We, the 99%
The People’s Manifesto for Global Economic Justice
Version 3 / 25 September 2025
Who We Are
We, the 99% are the people of the Global Majority.
We are rural farmers and informal workers. We are township youth and precarious migrants. We are workers, land defenders, caregivers, artists, and activists. We are housekeepers, teachers, fisherfolk, miners, market traders, and nurses. We are displaced people, indebted communities, and overworked mothers. We are queer, trans, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and from every corner of the earth, still reeling from centuries of theft.
We are the people of the Global South—Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, and Oceania. We are also the gendered, racialised, and working classes of the Global North. We are feminists, socialists, ecologists, abolitionists, and ordinary people struggling to survive and live with dignity.
We come from places burdened by debt, exploitation, war, occupation, and climate collapse—but we are rich in knowledge, culture, resistance, and care. We rise from our lands, communities, and histories to reclaim power and reshape the global order.
We are not a brand. We are not a campaign. We are a movement.
We are the 99%, and we are rising.
Our Analysis of the World: The Global Economic Order Is Violence
We live in a world structured by inequality—a world built on the foundations of conquest, slavery, colonialism, and dispossession. This legacy has not ended—it has simply evolved. Today, its machinery operates through trade regimes, global finance, corporate impunity, and military control.
The 1%—a small global elite in the minority world—has consolidated power through centuries of colonial plunder, financial extraction, and neoliberal deregulation. The economies of the Global South have been forcibly shaped into extractive service stations for the North—feeding land, minerals, food, and cheap labour into an insatiable machine of profit and power.
Systemic debt crises and illicit financial flows are not accidental—they are the modern weapons of empire. These mechanisms rob our nations of development, strip our people of opportunity, and lock us into cycles of dependency and austerity.
The violence is economic, but also deeply social. Capitalism organises society as a battlefield—where some are made disposable, and others profit from their pain. This violence is racialised and ethnicised, criminalising migrants, queers and poor people, marginalising the disabled, and dispossessing the Black and Indigenous peoples of the world. It is also profoundly gendered: unpaid care work sustains households, communities, and economies, but it is rendered invisible and undervalued—exploiting women and girls in every part of the world.
Under capitalism, our bodies, our time, and our dreams are extracted. We say: no more!
The World We Are Building
We envision a world rooted in anti-racism, care, dignity, and justice.
A world where geopolitical power is shared, not hoarded. Where no nation or people is crushed by debt, military occupation and control, or dictated to by institutions that serve profit over people. A world where all economies are organised to meet human and planetary needs—not the demands of global markets.
We believe in people-centred democracies, where governments are accountable not to corporations, but to communities. Where public goods—healthcare, housing, education, water, energy—are guaranteed, not commodified.
We are building a future that rejects ethno-nationalism and gendered violence, and in its place, celebrates solidarity, plurality, and peace.
We are bringing ecologically sustainable economies into being, not ones that burn the earth and bomb people for short-term gain. We seek a world where the dignity of all peoples and the vitality of our planet are upheld—for current and future generations, and for all non-human life we share this Earth with.
In a world where the 1% controls the narrative to maintain power, we, the 99%, reclaim culture as resistance, as memory, as imagination. We are the storytellers, artists, educators, and makers who shape what feels possible. Culture is Power. Culture is how we fight. Culture is how we survive. Culture is how we thrive.
What Justice Demands
We, the 99%, demand nothing less than the transformation of the global system:
- Tax the 1%: Impose meaningful taxes on the super-rich, financial speculators, and multinational corporations so they pay their fair share and stop extracting from our communities.
- End illicit financial flows: Clamp down on tax havens, shell companies, and capital flight that strip billions from public coffers every year.
- Transform the debt system: Cancel illegitimate and odious debts. Restructure global finance to enable low- and middle-income countries to invest in their people, drive sovereign development, and build economies of care.
- Enforce corporate accountability: Hold transnational corporations legally accountable for environmental destruction, labour abuses, and human rights violations.
- Remake multilateralism: Build truly democratic and representative multilateral institutions that ensure fair cooperation and respect sovereign development.
- Invest in climate justice: Ensure wealthy nations and corporations pay their climate debt to enable the just transition and adaptation of the countries and peoples worst affected by climate change to be more resilient against ecological, economic, and social collapse.
- Recognise and redistribute care: Build systems that value and resource care work. Prioritise public investment in health, education, child and elder care, as well as in the social safety-net.
- Secure us against hunger: Drive public investment into supporting local food systems, fair markets, and food sovereignty so that no one, anywhere, is left to starve in a world of plenty.
Call to Action: Rise with Us
1. We, the 99%, are rising not just to challenge the status quo, but to create a world that reflects our values of justice, dignity, and care for all. The future is ours to reclaim, and it demands that we do so with courage and conviction!
2. From Soweto to São Paulo, Manila to Mombasa, Cairo to Kingston, we are organising, marching, teaching, dreaming, resisting.
3. We are reclaiming our economies, our politics, our lands, and our futures. We are building solidarity across borders, across identities, and across generations.
4. Join us in forging a new world order—an order that champions the rights of every individual and all peoples; an order that fosters community and cooperation; an order that affirms the inherent worth of all people.
5. In your communities, in your workplaces, in the streets, in the fields, in the halls of power—we are calling on you to rise with us.
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