By Sekoetlane Phamodi for IPASA
A counterpoint for the G20
On 20-22 November 2025, progressive forces from the Majority World and our allies from the Global North will meet at the We, the 99% People’s Summit for Global Economic Justice to be held at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. Convened by The New Economy Hub, Fight Inequality Alliance, Mobilize and 350.org, the People’s Summit will be held on the margins of the G20 Leader’s Summit as a people’s counterpoint to the global economic governance platform of which the South African government holds the presidency. Our purpose at this convening is to bring together progressives located in social movements, community organisations, NGOs, knowledge institutions and the institutions supporting them from across the world who have been advancing anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles to generate concrete alternatives to capitalism and consolidate a locally rooted but globally connected program of action to attain global economic justice.
Our purpose is informed by an analysis of the capitalist system and its current neoliberal articulation as producing systemic violence by design. From its imperialist origins of colonial conquest, over 500 years ago, into the globalisation of the economy that followed World War II and was accelerated from the 1970’s, capitalism has produced astonishing inequality, concentrating the wealth of the world in the hands of just a few super-wealthy elites whose upper crust’s combined wealth, at $16 trillion surpasses Africa’s projected GDP of $2.8 trillion, for 2025—nearly six-fold. To put the extent of this avarice in real terms, last year, Oxfam reported that the world’s five richest men more than doubled their fortunes to a combined value of about $869 billion while, at least 800 million workers across 52 countries, lost a combined $1.5 trillion in average real wages.
Uncomfortable reality
This wealth inequality has also created the conditions for real declines in human development outcomes through a structurally unfair debt system which extracts the wealth generating capacity of developing economies through outsized interests on short-term dollar-denominated loans that keep them in a perpetual debt-trap. This debt system functions through the architecture of the Bretton Woods institutions to benefit asset managers and drive capitalist wealth accumulation, and is worsened by the theft of tax revenues by wealthy elites and multinational corporations. It goes on to erode democracy, coercing the governments of developing economies, as we see time and time again in Africa, to make Faustian pacts that lead them to act contrary to the interests and mandates given them by their people. This relegates them to the ranks of what can only be called “surplus people.”
This notion of “surplus people” is important to contextualise the misery of Black life in South Africa that philanthropies and family offices wish to support them in overcoming, through their investments into social justice, education and entrepreneurialism. These are people whose lives, in the prevailing schema of economic and political power, are reduced to expendability—pushed to the margins and rendered fungible to the stable functioning of the prevailing economic order through the continued enclosure of the commons, while capital consolidates and the chasm of inequality between the rich few and poor majority grows in unprecedented ways as we are seeing today. I am talking, here, about workers displaced by socio-technical transitions such as large-scale automation, AI and the energy transition, communities displaced by mine closures and climate shocks and households starved by manufactured famines and rising food and energy prices. These surplus people are also migrants criminalised at our borders as well as in the interior, and entire bloodlines obliterated for the conveniences and profitability of relentless occupation, war and genocide.
Foregrounding and strengthening community voices
The counterpoint to this regime of governmentality is well characterised in economist Raghuram Rajan’s book, The Third Pillar, in which he reminds us that society rests on three pillars: the state, the market, and the community. But in today’s world, and as we see from how global economic governance platforms like the G20 run, the state and the market have grown powerful while communities—the very pillar that sustains democracy—have been hollowed out. The state and the market have grown powerful, but without strong communities—the third pillar—democracy collapses into spectacle setting the conditions for increased polarisation, peace and security crises and authoritarianism. We need only look across to the USA, which will take on the G20 presidency at the end of the year and the red tide rising over much of Europe to understand what is coming for us, here, too. In this conjuncture of geopolitical transition that is coming into being with the unspeakable suffering of war, climate catastrophe and socio-economic upheaval, the urgent work progressives must be doing now, more than ever, is to rebuild that third pillar of community through movements rooted in people’s struggles.
We can no longer leave the organisation of the global economic and social justice we have long been languishing solely to global governance platforms and mechanisms like the G20, the UNFCCC COPs, or the Bretton Woods institutions. These institutions have lost their credibility and social legitimacy because they are slow (and sometimes unwilling) to make the choices we need at a time when we have no choice but to accelerate action. Considering that these institutions are built on unjust relations of reciprocity that deepen entrenched injustices, what is to be done?
Building Resilience in a fragile world
I have previously written on why philanthropies now have little choice in integrating climate action in the articulation of their mandates to contribute towards socio-economic justice, and I would like to take this further. If we are serious about building the scaffolding for resilience in a changing and fragile world, our purpose and approach have to look beyond the economy we have in both nature and structure, but empowering civics and the state to negotiate our transition into a new fiscal-social compact that will set the conditions for an economy and society capable of remaining resilient through the shocks brought about by growing geopolitical instability, climate change and our own socio-political transition in locally rooted but globally connected ways.
This renewal of the fiscal-social compact will require revisiting unsettled issues like our prevailing regimes of wealth accumulation and distribution, our macroeconomic policy fundamentals and, significantly, whose interests that they actually serve. It will also mean re-examining our overdependence on the dying fossil fuel economy that is also killing us, as well as our role in remaking multilateral processes and their institutions to play a genuine role in enabling us to build economies and societies held up by solidarity, equality and sustainability. For philanthropies and family offices, putting your energies and resources into trying to influence the G20 process through its engagement groups might be one way of contributing to this urgent and necessary effort, but there could be more impact to be had from supporting and strengthening the efforts of people-driven processes like the We, the 99% People’s Summit to build the political power required to mandate state actors to double down in advancing our demands for global economic justice.