On
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank
This
text is a lecture we held in Prague on January 4, 2001.
I think
one should deal with the movement against IMF and World Bank
which in most cases goes together with a critique on
neoliberalism, globalisation and imperialism, but also
multinational companies etc. The reason is that the arguments of
that movement all are somehow critical towards capitalism and
states or statehood in general, which have to be in the centre of
critique of society, as they are themselves the structure of
society on which everything else is based. That means all the
things people need for their lives today are produced by way of
capitalist production, and all these things have the form of
commodities. The only aim, the only purpose of production in
capitalist society is, according to Karl Marx, the expansion of
value, of capital, or the restless never-ending process of
profit-making by exploiting human labour power. The democratic
state ensures that this process can go on, basically by
guaranteeing the right of ownership, of property.
But to
come back to that movement, calling itself anti-capitalistic, I
think that people involved there often make some basic
theoretical mistakes, so that they often hold and support
ideologies instead of criticizing capitalism.
Firstly,
they often personalize social relationships. That means, they are
constantly looking for groups, persons or institutions that shall
be responsible for exploitation and the poverty and misery people
are confronted with in capitalist society. Such groups and
institutions are, for example, the IMF and World Bank or WTO, but
also big multinational companies such as McDonalds, Shell,
Microsoft etc. Even single persons such as Bill Gates, George
Soros or the President of the United States shall be responsible
for people`s misery. According to older, mostly marxist-leninist
theories, the monopoly capitalists, being only a few powerful and
rich people, are responsible for everything.
The
problem about such theories is that there are no single persons
or institutions deciding consciously or making a plan how to do
the worst to normal people. They don`t even have much freedom in
their decisions, in their way of acting, as in capitalist
society, there is no owner of capital being able to decide not to
exploit people anymore. If he or she did so, he or she would lose
his or her capital and thus become a worker who possesses no
means of production, but only his or her labour power. As a
worker, he had to sell his labour power, that means to work for
wages. Thereby, he directly supports capitalist production and
its aim, as he produces value and surplus value. All people need
to sell something, be it their labour power or any other
commodities in order to survive. So no one alone can get out of
this circle, they all have to play their part in this terrible
game called capitalism. The IMF is just an agency, another
instrument for capitalist goals within the worldwide market. But
I will come back to that later.
The
problem of personalising social relationships is that not a
single institution, not the wealth of some people, not
multinational companies etc. but capitalism itself is the thing
to overcome. Leftist theories often forget that this is the only
consequent way to achieve a society in which the satisfaction of
human needs is the aim, where wars make no sense anymore. Small
and local companies as well as the big multinationals do not have
the aim of improving the living conditions of people, but they
want and need to expand their capital. Although owners of capital
may be assholes as private persons sometimes, they do not act as
capitalists out of evil or immoral motives/reasons, or because of
a bad character trait. This personalised explanation some
leftists suggest within their argumentation is the wrong one. As
I said before, owners of capital have no other choice than
exploiting people unless they want to become workers. Marx said
that the expansion of value, be it in the form of money or
commodities, becomes the subjective aim, the sole motive of the
operations of the capitalist, who functions as capital
personified and endowed with consciousness and will. That means
that the one who "acts", who is the real subject in
capitalist society, is something non-human. It is the value which
has to expand. But of course it is not visible. What is visible
are the persons who just execute that will, that aim.
Another
problem of personalising social relationships they become
social relationships by the exchange of commodities is that
it is not only a wrong analysis of capitalism, but also a
dangerous one. The German National Socialists also had a kind of
critique on capitalism: They considered the Jews to be the
representatives of the sphere of financial capital, which should
be the bad, rootless side of capitalism, whereas the sphere of
production, the productive capital, should be the good, the
German one. Anti-semitists project anything they do not
understand about capitalism, anything abstract, such as the
money, on the Jews and on their "evil characters".
Within their image of the world, the Jews are extremely powerful
and secretly control the whole world. They re considered not to
work for their money, but to just let it work for them and to
drain dry, that means to suck out the Germans, the non-Jews. They
are considered to be extremely rich in contrast to the poor
normal people. What I want to say is that some arguments of
anti-capitalist and leftist movements are of the same structure,
of the same pattern, as the anti- semitic ideology, although the
people themselves may not hate Jews or want to eliminate them
like the Nazis did or even know about this similarity.
What
leftists often look at, is the surface of capitalist society,
that is the symptoms or the effects of people's lives, but they
do not grasp the reasons of it. The reasons they consider to be
bad character traits of rich and powerful people. It is the same
with politicians: You cannot only blame them as individuals for
the violence and brutality the state does to people even
though the job they chose is a brutal one always involving
domination -, but you have to criticise thee state as a whole, as
an institution that puts people in prison, carries out wars etc.
In a way,
the critique on IMF should be similar. It is not evil itself but
an instrument, a means of the successful nations which have the
majority of votes there, to keep all the other nations in the
state of being useful for the expansion of wealth of the rich
nations. In reality, that means that the IMF grants credits to
countries which have a deficit in their balance of payments, so
roughly spoken, the imported or bought more than they exported or
sold to other countries. With the help of these credits, they are
able to take part in the worldwide market and have trade
relations with other countries.
No country could survive on
its own, it will always have to conduct imports and exports. But
in order to do this, to have money that is accepted by other
countries, it must obey the international trade rules. That
means, for example, to balance out such deficits with the help of
IMF credits. So these countries stay members of the worldwide
market and can thus be used by other countries to make profits,
but at the same time "survive" somehow. Of course, it
is not as easy as it might look: In order to get a credit from
the IMF, the country has to fulfil certain conditions. Among
others there are
· The lowering of expenditures of the
respective state. This means in most cases less welfare and
social expenditures of any kind.
· The increasing of
taxes. In most cases, this is worst for poor people who have to
give more of their little amount of money to the state.
So the
IMF credits and its conditions which, roughly spoken, are meant
to create a normal capitalist state and economy, are by no means
meant to serve the people in these countries. But this goes with
nearly all other measures of states and with the aim of
capitalist production as well.
Making
the IMF a more democratic institution, as some groups claim, so
that all countries have the same vote there, would not
necessarily mean any real improvements, because the general
function, the purpose the founders of IMF had in mind, would not
be any different then. Furthermore, capitalist society or the
world market would not be a better one if decisions were taken
more democratic, by more participants. It always involves
compulsions and pressures, for example the pressure, the
necessity to work for wages in order to survive.
Also the
claim for the abolition of IMF is a problematic, a two-edged one:
If the countries of the Third World were not granted any credits
anymore and thus were no members of the worldwide market, living
conditions there would probably even worse. An economy not
working at all, a country where no capital exploits the people,
would be much worse than an economy which is dependent on other
countries. These consequences are often forgotten by leftists, in
contrast to the Republican Party of the USA which also claims for
the abolition of IMF. But they want to get rid of it because they
do not want to grant any money to the poor countries. They think
it is not profitable enough and consciously accept the fact that
they would become hells where even more people die of starvation.
So, let's
not fight against institutions but against capitalism as a whole
and statehood as well so that there are no more rich and poor
people, but society which is there for the needs of people, a
society where no more commodities, money or laws are produced.
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