>On Thursday 24 February, D Henwood forwarded a copy of the following
>article:
>
>>Financial Times - February 24, 2000
>>CALL FOR OVERHAUL OF IMF AND WORLD BANK EXPECTED
>
>I'm surprised few LBO-talkers had anything to say about this article.
>Basking in the glow of their symbolic victory in Seattle, segments of the
>anti-WTO coalition (especially the Naderite and the anarchist segments) seem
>to have forgotten that both the libertarian right and the
>nativist/isolationist right have their own critiques of the Bretton Woods
>institutions.
They've hardly forgotten. Rob Weissman of Multinational Monitor told me they'd probably offer some qualified support for this report. So did Soren Ambrose of the 50 Years is Enough campaign on my radio show the other night.
>What happens if the Congress, feeling pressure from the left and the right,
>sharply curtails funding for the IMF/IBRD ? Does global capitalism/imperialism
>automatically come to an end ?
No it won't, but I think it might complicate the life of cap'ism/imp'ism. Since they think there's something spontaneous, almost genetically programmed about capitalism, the right often forgets that state coercion is essential to the propagation and maintenance of capitalism. Without the Bretton Woods institutions, it would have been much harder to restructure the Southern hemisphere the way it's been restructured over the last 20 years: they're the lead dogs of neo-neocolonialism, a real executive committee of the world bourgeoisie. Without them, or with less of them, what would happen? I don't know, but it might be interesting to find out.
>On a somewhat related front, I found certain aspects of the article
>that ChuckO
>sent on the post-N30 activist generation rather amusing. The white
>middle class
>anarchists bemoan the absence of "people of color" in their loosely affiliated
>anti-global system coalition, and vow to work on their own racism to better
>build a broad coalition. Their repeated usage of the term "people of color"
>is a dead giveaway of their much-despised middle class social
>background, since
>few "people of color" use the very term to describe themselves, save those
>who are part of the intelligentsia, or at least have spent a few years
>attending a liberal arts university or college reading Bell Hooks and Cornel
>West.
I've been wondering about this. Much of the Northern anti-WTO movement is based on solidarity with the people of the South - who are, after all, "people of color." Why is there so little affinity for this movement among "people of color" in the U.S.? Doesn't it call into question the whole category, the assumption of common interests among non-Caucasians?
Since a lot of the U.S. anti-WTO movement is campus based, why is there so little interest among black and Latino students in it? I wonder if a lot of "minority" students are more interested in getting a piece of the capitalist action than they are in challenging it systemically? I'm pretty out of touch with campus life, which is why I'm phrasing these as questions.
Doug