IMF gets a little bashful in the impending fall

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Because of the anti-capitalist/corporate global protest movement, the IMF
has slimmed down its week-long meeting to two days - over 70% cut back of
capital investment in personal communications. Perhaps like other banks at
this time of impending global recession, they are ready for
"restructuring". But who will restructure the advisers on restructuring?

So:

> The International Monetary Fund and World Bank will hold their Joint
> Annual General Meetings in Washington DC from September 29-30 2001.


Yet despite, or because of, massive police preparations, nearby GW
University is to be closed for a whole week! This in turn is raising a
protest movement by students. Why should the university shut for a week if
the IMF is now going to meet for only two days. Intelligent students would
like to know. And not all the reasons can frankly be made public without
making the situation even worse.

It is really getting all very difficult. Almost out of hand. What are the
IMF to do?

It is almost like the situation described by Lenin:

> In most cases it is not enough for revolution that the lower classes
> should not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary that the
> upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in the old way. [1913]


Perhaps the genuinely esteemed Patrick Bond would say this is a step
towards the campaign goal of the total abolition of the IMF. Certainly they
must start to consider that the management of the global economy might be
more cheaply done by faceless, no doubt well paid bureaucrats, surrounded
by as much massive computer power as is needed to try to predict the
weather. But I would say to Patrick that much of the details of what
succeeds the present IMF (with or without a name change) will need to be
argued over to see whether the detailed reforms genuinely make the world
economy more democratically accountable or are a further mystifying veil
over the actual power structures of the world.

Anyway, just to help people keep up to speed, below is an inflammatory call
to Washington, but probably legal, because it does not incite the multitude
to carry lethal objects like stones. I was interested in Leipzig last week
to hear that in the decisive standoff with the armed forces of the DDR in
1989, the mass movement carried flowers, partly to ensure they would not
throw stones.

There is a difference between getting a bashful and getting bashful. At the
moment neither the IMF nor the protest movement know what the IMF are going
to get at the end of the month. Coy they are already.

But what is happening now does not depend on the success or failure of any
one tactic. The power structures of world capitalism have a major and
perhaps insoluble credibility problem about how they can remain (in the
words of Engels - OFPPS) "seemingly standing above society" "for the
purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of
'order'", without being drawn into an endless series of debilitating and
unacceptable skirmishes all disastrous for its public image on the global
media. There are no reasons to think that the protest movement will abate.
Basically the IMF would be wise to realise it has lost already, at least in
the old way.

And "Empire" becomes available at paperback prices this fall/autumn to
multitudes of the rash, youthful, aspiring intelligentsia of the world who
will read it and think, that the world economy could somehow we run better,
if only someone listened to them!


http://www.globalizethis.org/s30/

> Your presence in Washington is needed! Since the watershed Seattle WTO
> Meeting in November 1999, the voices demanding change have grown stronger
> and stronger. The finance ministers and international bureaucrats who
> shape the world economy to make the rich richer and the poor poorer need
> to know that these past two years have not just been a bump on their road
> to global domination. The peoples' movements of the world will not stand
> idly by while those holding power continue to impoverish and oppress the
> majority of the world's peoples and ravage the earth's environment and
> resources while enriching themselves and corporations.


> We call on concerned people from all over the world to come to Washington
> DC in September to protest and expose the illegitimacy of the institutions
> and officials who continue to claim the right to determine the course of
> the world economy.


Chris Burford

London