Marshall Plan for Third World?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

?Marshall Plan? for Third World

Between 1948 and 1952 the US rulers provided billions of dollars in
long-term loans that were used to rebuild the foundations for renewed
industrial production and political stabilisation in war-ravaged
capitalist Europe and Japan. The expansion of the developed
capitalist economies over the subsequent two decades rapidly narrowed
the large initial postwar gap between the level of productivity in
the US and the other developed capitalist countries.

Many liberal commentators have called for a similar ?Marshall Plan?
to be applied to the Third World in the naive view that this would
have similar results there. However, imperialist domination of the
semicolonial countries prevents the development of a class structure
and value of labour power capable of supporting an internal market
that can either meet the profit needs of a broad developing local
bourgeoisie or absorb massive imports of capital and commodities from
the imperialist countries. These semicolonial class relations permit
the emergence of isolated pockets of ?prosperity?: layers of wealthy
export and service- oriented capitalists and a narrow, relatively
prosperous, middle class. But there neither is nor can be a
relatively well-off population of employed wage workers or prosperous
farmers able to purchase a wide range of consumer durables on a level
comparable to the imperialist countries.

Since the late 1960s imperialist governments, banks and international
finance agencies have foisted hundreds of billions of dollars in
loans on the semicolonial countries. The Marshall Plan has been
repeated. Its main result has been a disaster for the workers,
peasants and even the bulk of the urban middle class in the
semicolonial countries. Nor has it proved possible for local
capitalists to reproduce the successes registered in postwar Europe
and Japan. Just the opposite has occurred: the gap between the
economic strength of the imperialist and semicolonial countries has
widened. The Third World debt has not been a blessing preliminary to
a historic developmental take-off, but a trap preliminary to a
devastating crisis. The contrasting experiences of the results of the
Marshall Plan in Western Europe and Japan, on the one hand, and its
repetition in the semicolonial capitalist countries on the other,
demonstrate that debt is a social relation, one that has
diametrically different effects depending on the relative power of
the lender and borrower.

In small handful of semicolonial countries?South Korea, Taiwan,
Mexico, Brazil and Argentina?imperialist loans facilitated a process
of broader industrialisation in the 1980s. In the 1990s these
countries became the targets for a substantial shift of international
capital flows, as the bulk of imperialist capital flowing into the
Third World switched from loans into portfolio investments?that is,
into buying up stocks and bonds in the big private companies and
newly privatised state enterprises of what are known as the ?emerging
markets?. As the experience of each of these countries has
demonstrated, this buying up of shares is simply a stepping-stone to
imperialist capital directly taking over and running the largest and
most profitable enterprises in these countries, which were formerly
in the hands of local capitalists?that is, to reversing the limited
gains in independent industrialisation that were made by these
capitalists during the 1980s.

Full: http://www.dsp.org.au/links/index.htm (from Doug Lorimer's
"Imperialism in the 21st Century", current issue of Links Magazine)

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/19/2002

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