Defunding the Fund, Running on the Bank

Monthly Review, July, 2000 by Patrick Bond

The IMF and World Bank are central to imperialism's reproduction, both in terms of their power to dictate how the poor countries will "develop" and their power to displace the effects of capitalist crisis onto the world's poor. They carry out their mandate in a way that entails both universal suffering by subordinate classes and damage to the environment. But in the wake of the April protests, there are prospects for a more sustainable and radical resistance strategy. For even if the Fund/Bank represent merely institutional vehicles (through which crisis displacement and uneven capitalist development are coordinated), they are exceptionally important targets, at least until more serious challenges are generated by shop-floor, community, feminist, and environmentalist protest to local and global manifestations of the mode of production itself. Indeed, campaigning to abolish the Bretton Woods institutions and the interests they serve offers possibly the best focus for global class struggle in all its various s pheres that the left has yet witnessed.

Strategic Divergences

There are those, however, who suggest that abolishing the IMF and the World Bank is an inappropriate radical strategy. Some envision the development of a world state. Such a state, the logical consequence of the rapid globalization of capital, would imply the creation of a global working class (and its party). Such a global working class could then contend directly with capital, struggling for environmental protection, wealth redistribution, peacekeeping, and human rights policing. Socialist intellectuals working from the world-systems tradition, social justice philosophy, and "cosmopolitan democracy" theory are advancing such a case. Here are Terry Boswell and Chris Chase-Dunn in The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism:

The interstate system is the political structure that stands behind the maneuverability of capital and its ability to escape organized workers and other social constraints on profitable accumulation. While a world state may at first be largely controlled by capitalists, the very existence of such a state will provide a single focus for struggles to socially regulate investment decisions and to create a more balanced, egalitarian, and ecologically sound form of production and distribution. [2]

Skeptical, University of Chicago philosopher Iris Young recommends closure of the IMF and Bank, which "do not even pretend to be inclusive and democratic." Instead, she argues that a "reasonable goal" is reform of the UN, "the best existing starting point for building global democratic institutions... As members of the General Assembly, nearly all the world's peoples today are represented at the UN." Moreover, the UN is a site where imperial powers "seek legitimacy for some of their international actions" and where states "at least appear to be cooperative and interested in justice." Likewise, civil society organizations have mobilized around UN events and issues. [3]

The primary problem here is that given the existing and foreseeable balance of international power, hopes for eco-social progress through world state-building are utopian, maybe dangerously so. Far more likely, if this course is pursued, is an expansion of neoliberalism, the universal rule of property, and the commodification of all aspects of daily life everywhere, with consequent destruction of noncapitalist ecological, social, and economic processes, amplified through far more devastating punishment by the "international community" for transgression by oppositional states or popular movements.