IMF

[Chris Burford]

At 15:45 10/04/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Someone wrote me offlist:
>
>>Couldn't resist on this one.  I take your point vis a vis Brad.  But, given
>>that these institutions are simply US tools, what difference would it make
>>if they did not exist.   Eg. In Asian crisis, US simply wrote the "IMF
>>program".  In Mexico, no different,  In Latin American debt crisis, the
>>same.
>
>But the IMF gives the U.S. the political cover of multilateralism - and it 
>helps keep the EU and Japan on board. Sort of like NATO's role in the 
>Kosovo war.
>
>Doug

These are organs of world government coming into being. Imperfectly of 
course, and stained from the tortuous processes of their birth.

It may be right tactically to oppose them, but that action too is part of 
the process of them being shaped as accountable organs of world government.

Pure opposition as a matter of principle is leftist gesture politics. IMHO 
of course.

The most revolutionary stance is to calculate what reforms are most in the 
interests of the people of the world and which can be accomplished in the 
next three years, in the three years after that, and the three years after 
that.

However passionately leftists may denounce the IMF, its members will not 
suffer a painful death. Nor should they necessarily: they are merely the 
personifications of abstract global capital.

The tactical reality is that on the eve of the triumph of the world 
revolution, they will be offered early retirement.

So intelligent revolutionary reforms please, not gesture leftism.

Chris Burford

London