As I have been wanting to meet Gunder Frank for 20 years, I cannot necessarily complain that the introduction was not as I would have wished. Nevertheless it does get to grips with the issues.
I suppose it is inevitable that people like Doug and Gunder Frank like all of us at times rely on a perception of what is left wing "common sense" without analysing more deeply. But one of the merits of a large open e-mail discussion list is that different ideas can be challenged and a wider truth can be explored beyond what any one individual could achieve.
Power in the IMG is proportional to capital contributions. It has a constitution that favours the largest capitalist countries and perpetuates their control of the global economy. Should they think it in their interests they will issue Special Drawing Rights. Full stop/period!
(Note in the last 6 months Clinton has added his voice to sales of IMF gold reserves, therefore de-monetising gold.)
At the time of the oil price rises in the 70's the western nations devalued the world currencies by printing themselves Special Drawing Rights.
Not only is it possible that a Marshall Plan for the Balkans might be written. It is already in the process of formation. Joschka Fischer is working on a 30 year plan to incorporate the Balkans into the multi-ethnic European super state. That will need massive amounts of capital. It will be found. Perhaps this thread title will change to the Fischer Plan for the Balkans.
It is happening now, independently of the will of any individual. Clinton was scientific in a televised briefing sometime before the start of the war, that the USA needs to be involved in Europe because it has an interest in the development of the open market far beyond the limits of any nation state trying to reverse a medieval land battle of 1389.
Capital is now flowing massively into Albania. It might in the eyes of some list members be immoral capital, but capital knows no morality. The Albanian economy will never never be the same. Last chance for a cheap unspoiled ethnic holiday on the Adriatic coast gone forever.
Special Drawing Rights will not be printed by the IMF for places like Africa or South America because it is not particularly in the interests of the great capitalist powers. Indeed it is argable that the main effect of the massive IMF support to Brazil was to allow western creditors to withdraw billions of dollars from that country to avoid paying the price for the economic system which benefits them.
The reason why I have wanted to meet Gunder Frank for 20 years is because I know his name as one of those who contributed to the debate on global unequal exchange. To the best of my understanding this was never resolved, I suspect because whatever specific reasons for it, the fundamental reason is inherent in the commodity relationship on a world scale and the uneven accumulation of capital globally.
I actually think that Special Drawing Rights should be printed for the Africa, but that suggestion was also met by a received left wing common sense and worldy wisdom as quite impractical. I would indeed like to excell at challenging left wing common sense, which just settles down to occupying a cultural niche in the capitalist system.
I do not object to raising impractical demands as well as practical demands, if the impractical demands illustrate a fundamental stance without which the control by capital of the world, cannot be ended.
We (progressive people) need a global system that reverses the uneven accumulation of capital and pumps capital back to the peripheral regions. (Just as modern superstates have to do). The demand is therefore a demand that for the sake of humanity as a whole, and of the management of the world as a whole, the movements of international finance capital must be brought under global democratic control. Whether that takes 5 years or 50 years, it is true. It is progressive. It is correct.
Finance capital must be urgently controlled. Ownership of land by capital must be abolished. Industrial production by capital must be socially controlled.
The total social value created by the working people of the world must be controlled not by dead labour but by living labour.
There is a world to win.
Silly to imagine it is possible isn't it?
Especially if it requires decent left wingers to get involved in thinking about reforms.
Chris Burford
London