Ok let me try again. Even longer this time. Will get to Brad's comments in the next post.
> But I also think you simplify the politics of emerging economies to assume
> that left forces all would prefer having the oxygen of IMF help (however
> foul the air) cut off completely in the hopes that the left could win out
> in the financial chaos that would follow. South Korean unions not only
> signed on to the IMF loans but actively lobbied for the money:
Oooh, this is getting slippery. Louis has come back about South Korean unions... but even he didn't get around to mentioning that the leadership of the Federation of Korean Trade Unions was recalled by a mass meeting in early January precisely for being so wimpy.
> The AFL-CIO and other left forces in the US that have supported IMF
> recapitalization may be responding for some of the bad reasons you note
> (ignorance, self-interest) but there is also a strong element of
> responding to progressive forces in places like South Korea and, yes,
> South Africa who favor the availability of IMF loan bailouts as the lesser
> of evils.
Really Nathan, we're going from slippery to slimy. Who do you mean in SA? I honestly can't think of a single progressive here who has backed the IMF. When Camdessus came for a visit in October 1996, within 36 hours we had 60 of the top social movement leaders sign a statement and join a new Campaign Against Neoliberalism in South Africa, which included not only a boycott call on meeting Camdessus (which all the unions and civic associations heeded) but also a demand that the World Bank shut its SA mission and quit the country. No progressive here has, as far as I know, asked the AFL to support IMF recap; it's truly an absurd hypothesis.
And more generally, do you think the AFL gives a damn about what Third World unions and "progressive forces" say on US policy? You know there's a vicious international debate about attaching those labour/environment riders to trade bills. Though I'd support such riders for tactical reasons, I would also condemn wholeheartedly the AFL bureaucracy, including the new kids on the block, for messing up what could have been excellent int'l solidarity, by simply not taking the Southern movements seriously.
> As you note, there are deep divisions in the South Africa progressive
> movement over accepting IMF funds.
Oh that's what you mean, the ANC Alliance debate. I have reported that the conservative-nationalist faction of the ANC has quickly become a comprador elite. Please man, those guys aren't progressive by any stretch of the imagination.
Given those deep divisions there, you
> should hardly be surprised if there are divisions among people of good
> faith in how to respond to progressive divisions over the IMF in places
> like South Korea, South Africa and Brazil.
Now Brazil is being dragged into this. Details, please. And can you honestly say that "progressive divisions over the IMF" have informed the way the AFL and some of the rightwing environmental groups conceputalised their position on IMF recap? Honestly?
> Is it really the proper role of progressives in the United States to say,
> well, Kim Jae Jung & the Korean unions and Nelson Mandela & COSATU
> leadership
Kim dae Jung is widely considered a sell-out, yes. Louis or Marty Hart-Landsberg if he's on this list, can handle that side of the argument.
Mandela isn't stupid. He's an old-time nationalist who has dropped his left flank in the dustbin (witness his bizarre speech to the SACP conference in July). The COSATU leadership wholeheartedly oppose the IMF and our home-grown IMF policy, and make no bones about it. I firmly believe in taking direction from the people who are affected; the damn thing is that in the 50 Years is Enough! movement, and amongst the inside-beltway development-type groups (with a couple of exceptions like the Alliance for Global Justice), a kind of petty-bourgeois stalinism emerged so that we couldn't, until this year, even get a "Defund" option into polite discourse, even though virtually all the major social movements of the South that have been involved in work around the Bretton Woods Institutions do indeed have a boycott position.
... are stupid and we know better than them what is good for their
> political/economic health, so as United States activists we will cut off
> loans that their democratically-elected governments have requested?
What IS this about "loans that democratically-elected governments have requested?" What could you be on about here? Is there a presumption that Finance Ministries -- anywhere -- have any kind of democratic accountability? That foreign loans do anything much more than help repay inherited and largely illegitimate debt, import luxury goods for a tiny elite and high-tech capital goods that hasten job loss, and feed capital flight by the consistently unpatriotic bourgeoisie? And all at the cost of tighter structural adjustment? Do you not get a sense of how vile that kind of "oxygen" is, and how it is drained away entirely by the elite?
> Of course, the IMF itself then undermines those democratic governments by
> blackmailing them into austerity programs. So that is the argument for US
> progressives fighting to cut off recapitalization, despite the desires of
> many progressive forces in those countries to, however reluctantly, accept
> the lure of IMF bailouts.
"Many progressive forces in those countries"? Who else do you have in mind?
> This is a global democratic dilemma where both the economic and political
> consequences of either choice is not clear, so people of good faith and
> similar values can end up on opposite sides.
Comrade, Nelson Mandela does not share a hell of a lot of similar poli-econ values to you and me, or to his constituents for that matter, I promise you. To the extent there is "embedded autonomy" in his government, he has used power to amplify neoliberal policy, not only in macroeconomic terms but in a wide range of microdevelopment sectors. This is not an ultra-left position. Did you not check out the last correction I sent on this a few days ago? I have a forthcoming book that deals with the rest of the neoliberal drift.
> The best solution, obviously, is to escape this Prisoners Dilemma
> altogether and have institutions of multilateral lending based on values
> of economic equity and sustainability rather than primarily serving the
> interests of financial elites.
No man, the only reasonable solution is to work to SHUT DOWN "institutions of multilateral lending" and make financial processes nearly entirely domestic in character, because with a few trade finance exceptions (such funding is always available in any case) there is no damn need, in "developmental" terms, for the kinds of foreign lending or foreign portfolio investments that we've seen proliferate since the 1960s. Even Keynes recognised this when he said that "above all, finance should be local" in that 1933 Yale Review article we've discussed here before.
(And I emphasize "primarily" since it is the
> secondary results that lead some progressives in all these countries to
> reluctantly support the continuation of the IMF). Just as US progressives
> have pushed for labor and environmental standards to become key parts of
> any new trade agreements, they are pushing for such standards to become
> part of the IMF.
Yeah but again, aside from the Chilean CUT, what South forces have they bothered to consult with, much less bring on board? I used to work with some of these comrades, at IPS in Washington, and on this matter they have fucked up pretty seriously. Inside-the-beltway opportunism during a Reagan-Bush era when they were short on strategy and without any serious mass constituency of their own, is the only explanation.
> As I detailed, the Progressive Caucus and other allies don't have majority
> control of the government. They can bargain with the executive branch to
> push for changes, but we need to expand progresive power within our
> government to really succeed in that endeavor. Now, there is one
> argument (especially by those in the US who disdain really fighting for
> power within the electoral realm, preferring propaganda efforts to
> campaigns that lead to election) for just saying no to the IMF on the
> assumption we will never have the power to change it.
And how would you see a scenario arise where "we" would have that power? Or progressive technocrats who could actually go in and do battle with Fischer?
> The other side of this whole dilemma is strengthening the coordination and
> strategic planning between progressive forces in emerging economies and
> with the US & Europe. Any real reform of the international financial
> system will need a much more coordinated sense of alliances across
> national boundaries.
Yes but again, there's a split in "our" ranks between those who would build a global regulatory apparatus (here I would point nearly exclusively to inside-beltway NGOs) and those who would try to smash such on principle, a split which we witnessed at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings six weeks ago. Doug was there too. I don't see progressives achieving a global consensus on how to clean up the int'l financial system (Doug failed to give us even a roadmap in his book focusing instead on the US policy arena), much less ever having the disruptive power to gain a seat at the table. That's why, regrettably, in those old debates between progressive nationalists and progressive internationalists on the PEN-L lists, I've been more sympathetic to the former. There's a line of argument in the World Systems school (Chase-Dunn, Wagar) that you've got to have a world party if you want world socialism, and that has to come via a world state. Sorry, the balance of forces is so dreadful that we can't even begin to contemplate how to democratise those embryos of the world state, and to the degree we succeed -- with the World Bank on gender, environment, transparency and community participation, for instance -- we simply give them more credibility to do really nasty economic things to us.
> But given the heinous, inhuman results of these day-to-day choices in the
> present system of financial austerity and debtor's prisons, these
> divisions among progressives over strategy are going to be deep and often
> nasty.
They don't have to be. I think I've picked apart your argument about the "progressive" friends of the IMF with as much care and interest as I can muster and I frankly haven't learned anything that would change my utter disgust at the congressional liberal(cum neolib) dems (and the AFL bureaucrats and elitist Washington NGO technocrats) who you in your earlier post lauded. These are not, in short, progressive people. They appear to be the kind of liberals who easily fall into the bourgeois or labour-aristorcrat camps at the crucial moments, and who are therefore "our" enemies. That their greatest damage is to people across the globe who are of a different colour and of far lower incomes than their constituents, and that such injustice is not even conceptualised, much less resisted, by the mass US polity, is something that you simply cannot get away from.
> My biggest worry is that such divisions (a natural result of such shitty
> alternatives created by the capitalist system) will go beyond a vigorous
> internal ideological struggle but instead retard the broad global mass
> grassroots unity we need to fight for a better alternative system.
Grassroots unity, yes. Unity with congressional democrats and AFL hacks and Co-Opted NGOs (yes they are known as Congos), hell no.
But I do appreciate the chance to shout and scream about this. Wish there was a pitcher of beer around so I could fill your glass and smile and hope for a rebuttal...
P.