The world is changing rapidly. Technology is impacting production relations where traditional wage-labour is being supplanted by automation, platform-based gig economies and tech centric eco-systems. Geopolitics has witnessed rising protectionism where strategic policies are replacing free trade assumptions. The world is transiting from the economic logic of globalized, cost-driven supply chains to a more fragmented world with a focus on resilience and geopolitical vulnerabilities.
The changing production relations create new economic models which shift value creation decisively away from labour to knowledge, data and digital assets. This has resulted in a drastic shift in power from common people to those who own and manage technological infrastructure, leading globally to an unprecedented concentration of economic power and wealth. Technology and digital identities have further alienated people, homogenising thought and privileging processes over humanity. Widespread surveillance has muted both resistance and the agency of protest.
The case to reclaim a more considerate and plural world, based on goodness and humanity, needs an effort to reinstate people’s voices to determine their own futures. It needs an active engagement of common working people and the conviction that Earth is a common inheritance, where all can live peacefully - with understanding and cooperation, eschewing exploitation, domination, occupation, destruction and humiliation. The newsletter “SOUTH-SOUTH”, brought out in English and Hindi, is a small effort in this direction. We seek to share information, disseminate perspectives, create an awareness of global events and changes taking place in world political economy and also revisit past attempts at global cooperation to equip and inspire people seeking to make the world a more inclusive, beautiful and better place."
