>Alexandre Fenelon wrote:
>
> > The absurd doctrine o self suficiency in a 20 million inhabitants
> > country and the massive military spendings ruined the North Korean economy.
>
>And just why, I wonder, was all that military spending needed? And
>if you were surrounded by U.S., Russia, & China, self-sufficiency,
>whatever its difficulties, might be rather attractive. Moreover, when
>they did slip and take on too much foreign debt, they had the
>courage (which no other third-world nation has had) to simply
>repudiate that debt rather than become a fiefdom of the IMF.
>It was the policy of self-sufficiency that made that possible.
The foreign debts became intolerable mainly because of the U.S. interest hikes that engineered a depression to break the American workers. Since then, capital has been sucked out of the rest of the world into the financial center at the core. The Third World nations should have gone along with Castro's call for the formation of a debtors' cartel; they could have collectively repudiated the debt, or at least renegotiated the debt service schedules on _their_ terms, not on the IMF's terms. And American activists -- especially organized labor -- should have supported attempts at making a debtors' cartel during the 1980s in Latin America, for instance (see James Petras, "Foreign Exchange," at http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/petrasapr98.htm).
Why isn't the making of a debtors' cartel on the political agenda now? I only hear of it from some people involved in Jubilee 2000 (see the Lusaka Declaration [http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/policy_papers/lusaka.html], for instance).
Some on this list mentioned their admiration for the work of Samir Amin. If they like Amin, I should think that they should at least have some thoughts on de-linking, South-South trade, etc. which have been central to Amin's anti-imperialism. Just imagine how the North Korean "Juche" might work, if it were practiced in alliance with a number of Third World governments which collectively repudiated international debts & were working to create a new regional South-South aid & trade regime.
For such a program to emerge on our political horizon, there would have to be a number of revolutionary movements in the Third World that actually controlled their states. Would American activists involved in Seattle & A16, currently happy working with the AFL-CIO, support such movements if they emerged?
Yoshie