Green Debt Bondage: How Indonesia’s Electric Transition Deepens Platform Driver Exploitation

Arif NoviantoLeave a comment

Somewhere in the state of Maharashtra, a cotton farmer took his own life after years of compounding debt and crop failure. Across India, this tragedy is not rare. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 11,290 farmer and farm-labourer suicides in 2022—roughly one death every hour—with debt consistently identified as a leading cause (Down to Earth, 2023). In Sulawesi, Indonesia, villages are being cleared to make way for nickel smelters that supply the batteries of the global electric-vehicle boom. Workers at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park earn higher wages than they would in farming, but face fatal furnace explosions and respiratory damage as recurring occupational risks (Campbell & Lee, 2024; Global Witness, 2025). And on the streets of Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya, a new population of electric motorcycle drivers pedal their way through twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days (Novianto, 2025a), servicing loans they never chose and rental fees that can never be fully paid.

These are not three unrelated stories. They are distinct moments in a single global process: the uneven, extractive, and deeply political reorganisation of labour under the banner of the green transition. In this article, I want to argue, drawing on my fieldwork with electric-vehicle (EV) platform drivers in Indonesia, that this reorganisation has produced what I call a regime of green debt bondage—a configuration in which ecological transition, platform governance, and financialised credit converge to bind workers to perpetual labour without delivering the promised climate dividend.

Debt bondage is most often associated with pre-capitalist or early-capitalist forms of coercion: the indentured plantation worker, the brick-kiln labourer, the trafficked domestic servant (Breman, 2007; Brass, 2011; LeBaron, 2014). Its reappearance inside the shiny, algorithmic, climate-friendly infrastructure of platform capitalism should unsettle us. It signals not a rupture from coercive labour regimes, but their transformation into more diffuse and systemically embedded forms. What I call green debt bondage refers to a condition in which workers are not only tied through credit, rental schemes, and platform deductions, but are also structurally compelled to remain within precarious work due to the absence of viable, decent employment alternatives.

In this regime, indebtedness does not operate in isolation; it interacts with broader labour market constraints that limit workers’ capacity to exit. Debt becomes a mechanism that deepens this entrapment—pushing drivers to work longer hours, accept worsening conditions, and absorb greater risks simply to service obligations they cannot easily escape. As such, the “greening” of transport in Southeast Asia does not merely reorganise infrastructure, but reconfigures coercion itself: embedding exploitation within both financial relations and structural labour precarity under the banner of ecological transition.

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Militarised AI, Private Credit, and Iran War

Farwa SialLeave a comment

By Farwa Sial and C.P. Chandrasekhar 

Private credit markets are showing real signs of stress, with multiple major funds restricting withdrawals as investors struggle to exit illiquid holdings. The fears of investors in these funds, which explain the withdrawals, is driven by the success of AI, which, while driven by enormous capital spending financed in part by private credit, is perceived as disrupting the pre-existing software landscape, many of the creators of which had been financed with credit from these funds. These two dynamics are increasingly tied to military demand, with the US government encouraging private capital to build defence-linked AI infrastructure. The war on Iran is amplifying these trends by squeezing energy costs, tightening liquidity, and accelerating a shift wherein AI investment becomes less market-driven and more concentrated around state-backed priorities.

Around the 22 March 2026, two of the largest players in private credit, Apollo Global Management and Ares Management, dropped redemption gates on flagship retail credit vehicles, temporarily limiting and/or restricting investors from withdrawing their money. While investors had requested withdrawals of 11.2% and 11.6% respectively, both funds capped redemptions at 5%, leaving roughly half of requested capital locked in place.

The gating at Apollo and Ares is just one visible manifestation of broader strains across the roughly $1.8 trillion private credit market. On April 2, it was reported that Blue Owl capital had received redemption requests of upto $5.4 billion over the first quarter of 2026, with those requests amounting to 22% of its private credit fund and a much higher 41% of another of its funds target at software and technology firms. In response, Blue Owl announced a cap on redemptions of 5% of shareholder funds. Earlier BlackRock restricted withdrawals on its HPS Lending Fund, which stands at approximately $26 billion. Blackstone faced roughly $3.8 billion in redemption requests from its flagship private credit fund and stepped in with its own capital to help meet those withdrawals. Morgan Stanley saw around 11% repurchase requests in its North Haven Private Income Fund and Cliffwater honoured only about 7% of roughly 14% redemption requests.  

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The ‘Academic Apex’ and the Colonisation of Development: Unmasking the RCT Scam

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For the better part of two decades, development economics has been held captive by a ‘clinical’ revolution. What began as a niche statistical tool has, through a masterclass in institutional branding, been elevated to the undisputed ‘Gold Standard’ of economic science. We are told a heartwarming tale of ‘Nobel laureates caring about poverty’, a narrative where the ‘bottom billion’ are finally being saved by the rigorous, scientific tinkering of MIT and Harvard.

But as I argue in the newly released second edition of Nobel Laureates Caring About Poverty: Banerjee, Duflo, MIT, and Randomized Controlled Trials(2026), if we strip away the public relations sheen, a far more cynical reality emerges. This is not a story of scientific discovery but an ‘Inside Job’ executed with clinical precision. It is a rebranding exercise designed to cement institutional power and create a circular monopoly over global funding and academic prestige.

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An anti-imperialist just transition: From fossil fuel treaty to the shaky nuclear non-proliferation treaty

Farwa Sial2 Comments
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif (third from left) at the Board of Peace’s charter announcement and signing ceremony during the World Economic Forum in January 2026 in Switzerland. Photo: Daniel Torok / White House

The recent withdrawal of the US from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other international organizations in January 2026, was preceded by the decision in COP30 Belém to have rights-based and people-centred approach to the Just Transition Mechanism in October 2025.

The US exit from the UNFCCC, the primary global treaty on climate will take full effect in a year’s time. The new attempt to define and revive a Just Transition mechanism, without US interference is considered hopeful, especially since it is linked to the Belém Action Mechanism” (BAM), an initiative which attempts to foster international cooperation, technical assistance, and capacity-building to ensure an orderly shift away from fossil fuels, and has been strongly supported by civil society and activists.

However, the new Just Transition Mechanism faces a fundamental problem: the historical conditions that made both its conception and implementation conceivable have now become obsolete. The UNFCCC bureaucracy has long operated on the pretence that imperialism does not exist, but it is now confronted with a reality in which neoliberalism has collapsed and US-led imperialism has re-emerged in an overtly militarised and increasingly fascistic form.

Neoliberalism no longer merely shortens life expectancy; it is now accelerating death rates globally through active war and warfare (see Kadri 2023). This shift is also reshaping the modalities of imperialism itself. US-led trade de-globalisation (through tariffs and EU protectionism) now coincides with a deepening of financial imperialism, marked by escalating sovereign debt crises, financial engineering, and the rapid expansion of private credit. As C.P Chandrasekhar notes, one of the likely scenario of this is that the world economy on the whole will not even have an escape route to ameliorate economic hardship and move towards a viable recovery.

In this context, the central question becomes what kind of “Just Transition” is even possible. More fundamentally, what would a genuinely people-centred Just Transition mean under these conditions?

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ASEAN Summit 2025: Imperialism, Monetary Subservience, and Racial/Class Divisions

Farwa Sial1 Comment

By Farwa Sial and Fadiah Nadwa Fikri

The 47th Summit of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), held in Malaysia in October 2025, was a pivotal moment in the ongoing attempts by the United States to redefine the socioeconomic trajectory of Southeast Asia. While much analysis of the Summit has focused on the impact of US tariffs, there has been less attention to how these deals constrict the region’s monetary autonomy. Here we focus on the stipulations in the deals that will impose monetary subservience in Malaysia and Thailand, under the framework of ASEAN. The signing of these agreements is not a purely exogenously drive, but rather aligns with ASEAN’s historical anticommunist foundations. By deepening the region’s subordination to the United States while simultaneously expanding trade relations with China, the deals also hold implications for reconfiguring racial and class dynamics in the region.

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USAID is being dismantled, what comes next? An Interview with Liz Grossman Kitoyi

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‘Most young Africans I meet are not mourning the loss of aid, but they’re questioning why it took so long to reckon with its fragility’

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr Amber Murrey, a scholar of anti-imperial geographies and co-author of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies, speaks with Elizabeth (Liz) Grossman Kitoyi, founder of Baobab Consulting and a development practitioner with two decades of experience in Senegal, Malawi, New York, Washington DC, and elsewhere.

In this conversation, they explore the historical dismantling of USAID as a political and narrative project with profound implications for how Africa is positioned within US policy. This political project ultimately led to the dissolution of Liz’s own work with USAID. Drawing on Murrey’s longstanding critiques of the epistemic hierarchies embedded in the development industry, the discussion surfaces the structural dependencies hardwired into donor-driven systems and the contractor ecosystems that delimit the very meaning of ‘reform’. Yet, as Grossman Kitoyi reflects, there are also central spaces of African agency where young people, educators, and innovators are envisioning futures no longer tethered to aid’s fragile architectures. What unfolds is a shared call for narrative sovereignty, radical humility, and forms of development rooted in solidarity.

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Trump is attracting investment to the US – but at a huge cost to workers and the environment

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Early in his second presidency, Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs was met with widespread scepticism. Critics warned of economic decline and a global backlash. Yet the current landscape for the United States paints a more complex picture.

Less than a year into his second term in office, the White House claims that Trump is bringing manufacturing back to the US. It also proclaims that Trump has secured trillions of dollars of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2025 alone. Other voices, however, estimate that these commitments will amount to just a fraction of that.

So what’s the true picture? Much of this FDI is going into the US’s burgeoning semiconductor sector. This inward investment is indeed a stark reversal from the post-1991 trend of outbound American capital, when US firms raced to set up factories in countries where it was cheaper to manufacture.

And the surge is bolstered by commitments of US$300 billion (£225 billion) in capital investment commitments from tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta. These investments reflect both Trump’s aggressive diplomacy and his close relationship with Silicon Valley’s tech elite.

Despite concerns about a tech bubble, these investments signal a deepening state-private partnership, and a reorientation of priorities with a view to coming out on top in the global AI race.

Central to this strategy is the reshaping of global supply chains. At a conference of venture capitalists in March, US vice-president J.D. Vance criticised US firms for their reliance on cheap overseas labour. He warned of the risks of losing the US’s technological advantage, especially to China.

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Geopolitics isn’t killing global supply chains—it’s powering them

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Global supply chains (GSCs) – which account for around 70 percent of international trade – are often referred to as the backbone of the world economy. As tensions rise between major powers—especially the United States and China – many commentators fear for the future of GSC’s and hence the world economy. Such projections overlook how geopolitical rivalries have stimulated the development of advanced technologies, which in turn enabled the rise and ongoing transformation of global supply chains.

A close look at the US-led development of technology during the Cold War shows that it enabled the formation and expansion of many contemporary global supply chains. China in turn has made efforts to catch-up to US technological development, and in response, the US has been deploying strategies to curb China’s tech rise amid a new geopolitical rivalry.

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