DECLARATION OF THE G20 COUNTER-SUMMIT

St Petersburg, 4 September 2013

Social movements and civil society organizations from different parts of the world have met on 3 -4 September 2013 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on the eve of the G20 Summit and in a context of the threat by the United States of America (USA) to attack Syria. With the participation of more than 30 international delegates of world social movements, our G20 Counter-Summit, was hosted by the Post-Globalization Initiative.

We voice the vision of peasants and fisherfolks, women and men workers, indigenous communities and people everywhere who say: what we need is system change!

The G20 has not been up to this task, nor even up to the task of durably reforming world capitalism. The G20 is not legitimate, democratic or transparent.

Five years after the financial meltdown, the G20 continues promoting failed neoliberal policies. The cooptation of the so-called emerging economies – such as the BRICS – is obviously not a move away from neoliberal globalization. On the contrary, these countries have also been giving funds to the IMF - $75 billion in 2012 – to continue forcing austerity measures in countries facing deep recession and social crisis.

Therefore, we stand in solidarity to the struggles of the Greek people – and so many others on the European periphery, not to mention the other victims of the IMF – who are suffering the burdens of the incompetent troika recipes. Meanwhile, the banks which created the crisis are profiting from the privatization of public Greek infrastructure.

Nothing much different could be expected from the G20, because it is the expression of the corporate capture of our governments, a process that has been deepened in the last forty years, and especially since the G20 attempted its first band-aids in 2008.

During this period a vast architecture of impunity was built to serve the interests of transnational capital. The global economic architecture includes Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and International Investment Agreements such as Bilateral Investment Treaties, the current international and regional financial regimes, as well as institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and tribunals such as the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

These institutions are responsible for the current crisis and should be deconstructed and rebuilt for the safety of us all. Instead, governments continue to insist on FTAs, such as expressed in the Transpacific Partnership, the Trans-Atlantic Agreement and the WTO Bali Package in the run-up to the Ministerial Summit in December 2013.

This architecture of impunity houses the systematic violations of rights of people and nature by Transnational Corporations, with the complicity of captive states. In the face of these attacks on our rights, affected communities, workers, migrants, women, peasants, indigenous communities and many social movements all over the world are resisting and fighting back. We are mobilizing and building alternatives to the capitalist system. Recent social mobilizations in Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, Colombia, southern Europe and many other places are an expression of the fact that people do not accept the privatization of the public and of the commons.

Government responses to these protests are predictable: widespread repression and criminalization of social movements everywhere. We stand in solidarity with political prisoners and civil society organisations in Russia, as well as the many activists facing repression worldwide.

We want a world where socialization of the vast productive capacity in our world economy is achieved, but through democracy. In contrast, the market as currently constituted privatizes wealth and socializes poverty, repression and ecological destruction. We reaffirm the primacy of human rights and democracy over the rule of the market and finance.

At this moment of extreme danger in the Middle East, we stand united in demanding that outside powers stop adding to the violence in Syria, and we specifically demand that the United States government refrain from its regular tendency to bomb instead of seeking peace. There is no way the threats to escalate violence could possibly improve the situation in Syria. It will only add to the suffering of the Syrian people.

Moreover, bombing Syria will cause further insecurity and violence across the region. We share the world’s opposition to this illegal criminal attack. It is opposition expressed by people and governments all around the world, including the Arab League, UNASUR, several Asian countries, the British Parliament (even), and others. It is a damning indictment of the G20 that these world leaders cannot come together and agree to stop fueling the conflict in Syria.

We equally reject the new world of global surveillance such as PRISM, carried out by the United States National Security Agency and many other powers within the G20. This is a direct violation of the basic human right to privacy and an attempt to create a culture of fear in order to undermine democracy and any expression of opposition to the corporate powers that rule the world today.

The G20 elites will slap each others’ backs as they provide the most trivial reforms to the world financial and monetary system. But this is not a financial crisis; it is a crisis of civilization. The implosion of September 2008 was the expression of an ongoing process. The adverse power balance, in which so many Treasuries and central banks are under the influence of the private banks, meant that governments transferred massive amounts of resources to the speculative oligarchy.

In doing so, financial and macroeconomic indicators artificially improved – but the destruction of fundamental mechanisms of price formation and the expansion of structural insolvency triggered a very acute hegemonic dispute. Even continental Europe has become a new terrain of looting. Unemployment, the dismantling of the welfare state, and widespread privatization are part of the offensive of the neoliberal agenda, in the context of the overwhelming evidence of its doctrinal bankruptcy.

Expressions of these crises include a new wave of unrepayable debt imposed upon consumers and students; more extreme cases of violence again women; volatility of food prices and the endangered food sovereignty of peoples; and the recent strong outflow of capital from poorer to richer economies, leading to enormous currency pressure on Indonesia, Brazil, India and other countries. Vulture funds continue to loot countries in the process of debt write-downs, with their threat to Argentina now requiring our solidarity.

The G20 – a self-selected clique of rich and emerging countries’ regimes that designated themselves as the new steering group for the global economy – wanted us to believe there is no alternative to capitalism. They want us to believe that our broken planet can be saved by more of the same measures. Yet these measures are condemning the world to a vicious and endless cycle of crisis and environmental collapse.

We need a new path for a different and better future. Like nature, our alternatives are diverse and simultaneously happening in various levels: global, national and local. They are directed at various aspects of life to ensure that the majority can live well.

Our governments must instead promote the already existing alternatives that could lead to alternative systems and relations. These alternatives were inspired by the ideals of reclaiming our commons from the control of big business. Activists are building a genuinely green and genuinely sustainable path to development and autonomous management, and especially to the constructive use of the commons. We propose Climate Justice and Food Sovereignty, which require the complete overhaul of systems, of hedonistic lifestyles and of unsustainable ways of production and consumption.

We call people everywhere to join global campaigns, which are building these alternatives, among others:

Global Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity

Climate Justice Now!

Mobilizations of social movements for the Bali Week of Action to end the WTO in Indonesia

Global Network for Justice on Global Investment

G20-OWINFS (Our World is Not for Sale) Network

What we need is system change!