Market-based conservation has gained a lot of traction over the years, and almost all forms of nature have been commodified. Packaged into sleek financialised terminology such as carbon credits, ecosystem services or species banking, the market has become a supposed panacea for conservation. Yet there is ample evidence that challenges this dominant logic.

Swaziland has been an absolute monarchy for decades, but absolute monarch King Mswati III is being pressed by both the country’s democratic movement, the Commonwealth and the EU to discuss democratic reforms.

South African politicians have promised better housing and the sinister-sounding “slum eradication” for years. Undocumented, unreliable and famously corrupt, these promises have failed to pull slum populations into legal, decent government-provided housing. The landless have no option but to occupy public land.

Any Left-wing party that comes to power in Namibia, Zimbabwe or any peripheral country today would be in the exact same position as Syriza: It would lack the political and economic power to bring about radical changes. The reality of a global system policed by imperialism makes it impossible for poor countries to break with capitalism and to begin to build socialism.