Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Former colonial powers won’t pay reparations voluntarily—nor could they fully admit what they did without opening a legal floodgate. So perhaps its time to stop asking, and realize that they’ll only arrive as an outcome of organized Global South power. For example, a small levy on extractive flows, pooled and used to build capacities that end endless extractive relationships.

Lede: why this matters now

The reparations conversation keeps getting trapped in the same dead end: will Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the U.S., etc.—and the corporations that grew rich from colonialism—ever take full responsibility? Maybe they’ll offer statements. Maybe they’ll fund memorials. But meaningful reparations—real acknowledgement, real money, real repair—runs straight into a problem (beyond the typical racism) they will never openly concede: liability.

If a former colonizing state fully admits that the colonial encounter and slavery were foundational crimes that created enduring wealth for them and enduring underdevelopment for others, it doesn’t just become “history.” It becomes a legal and political cascade. A waterfall of claims. Claims steeped in centuries of racist policies, eugenics, and every other practice used to suppress the black population. That’s why this will never be resolved by waiting for the perpetrators to “do the right thing.”

So the question isn’t: Will they pay?
The question is: How do reparations-seeking countries get what’s owed when the perpetrators refuse?

They take them—not through chaos, but through sovereignty, coordination, and steadfast solidarity. This is the logic of parallel structures: you don’t wait for permission to live the truth. You build infrastructure and enable practices that make your truth materially real.

(If you’re coming to this through recent reporting, here’s a recent Guardian article, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s seminal U.S. framing in “The Case for Reparations”.)

They won’t admit it—so stop waiting

We can say it plainly: the Global North ascended through colonial extraction and slavery. Lives, labor, land, sugar, cotton, rubber, gold, bauxite, uranium, oil—taken, underpriced, coerced, violently secured, then laundered into “development,” “modernity,” and “the rule of law.”

And the same basic pattern is still here, dressed up in contemporary language: “investment,” “stability,” “aid,” “trade,” “structural adjustment,” “risk management,” “good governance.” The names change; the flow often doesn’t, nevermind the exploitative power dynamics.

So the reparations conversation can’t be built on moral hope. It has to be built on material leverage.

The Global South has leverage—if it comes together

Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and other ex-colonies hold an extraordinary share of what the global economy depends on: mineral reserves, strategic inputs, agricultural commodities, biodiversity, key sea routes, and (in the Caribbean especially) tourism flows tied directly to North Atlantic wealth.

The problem isn’t lack of leverage. The problem is fragmentation. Countries get played against each other. Deals get signed in isolation. Elites get rewarded for compliance. And the coalition never forms.

But if a core group of reparations-seeking countries did form—especially those with strategic leverage—then even small policy shifts could become world-shaping.

The most practical starting point is not a dramatic embargo. It’s a small, consistent, legitimate levy that is hard to resist, works, and shows other countries what is possible.

A simple proposal: a 1% Reparatory Justice Levy

Here’s the core idea:

A coalition of reparations-seeking countries—starting with a serious core bloc—implements a 1% levy on designated extractive exports to former colonizer states (and/or to corporations headquartered there). Not everything. Not forever. Start with the obvious: raw materials and extractive industries where colonial patterns are still visible in the ground (think the alliance of Sahel states and uranium to France).

And for the Caribbean, the logic expands naturally: the colonial encounter wasn’t just mines; it was plantations, forced labor, and the extraction of wealth through sugar and rum. Today, beyond sugara dn rum, the closest equivalent “flow” is tourism—especially flights and resort economies tied to North Atlantic income. So the coalition can include micro-levies like a small solidarity fee on flights arriving from Europe and North America, or on high-end tourism transactions. (This isn’t theoretical—there are real precedents for an airline solidarity levy model that funds pooled public goods.)

This is not “asking.” It’s not “begging.” It’s not “guilt.” It’s an assertive policy regime:

• You want access to our resources?
• You pay a small reparatory charge.
• The money goes into a collective fund.
• The fund builds the capacity to stop being exploited.

A 1% levy is not radical. What’s radical is pretending the current arrangement is neutral.

The fund must not become permanent dependency

Even though reparations should be about justice and accountability - with not strings attached - when have you ever met an 'ethical' slavery or colonizer? One that will just give it all back? Thus, the most important part is that the levy cannot just become another social spending stream—important as healthcare and education are. If the levy only patches wounds while the extraction machine keeps running, you institutionalize the very relationship you claim to oppose.

So the fund’s mission has to be regenerative and time-oriented:

The levy exists to build the capacity that makes the levy unnecessary.

That means investing in the exits:

• refining and processing capacity (stop exporting raw cobalt; export refined products)
• regional manufacturing and value chains
• energy sovereignty (grids, renewables, storage)
• ports, shipping, and logistics infrastructure controlled locally
• universities, R&D, and training ecosystems
• ecological remediation in extraction zones
• public institutions that can plan beyond short-term crisis
• sustainable and autonomous food systems
• etc.

This is repair that ends the need for repair.

“But Congo would pay more than Jamaica”—yes, and that’s why the fund needs solidarity rules

A real coalition has to handle internal inequality honestly.

Some countries sit on minerals the world can’t easily substitute. Others were devastated by colonialism in different ways—plantation economies, forced monocrops, debt traps, tourism dependence, climate vulnerability. Jamaica can’t “compete” with the Congo on cobalt. That doesn’t make Jamaica less harmed, less entitled, or less structurally trapped.

So the coalition fund cannot be “you get what you contribute.” That kills unity immediately.

A workable structure is a two-pot system:

Pot A: Solidarity & Repair (formula-based)

• a baseline floor for every member (small states matter)
• weighted by need/vulnerability and historical harm
• designed so plantation/enslavement economies (high value during old colonialism) aren’t punished for not having rare earths (of more value today)

Pot B: Capacity-Building Exits (project-based)

• cooperative funding for refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, regional universities
• preference for multi-country projects that build shared independence
• long-term commitments, not PR grants

This way the extraction of the materials in the Congo isn't just taxed; it gets funded to transform. And Jamaica isn’t sidelined; it gets recognized as central to the colonial story and central to repair.

Governance: if it looks like elite rent, it dies

A reparatory levy fund has one existential risk: it becomes another pot of money for elites and intermediaries. Then it loses moral legitimacy inside the coalition and becomes an easy target for Northern propaganda.

So governance has to be designed as if legitimacy is the whole project—because it is:

• equal regional representation, rotating seats, small-state protection
• public dashboards of inflows/outflows (every euro tracked)
• independent audits
• hard conflict-of-interest rules
• citizen-facing reporting: “this levy built this refinery / this clinic / this training program”
• a legal defense pool (because retaliation and arbitration will come)

This isn’t “good governance” as the typical neoliberal slogan. It’s coalition survival, and to survive the aggrieved countries have to maintain the moral high ground. And it will work because they are right, and people will know it is right. To atone for past expropriations carrying deep repercussions today.  

So what / what now: reparations as collective power, not moral request

Reparations won’t come from conscience. They’ll come from leverage.

Former colonial powers won’t give you the confession you want, because it’s too expensive - both politically (racist constituents) and economically (liability). So stop structuring your politics around their refusal. Build a parallel mechanism that turns Global South material power into a pooled reparatory capacity fund, with a small levy that is easy to explain and hard to dismiss.

Start with a core bloc. Start with 1%. Start with extractive raw material exports and North Atlantic tourism flows. Start with transparency. And use the money to build exits: refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, universities, sustainable food systems—real capacities that end the colonial logic rather than managing it.

The message isn’t “please acknowledge us.”
The message is: We acknowledge ourselves. We organize. We set the terms. We aren't your lap dogs anymore. 

And if the Global North wants to live in the world it claims to believe in—rules, law, ethics, responsibility—it can start by respecting a modest reparatory levy designed to repair the damage that built its wealth in the first place.

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe loves a story about “catching up.”

Southern Italy must catch up to the North.
East Germany must catch up to the West.
Post-socialist Central Europe must catch up to the “advanced” core of Europe.

This story is presented as neutral description, as if history simply flowed downhill toward modernity and some places got stuck in the mud. But the “catching up” story is not neutral. It is a technology of power: it explains away structural inequity as cultural deficiency, and it justifies a long chain of decisions that relocate sovereignty—over land, over firms, over futures—somewhere else.

If you’ve lived inside these divides, the insult is not only economic. It’s existential. You learn that your region’s ways of living are “not serious,” your social habits are “backward,” your tempo is “lazy,” your reluctance to play the careerist game is “a problem,” and your memories are “false.” The center doesn’t simply take resources; it takes interpretive authority—the right to define what counts as progress.

But here’s the twist that the “catching up” story cannot grasp:

What if these regions aren’t merely lagging?
What if they are holding capacities that the center has actively eroded—capacities for human life that cannot be replaced by GDP?

That’s not a romantic slogan. It’s an empirical claim about what marginal places preserve, practice, and reproduce—often precisely because they were never fully absorbed into the center’s tempo, ideology, and social design.

The politics of “backwardness” is a politics of dispossession

In all three cases—Southern Italy, East Germany, and post-socialist Central Europe—the familiar material pattern is not just “inequality.” It’s something more specific:

• Decisions move outward.
• Ownership moves outward.
• The region becomes a labor reservoir and a managed territory.
• And then a stigma narrative (“backward”) arrives to make this feel natural.

That stigma does real work. It trains people to doubt their own ways of living. It turns structural limits into personal shame. It makes people internalize that they deserve less.

But stigma has another function: it prevents revalorization. If you can convince a place that its strengths are defects, you can strip it of confidence, autonomy, and imagination—then sell it “development” that looks suspiciously like dependence.

So let’s do the opposite for once. Let’s name what these places hold, and why it matters.

Southern Italy: temporal sovereignty and relational wealth

Southern Italy has been framed for generations through deficit talk: laziness, corruption, clientelism, inefficiency—an entire moral vocabulary used to explain economic hierarchy as cultural failure.

Yet anyone who spends real time in the South sees something else: a different theory of life.

Not as an ideology, but as practice:

• Life is organized around relationships, not merely schedules.
• Value is produced through mutual presence, not only through productivity.
• Social time is not a leftover; it’s an infrastructure.
• The household and the neighborhood remain meaningful economic units: food cycles, care cycles, repair cycles.

The South is often described as “slow.” But slowness can also be read as temporal sovereignty: the ability to refuse a world where the clock is the ultimate authority and the self must always perform.

This is not a fantasy; it is a measurable lived difference. The center often has more money, more options, more institutional thickness. But it also produces chronic stress, thin sociality, and a permanent sense of being behind in one’s own life.

Southern Italy shows that another arrangement is possible: where “success” is not only individual mobility upward and outward, but the capacity to remain rooted, embedded, and human.

The center calls this backward because it cannot price it.

Czechia: everyday ecological citizenship (not the performative kind)

Czechia is frequently described as “post-socialist,” as if its defining feature is what it lacks compared to the West. But Czechia also holds a deep cultural competency that many western societies have partly lost: nature as everyday life, not as a weekend brand.

This isn’t just about hiking. It’s about a dense ecology of practices:

• tramping cultures that produce community through shared movement and simple living;
• mushroom hunting and foraging literacies that make the forest legible;
• lesní školka / forest kindergarten logics that treat weather as normal and children as belonging outdoors;
• informal and semi-formal communities of practice that transmit land-knowledge across generations.

None of this needs to be framed as nationalist pride. It’s more interesting than that. It’s a social design: a culture where ecological competence is not reserved for specialists, where “nature” is not consumed as an exotic escape from urban life, but integrated into the baseline of what a life is.

In the West, “sustainability” often becomes a moral performance—an identity, a purchasing strategy, a policy slogan. In Czechia, there’s often something quieter and more durable: habit. Culture doing the work that campaigns cannot.

That’s a serious asset. It’s a living curriculum for a future that will require land-literacy and non-commodified resilience.

East Germany: longing for socialism is not ignorance—it’s comparative memory

Here we have to be honest: people in the former GDR do romanticize aspects of state socialism. Not because they forgot repression or shortage or surveillance, but because systems are not one-dimensional.

And because what followed “unification” was not simply freedom. It was also:

• rapid asset restructuring,
• humiliating cultural pedagogy (“learn how to be modern”),
• externalized ownership,
• and a durable hierarchy of legitimacy.

When East Germans express longing, they often aren’t longing for authoritarianism. They’re longing for social guarantees, collective infrastructures, and forms of solidarity that made life intelligible and secure, even if the political form was deeply compromised.

There is also a deeper point that western moral language tries to avoid: modern liberal-capitalist states maintain strong security and policing apparatuses too—often using techniques that are remarkably continuous across regime change. The West’s story that authoritarianism is uniquely “over there” is convenient; it hides the coercions that make market society run.

So when someone says, “life felt more secure,” or “people were less alone,” or “the West is cold,” they are not necessarily confessing authoritarian desire. They may be making a precise comparative claim:

• that market society produces isolation as a baseline;
• that the West’s friendliness is often performative and transactional;
• that the constant competition for status corrodes community.

East Germany retains—sometimes stubbornly—residual collectivities: habits of association, directness, pragmatic mutuality, and an intuition that the social world can be organized differently than the market’s default settings.

Even if these habits are mixed, contested, and uneven, they exist. And they matter.

What these “margins” actually share

Southern Italy, Czechia, and East Germany are not the same. Their histories differ; their political trajectories differ; their injustices differ.

But they share a structural position: they have been treated as spaces to be managed by external standards, and they have been pressured to exchange their own capacities for acceptance.

And yet they persist as repositories of counter-capacities that the center struggles to reproduce:

1. Relational density
   Social ties as infrastructure, not decoration.
2. Temporal sovereignty
   The refusal of speed as the measure of worth.
3. Land-literacy
   Everyday ecological competence, intergenerationally transmitted.
4. Collective memory of alternative organization
   Not nostalgia as weakness, but memory as evidence that social systems can be different.
5. Low-capital abundance
   The ability to produce meaning and stability without constantly converting life into money.

The center calls these things “backward” because it cannot govern them easily. They reduce dependence on market-mediated solutions. They make people harder to discipline through scarcity narratives. They generate quiet autonomy.

Revalorization: not tourism, not nostalgia—political re-seeing

Revalorizing marginal capacities does not mean turning them into lifestyle content. It does not mean romanticizing poverty. It does not mean claiming these regions are utopias.

It means something more rigorous:

• seeing retained capacities as assets rather than defects;
• building languages that defend them against stigma;
• and treating them as design resources for futures that will demand more than growth.

It also means refusing the center’s epistemic authority. The “modern” world has produced astonishing wealth and also an astonishing thinning of life. The metrics of the center are not neutral. They are the outcome of power.

So the question is not “How can the margins become more like the center?”
The more radical question is: What can the center learn from what it tried to erase?

Because in a century of ecological constraint, social fragmentation, and political exhaustion, the so-called margins may not be behind.

They may be holding what comes next.