Invitation to BUKO 40

Via debt repayments that consume more than health or education budgets; through the repatriation of profits by multinational corporations and their manipulation of internal transfer prices, which ensure profit repatriation and tax avoidance; through a “free trade” system that enforces the law of the strongest, pushing weaker players out of the market. Social and ecological standards become competitive disadvantages, driving the exploitation of labour in "free" markets dominated by capital-rich actors. While their executives and shareholders live in abundance, billions lack food, medicine, or clean water due to starvation wages and land grabbing. Thousands die every day – not in the metropoles, but in former colonies, where global power and ownership structures remain colonial. Only a minority of them have been able to free themselves from the division of labour established under colonialism - and become exploiters themselves under global capitalism, as illustrated by China, India and Saudi Arabia.

This can be seen, for example, in the outsourcing of content moderation of disturbing internet content to the Global South. People are also exploited in the most precarious working conditions for the training of so-called artificial intelligence, where the mental health, labour rights and human dignity of the workers are not taken into account. In addition, vast quantities of minerals are needed, which are only mined in economically dependent former colonies, with no regard for people or nature. In addition, state-of-the-art technology is used to go to war, people are monitored and colonial conditions are violently maintained.

However, if wind power, solar energy and the reforestation of forests in the South only serve to enable the global upper and middle classes to maintain their resource devouring imperial lifestyle, colonial and neocolonial inequalities are once again evident here under the guise of sustainability: not only cheap labour in other countries, but also cheap nature there means that the rich in the global North - and increasingly also in the global South - do not have to change their capitalistic production, extractivism, and consumption patterns. The resulting waste is exported back to the countries of the South, poisoning the habitats there and damaging people's health.

This enables pharmaceutical companies to patent gene structures and traditional healing methods. This appropriation of indigenous knowledge in order to generate profits is known as biopiracy. The patent system also ensures that vital medicines or vaccines remain the preserve of the wealthy because low-income people cannot afford the expensive original medicines. As seen during COVID-19 where African countries experienced difficulties in accessing COVID-19 vaccines (e.g. South Africa and India's proposal for a special exemption scheme). During the coronavirus pandemic, the German government's obstructionism ensured that pharmaceutical companies were able to make profits at the expense of human lives. In the agricultural sector, the patent rules of the WTO lead to increased dependence of farmers on multinational corporations and their often genetically modified seeds, hindering food sovereignty. This is clearly illustrated by seed patent laws that affect farmers in countries such as Uganda, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

The political system of nation states denies the right to mobility, especially to those people who had the misfortune to be born in plundered rather than plundering countries. Supposedly universal human rights are only granted to their own citizens; the others are either deported or temporarily tolerated as cheap labour with a precarious status. The lack of a right of residence serves to intensify exploitation and prevents freedom of expression and the defence of fundamental rights.

The self determination rights of non-European peoples were ignored here and are still not or not fully recognised today. This applies to the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and also to the special case of Israel (more here). In another form, however, this also applies to the Wester Sahara, Tibet and Kurdistan, for example, where colonisation and oppression take place independently of European colonisers.

While the recognition of the Holocaust as a crime against humanity and genocide has rightly long been accepted, the genocide of the Herero and Nama was only recognised as such by the FRG a whopping 117 years later. And then only as "genocide from today's perspective", which does not justify any claims for reparations under international law. However, it is not only the lack of recognition of the crimes of European colonialism, but also the lack of appreciation and racist treatment of the millions of African and Asian soldiers who fought in the Allied forces against fascism in the Second World War that reveals the colonial difference that persists to this day.

In de facto ethnically segregated labour and housing markets; in development policy fundraising that depicts Africa through starving children and straw huts; in the arrogance of some "experts" who want to help people in the South with "development"; in media coverage of Muslim youth; in racial profiling by the police; or in the criminalisation of a (non-Islamist and non-anti-Semitic) Palestinian liberation struggle. These stereotypes were also evident in the Greek financial crisis after 2011: while German banks and investors were the winners of the crisis, the German media spread stories about Greeks whose laziness was blamed for the crisis, just as they had done a hundred years earlier about the indigenous people in the African colonies. It can also be seen in an EU foreign policy chief Borrell, who tells prospective EU diplomats that Europe is an idyllic garden, but the rest of the world is a dangerous jungle.

Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo, military intervention and alleged peacekeeping have always gone hand in hand with the establishment of a free market economy and investor protection - and with the immunity of its own soldiers and civil servants from local jurisdiction. The German armed forces are also officially supposed to secure access to raw materials in the south, and the deployment of its troops in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan or Kosovo by no means primarily serves humanitarian goals, just like France's bases in Africa or the several hundred US military bases worldwide. Even if the conflicts in Syria, Taiwan or Ukraine show that there is also Russian and Chinese imperialism, this in no way means that Western imperialism is history.

While the UN General Assembly is largely toothless (and the majority decision on a new world economic order was simply boycotted in 1974), these Western states make up three of the five veto powers in the UN Security Council. They still have a majority of votes in the IMF and World Bank because voting rights are weighted according to capital shares. Whoever pays a lot has a lot of influence - at national level, this principle has been considered undemocratic (except by hardcore neoliberals) since the early 20th century. At international level, the German Executive Director of the World Bank has roughly as many voting rights as the representatives of all African countries put together. This leads to discrimination against former colonies such as black-majority countries, but also American countries etc., for example through structural adjustment programmes in sub-Saharan Africa or World Bank investments that have displaced communities.

Any kind of colonialism was and is an unjust regime that is incompatible with equal rights for all people. However, neocolonial practices (legal and democratically legitimised) also continue capitalist exploitation after independence and must be named and ended as such. This applies to all actors, not just those from the West.

In countless places, marginalised communities have fought back against enslavement, serfdom and exploitation - through disobedience, by building alternative forms of coexistence, politics and economics or through violent uprisings. In the development of modernity, rulers have often compared these mutinies, strikes and revolts to a many-headed hydra: no sooner has one head been chopped off than two new ones grow. According to legend, the Hydra was fought by Hercules, the Hercules who towers over the city of Kassel on the Wilhelmshöhe as a landmark. Hercules symbolises the ruling classes, who try to crush and divide any resistance. We believe it is time to unite the struggles against colonialism, neocolonialism and capitalism, against racism in all its forms (as well as anti-Semitism and antiziganism in particular ), against patriarchy, against domination and oppression in all its forms, and thus to strengthen the many-headed hydra.

The plundering of resources over five centuries, the enslavement, murder, expulsion and deportation of countless people, especially Africans, the destruction of civilisations, cultures and languages and, ultimately, the basis of life on the planet cannot simply be reversed or "made good". But Europe and its settler colonies have a moral duty to pay reparations for the prosperity created by robbery and enslavement. To those who paid for this prosperity but were never allowed to benefit from it. But above all, it is about "systemic reparations": about transforming the global economy into one that prioritises the basic needs of all and not profit, economic growth or technological progress. In addition, specific forms of reparation can include the restitution of stolen lands and artefacts, the cancellation of debts from the colonial era and the creation of inclusive educational institutions in which the history and cultures of the victims are taught.