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For some, Brexit has called into question the purpose of the EU and for some white liberals it has sparked concern over the possibility that it marks the end of internationalism.

The 1993 formalizing of the EU was for Africa no different than the 1884 Berlin Conference where Europe united to regulate and cooperate in its Scramble for Africa during heightened colonial activity by European powers. This predecessor union of Europe eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance. Today in Africa the EU plays the role of enforcing neo-colonialism through its Africa Working Party (COAFR) and so-called Africa-EU Strategic Partnership that ensure neo-liberal economic policies dominate Africa. We can be sure that when the partnership claims to cooperate on issues like governance and human rights it is not talking about how European countries are governed or human rights abuses in those countries. It is based on the paternalistic premise that Africa is inherently savage and contemporarily corrupt and naturally prone to abusing human rights.

elieving Brexit could represent the beginning of the end for international cooperation, as some have put it, is to believe that the world does or should revolve around Europe. The late Pan-Africanist Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) pointed out that those whose thinking is dominated by Euro-centrism and white supremacy often mistakenly “make the particular history of Europe the general history of the world.”

The style is welcome, 
akin to that of the best interdisciplinary scholarly blogs (like Crooked Timber, where Debt has been the subject of a symposium): clear, intelligent, and free of unexplained specialist jargon.

Partly, his maverick status rests on his politics – he is the anarchist saying things about debt, money, markets, and the state that the powers-that-be would rather not look squarely in the face. But largely his argument is a move in an interdisciplinary struggle: anthropology against economics.

“Can we really use the methods of modern economics, which were designed to understand how contemporary economic institutions operate, to describe the political battles that led to the creation of those very institutions?” Graeber’s answer is negative: not only would economics mislead us, but there are “moral dangers.”

Will we, then, see a reversal of policy? A sea of mea culpas from politicians who have spent the last few years telling disabled pensioners to give up their bus passes and poor students to forgo college, all on the basis of a mistake? It seems unlikely. After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality.

We are talking about a politics of crime and punishment, sin and atonement.

But in a larger sense, the message was that we were guilty of having dreamed of social security, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy.

Trump is simply carrying on that tradition. He’s finding great success because, as MarketWatch columnist Rex Nutting recently noted, Democrats have “sided with the elites on the crucial economic question of our times: Who would win from globalization, and who would lose?”

Instead, we must build a movement for trade justice that rejects both Trump’s opportunism and the long-standing neoliberalism of the Democratic and Republican parties.

In 1999, in the face of a seemingly invincible World Trade Organization, tens of thousands of activists allied with the movements for labor, the environment, human rights, and racial justice united in the streets of my hometown, Seattle, and shut down the WTO meeting. Under the slogan “Teamsters and Turtles United at Last,” the protesters struck a blow against elites and lifted up a vision of a world trading system that put communities ahead of corporations and created jobs while protecting human rights and the environment.

In recent years, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have withdrawn from the ICSID Convention, all for similar reasons. These governments cling to the quaint notion that their societies’ resources ought to belong to the people who live there, and they view the ICSID as a way to grease the skids for the continued pillaging of said resources (which is usually accompanied, of course, by environmental degradation).

In any case, a withdrawal from the ICSID is not a shield from claims by private interests, and states like Venezuela and Ecuador are still staring at billions of dollars in potential compensatory payments stemming from a number of cases over the last decade. States cannot simply ignore these judgments, as it would be viewed like a sovereign default, with all the economic risk that entails.

As a recent McClatchy piece on a high-profile dispute between Oceana Gold Corp. and the government of El Salvador put it, “international investment laws are empowering corporations to act against foreign governments that curtail their future profits, “ and the ICSID is the vehicle these corporations are using to ensure that these profits are not threatened.

First, and possibly the most well-known: the attack on organised labour and the resulting drastic reduction in workers’ bargaining power. This occurred not just through the instrument of unemployment (or fear of it) used to discipline workers, but through regulation and legal changes as well as changing institutions. This is now an almost universal feature, except in societies such as in Latin America where recent political changes have generated some reversal.

Second, financial deregulation and significant increases in the lobbying and political power of financial agents. This has led to the massive expansion and then implosion of deregulated finance, with the crisis affecting the real economy in terrible ways. It has also contributed to deindustrialisation and the rentier economy.

Third, the triumph of private gain over social good and the aggressive delegitimisation of public provision. Quite apart from the adverse effects on the long term (in terms of inadequate public investment for the future or for meeting current social needs) this has terrible effects on society, creating not just injustice but small-minded and petty individualism as a dominant social characteristic.

An emphasis on debt could be politically promising -- particularly as it helps people understand the trap of capitalism, the way the system feeds off them, the way it relies on debt at multiple levels and establishes terms of credit and debit for the benefit of the capitalist class. A politics of debt seems especially posed to reach a middle class that compensated for its declining income with credit (that said, household indebtedness has declined since the beginning of the great recession even as part of that decline can be attributed to mortgage defaults). 

there seem to be some challenges or potential drawbacks to a political strategy based on debt:

It is difficult to overcome the individual dimension of debt: the individual quality of debt (credit card, mortgage, student loan) presents a collective action problem.

This is a systematic plan on a global level to cast two centuries of workers' conquests into a dustbin, to make humanity go backward in the name of national recovery.

Most European countries, which seemed as if they had been vaccinated against coups d'état, are now governed by technocrats, handpicked by Goldman Sachs and other big financial corporations, for whom no one has voted.

Van der Pijl’s exceptionally rich study of Bilderberg and subsequent US-European geopolitical maneuvres, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (which thankfully Verso Press is about to reissue), provides the theoretical underpinning that I feel Jones’ passionately conspiratorialist followers desperately need, if they ever aim to properly judge the world’s complex combinations of structure and agency.

ut religion, Freemasonry, Rotary, Jews, etc., can be subsumed into the social category of ‘intellectuals’, whose function, on an international scale, is that of mediating the extremes, of ‘socializing’ the technical discoveries which provide the impetus for all activities of leadership, of devising compromises between, and ways out of, extreme solutions.”

But they were nervous, too, of a coming political storm, remarked van der Pijl. Representing both BP and Goldman Sachs in 2007, Peter Sutherland (former WTO director) “was quoted as saying that it had been a mistake to have referenda on the EU constitution. ‘You knew there was a rise in nationalism; you should have let your parliaments ratify the treaty, and it should be done with.’ Kissinger said words to the same effect concerning unification of the Americas, stressing the need to mobilise the enlightened media behind its propagation.”

But Piketty advances such an argument without breaking completely with the architecture of neoclassical economics. His theory thus suffers from the same kind of internal incoherence and incompleteness as that of Keynes, whose break with neoclassical economics was also partial. Deeply concerned with issues of inequality, just as Keynes was with unemployment, Piketty demonstrates the empirical inapplicability over the course of capitalist development of the main conclusions of neoclassical marginal productivity theory. His work has thus served to highlight the near-complete unraveling of orthodox economics—even while staying analytically within the fold.28

This overall incoherence, as we shall see, ultimately overwhelms Piketty’s argument. He is unable to explain why capitalist economies tend to grow so slowly as to generate such a divergence between wealth and income (and between capital and labor). Hence, while his analysis sees slow growth or relative stagnation as endemic to this system, he neither explains this nor is concerned directly with it. Significantly, he replaces more traditional notions of capital as a social and physical phenomenon with one that equates it with all wealth.29

Nor does he address the relations of power—principally class power—that lie behind the inequality that he delineates. His analysis is confined largely to distribution rather than production. He neither follows nor (by his own admission) understands Marx, though at times clearly draws inspiration from him.31

This event raises several political questions for progressives: what type of ‘bank’ do the BRICS leaders propose; why is it needed; are these the appropriate leaders to organise and control the new institution; and is it something progressives should view favourably?

An international ‘development’ bank is a non-profit, cross-country, public sector institution that makes loans to governments for long-term projects, either directly productive ones (e.g., a hydro-electric dam) or supportive of productive activities (e.g., roads and highways).  A development bank's sine qua non lies in offering loans at more favourable terms than private banks.

For example, in place of a requirement that US$ 200 million to Zambia be used to build a hydro-electric damn, conditions would require the government to privatize public enterprises, savagely cut government employment, and drastically slash public spending.

The public consciousness is, at last, aware of the issues of financial regulation, wealth distribution and the means of production. But questions relating to religion regularly push these into the background (1).

Nikos Filis, editor of Avgi, a newspaper with, as main shareholder, the radical left coalition Syriza (2), came to a different conclusion: “The attack may orientate Europe’s future: either towards Le Pen and the far right, or towards a more reasoned approach to the problem. Because security needs cannot be met by the police alone.”

“If Syriza had been less intransigent on standing for the rights of immigrants, we would already have 50% of the votes. But this choice is one of the few points on which we all agree.”