IMF and Progressives

[Patrick Bond]

Hi Nathan, your problem is this:
> From:          "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu>
> you turn around and define those opposing the IMF as the only
> progressives that exist, in fact labelling every supporter (however
> reluctant) of IMF dealings as a "sell-out" or straight up "enemy."  This
> list includes Nelson Mandela, Kim Dae Jung, the AFL-CIO, half the
> Progressive Caucus, and the majority of trade unions in South Korea.  (Of
> course, Patrick wants to claim COSATU in his camp, even though they - with
> dramatic rhetoric condemning the IMF - have continued to support the SA
> government in accepting those loans.)

No and yes. No, COSATU doesn't support government accepting loans 
from the IMF or the World Bank, far from it. If you have other 
information, please supply it.

But yes, "support for the SA government" is the way a good 
majority of lefties play politics here. I'm in the same camp as the 
mainstream of COSATU, which is sometimes called "critical support," 
namely, promoting those aspects of government policy (particularly in 
the public health field) where ANC leaders do seek confrontations 
with corporate power, and also support of the ANC against all the 
various right-wing opposition parties, all the while hoping that the 
ANC Left will contest a variety of issues and occasionally win 
against the ANC Right. Mandela's unequivocally in the latter camp. If 
you want more evidence I'll send it along.

Support for the IMF is a pretty good place to draw lines in the sand. 
It's about class consciousness and internationalism, and against a 
myopic notion that maintaining global financial binds ("balance of 
payments support") is vital to civilisation against all evidence to 
the contrary.

And sure, there are ways to develop anti-IMF politics even when 
you're forced by circumstances to sign off on their loans. When I 
worked for a while for Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1995, he managed 
to do this with quite impressive nuance, largely by building up a 
Left flank in Haitian civil society and nurturing their critiques of 
his government's capitulation to neoliberalism. That made it easier 
for him to say no, when there were opportunities, to the visiting 
US AID-WB-IFC-IMF teams. With riots in the streets, he was even 
able to boot out his bourgeois prime minister in October 1995.

What Kim Dae Jung (I'm guessing) and Mandela (I know) do is not 
anything close; they try to shut down their Left opposition. Perhaps 
I should upload Mandela's July speech to the SACP or some articles 
about it, then you'd leave this alone.

In sum, yes, sectarianism is a perennial problem associated with 
fights within the Left. But Nathan, I'm sorry, you haven't done the 
work required to prove pro-IMFers and "Progressive Caucus" folk 
are within what we could minimally define as the Left yet, but I'll 
keep an open mind.

Yours,
P.