billionaires now own as much as half the world’s entire population (3.8 billion people). That obscenity is what has resulted in a massive, world-wide challenge arising under the banner of the Global South.

The Global South is this: a world of protest, a whirlwind of creative activity. These protests have produced an opening that has no easily definable political direction. Some of them turn backwards, taking refuge in imagined unities of the past or in the divine realm. Others are merely defensive, seeking to survive in the present. And yet others find the present intolerable and nudge the world toward the future.

Originally published in Beautiful Rising.