The GROUP OF SEVEN finance ministers and central-bank bosses met in
Bonn. They agreed to create a "financial stability forum", a pool of
experts who will try to foresee (and even forestall) problems in the
world financial system.
This "FSF" will struggle to study and to predict. It will have to use computers to aid financial modelling, and will create an irrestistible political pressure for computers as large as those used to try to model the complex dynamics of global weather patterns.
A key tactical question is how transparent are its deliberations? Gordon Brown set up the Bank of England committee advising on interest rates to be as public as possible.
The technical obstacles to controlling the world economy are ones that in principle can be described by complexity theory and chaos theory.
There are some hints in the natural sciences that systems that behave chaotically can nevertheless be controlled by computerised modulation of their processes, even in the absence of the computer having an exact replica of the equations that go into the system.
Even if such a dream is impossible, the existence of the FSF now means momentum towards various forms of control and regulation.
It also will raise the question of how much consent and cooperation the advanced capitalist countries expect from the less advanced, if in ten years time, the inequalities are as great as now.
We are moving gradually towards social production controlled by social foresight, in the words of Marx's address to the First International.
Marxists should attend to, and amplify interest in, this new Financial Stability Forum.
Chris Burford
London