In Bogotá, the question was asked in the language of policy: debt, trade, technology, energy, finance, industrial policy.

In Lahore, it was asked in the language of struggle: empire, war, sanctions, sovereignty, organisation, liberation.

On the first weekend of May, the two cities became sites where different visions of the global order were deliberated and contested. In Bogotá, inside the Palacio de San Carlos and the Ágora Convention Centre, the Government of Colombia, the Progressive International and Centro de Pensamiento Vida convened Economy for Life: Toward a New International Economic Order — a gathering of ministers, economists, public officials, organisers and intellectuals working to turn the demand for a new global order into a concrete programme.

15,000 kilometres away, Progressive International member Haqooq-e-Khalq Party and the PI’s People’s Academy convened the inaugural International Anti-Imperialist Conference in Lahore — bringing together scholars, organisers and movements to develop a rigorous anti-imperialist analysis adequate to the moment: one that charts the path of struggle towards the defence of sovereign development and the construction of socialism.

The gatherings began from different places.

Bogotá began from the work of government: public budgets, central banks, industrial strategies, debt architecture, trade rules, technology transfer, energy systems. Lahore began from the work of popular forces: political education, international solidarity, the right of peoples to determine their own future, and the material struggle in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran to dismantle the old economic order by enforcing the terms of a new one. Bogotá asked how governments could institutionalise sovereignty, and Lahore asked what makes sovereignty possible to build in the first place.

A people cannot be sovereign if its land is treated as a mine for foreign firms, its labour as a cheap input for global value chains, its currency as a target for speculation, its public budget as collateral for creditors, its technology as private property locked behind patents, and its political choices as a threat to be punished from abroad.

The old order is exhausted. But a dying order can still bomb, sanction, privatise, discipline and enclose. It can still raise interest rates in Washington and send debt crises through the South. It can still present a new scramble for minerals as a green transition. It can still call every sovereign experiment a danger, every public intervention a distortion, every demand for redistribution an attack on investor confidence.

In Bogotá, the conference was built around five pillars of a New International Economic Order: climate, energy and natural resources; industry, labour and international trade; money, debt and finance; technology, innovation and education; and governance, multilateralism and international law. It developed a set of proposals for shared institutions and coordinated measures that Southern governments can take collectively and unilaterally to transform the global economic architecture.

For decades, the South has been told to wait: for investment, for technology, for debt relief, for market access, for development to trickle down through rules written elsewhere. The New International Economic Order begins from the opposite premise: economic liberation will have to be planned, organised, and seized.

Across the sessions in Bogotá, old economic certainties were placed on trial. Colombia’s Education Minister Daniel Rojas challenged the idea that central banks can place inflation control above employment and social need, arguing that higher interest rates transfer the costs of the system onto the poorest. Finance Minister Germán Ávila asked whether growth is enough if it does not answer the questions: growth how, growth for whom, growth toward what end?

The international delegates sharpened the same point. PI Council Member Jayati Ghosh showed how access to credit, technology, knowledge and global markets has been distributed to large capital while denied to emerging economies, cooperatives and solidarity enterprises. Pedro Rossi warned that a green transition without industrial sovereignty risks becoming “green colonialism”: the South supplying resources while value, technology and power remain elsewhere. Fadhel Kaboub described the architecture: an international system that still assigns the Global South the role of raw material supplier, consumer of industrial goods and recipient of obsolete technologies.

In Lahore, that architecture was named: imperialism.

The Conference issued the Lahore Declaration, which traced imperialism through the mechanisms that seek to make sovereignty impossible. Sanctions are “invisible weapons” — not merely punitive instruments but tools of structural de-development that reorganise whole societies and class formations in line with imperialist imperatives, operating in tandem with IMF conditionality and domestic neoliberal reform to empower comprador classes while eroding state capacity. If war seeks to destroy a state from outside, sanctions produce a new economic order from within, forcing privatisation and fiscal austerity that serve the same de-developmental agenda.

The Conference confronted the ideological infrastructure that enables this process. The tools used to delegitimise liberation movements — branding resistance as irrational, violent, and unrepresentative — were not invented for Palestine. They were developed over decades of colonial counterinsurgency, from Malaya to Algeria, and are being redeployed today with the same precision against the resistance in West Asia — arguments that are reinforced by anti-communist frameworks that ignore the practical work of popular organisation-building necessary to bring a new world into being.

The Conference also affirmed the state as a bulwark against imperialism. Postcolonial states, whatever their internal contradictions, had genuine social content: ending colonial drain, building infrastructure, expanding education and healthcare, creating the only available mechanism for economic coordination outside monopoly capital. Their destruction — whether through military assault or through the slow erosion of sanctions and structural adjustment — serves imperialism, not the people. That is why the role of the regional resistance was so critical: it directly challenged the circuits and technologies of imperialist accumulation across the region, in the process constructing a post-imperial legal order.

Seen together, Bogotá and Lahore represent two attempts to chart pathways towards the transformation of the world order.

Bogotá showed that anti-imperialism must become institutional: public finance, industrial strategy, energy planning, debt coordination, technology sharing, trade reform, regional blocs, new legal architectures. Lahore showed that such institutions can only come into being, advance, and ultimately survive when they are backed by mass struggles.

The South needs both: the organized power to resist the enemy and the capacity to build what comes next. That work is already underway.

In Colombia, a progressive government is attempting to make the economy answer to life: to reindustrialise, decarbonise, redistribute, build public capacity and connect national transformation to a wider struggle over the rules of the global order. In Pakistan, workers, peasants and students are building a politics of popular power under conditions shaped by debt, militarism, ecological crisis and the long shadow of imperial intervention.

Latest from the Movement

Death Penalty for Palestinians

In April, the Israeli occupation introduced a death penalty exclusively for Palestinians. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated the vote on the Knesset floor with a bottle of champagne.

The practice is not new. In 1937, the British Mandate introduced military tribunals to deliver quick death sentences to Palestinians convicted even of minor crimes. Then, as now, the penalty is designed to terrorise Palestinians and make their lives — and their resistance to colonial occupation — intolerable.

Register to attend a webinar examining this expanding architecture of repression on 17 May.

Amazon workers win in Germany

In Frankenthal, Germany, Amazon workers have won a historic majority at the FRA7 logistics hub, with their union Ver.di taking 12 of 19 seats on the new works council — a mandate to challenge Amazon’s regime of excessive workloads, surveillance, unsafe conditions and management impunity from inside the warehouse. For more than a decade, Amazon has refused to bargain with Ver.di for sectoral collective agreements in line with Germany’s retail standards. But workers have kept organising — through strikes, shop-floor mobilisation and now co-determination — to force the corporation to respect the people who make its profits possible. The victory is a signal to Amazon workers everywhere: the movement to Make Amazon Pay is building power, site by site, to win fair wages, safe work, union rights, tax justice and an end to Amazon’s squeeze on workers, communities and the planet.

Our History

4 May - Kent State Massacre

The Ohio National Guard killed four college students and injured nine more at Kent State University Campus on this day in 1970. Massacred during a rally against their government’s imperialist intervention in Southeast Asia, news of the killings fueled further demonstrations across the country.

Throughout the spring of 1970, over four million students went on strike in the US. The wave of activity shut down classes at hundreds of schools and colleges as young people demanded an end to the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. Officials within the Nixon Administration would later refer to the protest as an “unparalleled crisis” for the ruling class on University campuses.

As part of ‘Operation Menu’, the US dropped 2,756,941 tons worth of explosives and 26 million cluster bombs on 113,716 sites in Cambodia between 1965 and 1973. For context, during the entirety of World War Two, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs. Consequently, Cambodia is among the most heavily bombed countries in history.

“Cambodia is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form," said President Nixon in December 1971. His rationale for bombing Cambodia “back to the stone age”, as one US general boasted, was that it would keep enemy forces at bay to allow the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and eliminate Vietnamese communist forces located over the border.

“They have got to go in there and I mean really go in,” Nixon told Henry Kissinger. “I don’t want the gunships, I want the helicopter ships. I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?”

Having kept Operation Menu a secret, President Nixon publicly announced the expansion of the Vietnam War to neighbouring Cambodia on 30 April 1970. Before he spoke, Nixon told his secretary that, “it’s possible that the campuses are really going to blow up after this speech.” He was right.

The following day protests broke out at Kent State University. Students buried a copy of the US Constitution to highlight that Congress had not officially declared war. As the demonstration grew, authorities announced a state of emergency and deployed police with tear gas to disperse the students. This only strengthened their resolve and protests continued throughout the weekend.

Referring to the students as “the worst type of people that we harbour in America,” Ohio’s Governor ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to occupy the Kent State campus. They arrived with bayonets, shotguns and long-range rifles to repress 3,000 unarmed student demonstrators. On the morning of 4 May, 28 National Guard soldiers shot into the crowd, firing about 67 bullets in under 15 seconds. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder were killed. They were 19 and 20 years old. "It was like a firing squad,” recalled one student. No one was ever prosecuted for the killings. To date, there has been no credible, independent, impartial investigation into the massacre.

The killings sparked the largest student strike in US history. Protests spread quickly as young people demonstrated in solidarity with Kent State students and public opinion turned against the Vietnam War. On 8 May, for example, Philadelphia’s students marched on Independence Hall, reducing high school attendance that day to 10%.

The parallels between the militarised repression of campus protests today and 50 years ago are clear. The violence that the US exports to Gaza has found its way home, just as it did from Southeast Asia. In 1900 W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “If, by reason of carelessness, prejudice, greed and injustice, the black world is to be exploited and ravished and degraded, the results must be deplorable, if not fatal, not simply to them, but to the high ideals of justice, freedom and culture which a thousand years of Christian civilization have held before Europe.”

Today his words apply not only to Europe but the United States too.

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5 May - Karl Marx is born

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, Germany.

A communist revolutionary, philosopher, and economist, Marx's teachings continue to guide struggles for liberation around the world.

Celebrate Marx’s birthday with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.

Art of the Week

Lester Rodríguez (1984, Honduras) is an artist, professor, and co-founder of the Experimental School of Art, based in Bogotá, Colombia. Rodríguez's work is the result of ongoing research on topics such as geography, regional crises, and migratory issues.

For the context of Dow Jones, Rodríguez was interested in the economic crisis, the impact of political discourse on financial flows, and the repercussions on the economy. Dow Jones tracks the stock market chart from December 2019 - December 2021, a time of interconnected yet seemingly independent issues including the pandemic, oil prices, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the U.S. China trade war affected exploited countries disproportionately.