The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

The problem, people began to realise, had to do with the internal contradictions of capitalism itself. Capitalists seek to maximise their profits by increasing productivity and decreasing the costs of production. The easiest way to decrease the costs of production, of course, is to push down workers’ wages. But if this process is left unchecked, ev

Under the banner of the Cold War, pro-poor legislation was demonised in Western media as ‘communist’, and this designation gave Western governments licence to employ even the most draconian tactics with impunity.

The aid paradigm allows rich countries and individuals to pretend to fix with one hand what they destroy with the other, dispensing small bandages at the same time as they inflict deep injuries, and claiming the moral high ground for doing so.

Poor countries don’t need our aid; they need us to stop impoverishing them.

The solution to mass poverty turns out to be remarkably simple. Poor people don’t need charity, they need fair wages for their work, labour unions to defend those wages and state regulation that prevents exploitation. They need decent public services – such as universal healthcare and education – and a progressive taxation system capable of funding

The application of this market logic to land and farming marked the formal birth of capitalism. It meant that, for the first time in history, people’s lives were effectively governed by the imperatives to intensify productivity and maximise profit.

Developmentalism was, after all, a Western model. By adopting the growth-at-all-costs agenda and by looking to the West as the apex of economic achievement, global South countries missed their opportunity to chart an alternative trajectory from the outset – one that would be rooted in care, ecology and sustainability; one that would draw on rather

Even in England, people didn’t welcome this new system with open arms. On the contrary, they protested and rebelled against it, for it violated long-standing cultural expectations about people’s basic rights to habitation, to the means of subsistence, to the means of life. The goal of the enclosure movement was not just to displace people from thei

The charity paradigm obscures the real issues at stake: it makes it seem as though the West is ‘developing’ the global South, when in reality the opposite is true. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are effectively developing rich countries – and they have been since the late 15th century.