Defunding the Fund, Running on the Bank

Monthly Review, July, 2000 by Patrick Bond

The attraction of defunding the Washington institutions, as campaign handles that U.S. and other Northern activists can easily invoke as part of a general consciousness-raising exercise about the Fund and Bank, is that it correlates to South campaigns that also aim to weaken, expel, and shut down the Bretton Woods twins. The basis for the growing campaign in Johannesburg, for example, to kick the Bank out of South Africa is that Bank staff have played crucial roles in policies ranging from macroeconomic structural adjustment to the privatization of Johannesburg's municipal services. The more the Fund and Bank are active in a given capital city, the faster local life is reduced to mere commodity circulation. Evicting the Washington economists who work so closely with local compradors is another step in changing the balance of forces in most domestic contexts. But it is also a warmup for the broader, deeper campaign to decommodify and destratify South societies. And for radical economists in the South who link the particular actions and ideology of IMF and Bank missions to the way in which the broader global capitalist crisis of overaccumulation plays out, it is no accident that we can locate both power and vulnerability within the sphere of finance--as Marx, Grossmann, Sweezy, Magdoff, and others have often reminded us.

For socialist activists, therefore, defunding the IMF and breaking the Bank can raise consciousness, dramatically improve global and local power balances, generate new thinking about radical local financing alternatives that lead to "development" independent of imperialism, and contribute to an internationalist solidarity unfettered by controversy over reform of global financial institutions. A16 gave thousands of activists an initial opportunity to run on the Bank and IMF. The followup challenge is to keep the institutions running until they drop from exhaustion.

Based at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Alternative Information and Development Centre (both in Johannesburg), Patrick Bond recently authored Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2000) and Cities of Gold, Townships of Cool: Essays on South Africa's New Urban Crisis (Lawrenceville, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000). Each contains two chapters on the IMF/World Bank role in denying South Africa a full-fledged liberation. The author thanks Ellen Meiksins Wood for her valuable input into a draft of this essay.

NOTES

(1.) Michael Albert, "Assessing Al6," Z Magazine, April 19, 2000.

(2.) Terry Boswell and Chris Chase-Dunn, The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism (Boulder, CO: Lynn Reiner, 1999).

(3.) Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 7.

(4.) Walden Bello, "Meltzer Report on Bretton Woods Twins Builds Case for Abolition but Hesitates," Focus on Trade 48 (April 2000).

(5.) David Harvey, "The Geography of Class Power," in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., The Communist Manifesto Now: Socialist Register 1998 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), p. 72.