Global Capital, Empire and Argentina

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Fri Dec 21 23:30:32 PST 2001


At 21/12/01 21:14 -0800, you wrote:
>In Empire, Negri and Hardt posit that there is no
>outside to Empire...we are all embedded in the nexus
>of global capital and there is no longer an escape
>route through a struggle known as "national
>liberation".
>
>Now we have seen a heroic revolt in Argentina this
>week, but one has to wonder how even the best
>intentioned group that came to power could free the
>country from the clamps of the IMF and World Bank. Is
>it possible or impossible...and what are the political
>implications of this? I would like to hear from
>everyone but am especially interested in the
>economists perspectives.
>
>Thomas

Good question, although I do not know how heroic the revolt has been except with the courage of hopelessness. One sign of the weakness is that no one is assuming there is any risk of a new dictatorship because there is no one offering a radical or socialist government.

I agree that social democracy, let alone socialism, is now not possible in one country.

We could and should campaign for global reforms backing the idea that countries can declare they are bankrupt.

Essentially the Argnetinan government has done this and the failed executive committee of the bourgeois state has collapsed in ignominy. There is shuffling about which politicians can now form a board of directors for the new executive committee.

PLUS

a global financial framework in which there is a fund of the order of 1 trillion dollars per year of IMF special drawing rights/ Tobin tax receipts (or whatever invention everyone will say is valid for purposes of exchange) against which countries can bid for finance.

The eligibility criteria and the rules can be tweaked periodically but they should include some deliberately extemely complicated highly technical formula favouring countries with a falling standard of living and in proportion to the extent their standard of living is below the global average.

I say 1 trillion because while we should welcome Gordon Brown's backing of the call for a Marshall Aid plan of the order of $35 billion, we must campaign now to shift the conceptual order of magnitude. It is quite inadequate.

This must be a serious plan to implement George Soros's call for a mechanism to pump capital from the centre to the periphery on arelentlessly regular basis to overcome the centralising effects of the inevitable processes of uneven accumulation of capital.

Then the system of state bankruptcies can work as flexibly as the way the USA astonishingly treats its own bankrupts. It lets them dust themselves off, and immediately go into business again. Indeed a bankruptcy in the USA is sometimes thought of as an instructive training in managerial skills!

Let us have a little economic democracy here, on a global scale. If the US wants its values spread hegemonistically throughout the world, how about decent rights for bankrupts! Forget the hungry. If we want to uphold the virtues of capitalism donn't forget the bankrupts!

Then the living labour of the mass of working people of a country like Argentina can choose between which potential bankrupts they want as the executive committee of the affairs of the bourgeoisie. And thereby can influence the needs for social capital. And have a greater chance not only of stabilising their lives but of turning the socialised structures for the management of abstract finance capital into structures in which working class power becomes hegemonic, through a process of punctuated evolution, (not excluding periodic heroic blind revolts).

Chris Burford

London



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