The International League of Peoples’ Struggle condemns the 80 years of plunder, austerity policies and super exploitation that has been railroaded into nearly every country due to the predatory loan and investment policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (IMF-WB). ILPS calls on its members to keep up the momentum of the July 22 day of action of the Reclaim Our Future campaign and prepare for more militant actions against IMF-WB dictates to come.
On July 22, 1944, the Bretton Woods Conference held in New Hampshire, USA, birthed the IMF-WB as the means to rapidly expand the influence and power of the US-led financial oligarchy in the wake of the US’s rise to global superpower after World War 2. It offered loans to countries ravaged by war or sucked dry by colonialism on the condition that multinational corporations gain control over national industries. In a further power-grabbing move, most of the IMF-WB loans offered to countries require the rollback of national laws that regulate corporate practices and protect industries from foreign ownership.
The people decry a near-century of IMF-WB led privatization, deregulation, and liberalization; austerity; debt bondage and violations of sovereignty; resource plunder while hollowing out domestic agriculture and industries; socially and ecologically harmful infrastructure and energy projects; imposing of neoliberal policies in war-torn countries in the name of reconstruction; and even support for military dictatorships.
The policies of the IMF and the World Bank have led to the high concentration and financialization of agricultural landholding and production in dependent capitalist countries, resulting in the displacement of small producers and the rise of monoculture. There has been a major uptick in land grabs by major corporations, especially the big agriculture and mining companies. IMF-WB policies have facilitated the concentration of power into the hands of big landlords backed by foreign companies who rule the countrysides of the global south with an iron fist, using their paramilitaries to terrorize peasant communities and Indigenous Peoples into submission. Rural communities have lost access to the land, the source of their livelihood, and have been forced into usurious work and land contracts that drown the peasant masses in debt. Land theft, militarization and ecological destruction from the climate crisis push many of these families into overcrowded and non-industrialized cities where the IMF-WB’s myth of mass employment policies are laid bare as more and more go without jobs and livelihood. Indigenous communities face national oppression and racism when faced with the same displacement.
Lack of industrialization and employment is paired with high taxation on industrial production that rarely is invested back into society and instead hoarded by the bureaucrat capitalists at the head of government. This leads to further closing down of industrial units which not only exacerbates unemployment but further concentration of production by the same bureaucrat capitalists who privatize and buy out the very industries their policies destroyed. This vicious cycle of joblessness and enforced pauperization of workers and peasants pushes people to leave their countries to become migrant workers abroad, where they face extreme danger, exploitation and racism as they fill a much-needed gap in the reserve army of labor in the imperialist countries also reeling from unemployment crises and de-industrialization brought about by the same financial oligarchs behind the IMF-WB.
The IMF-World Bank has also toed the line of US and European powers’ foreign policy and supported their imperialist wars. On the one hand, the international financial institutions have adopted an all-hands-on-deck approach to support Ukraine in the NATO-backed war with Russia. On the other hand, they have sanitized Zionist occupation in neglecting the central culpability of US-backed “Israel” in the destruction and maldevelopment of Palestine. Since October 2023, these violations are now full-blown genocide in Gaza.
Amidst the deepening economic, ecological and political crises of the imperialist system, the US, the UN and France in 2022 called for a “new Bretton Woods,” with an agenda to both address these crises and re-consolidate the legitimacy of the IMF-WB. Yet, this narrative hides the fact that it was the capitalist system itself, and the neoliberal austerity schemes of the IMF-WB which it created, that caused these crises by immiserating the working class and all the toiling people who built the world they profit from but who can no longer afford to buy the commodities that are the ultimate source of capitalist profits. In fact, the US-led financial institutions are preparing to double down on their austerity-driven investment programs as the declining US prepares for fiercer competition with its rising economic rival China.
During its Spring and Annual Meetings this year, the World Bank is expected to finalize and advance its new “playbook” to implement its new mandate of supposedly “ending poverty and promoting shared prosperity on a livable planet”. We must not be fooled. This playbook will merely create so-called new financing tools that hide behind climate rhetoric to promote and subsidize financial markets and big business in the Global South. It obscures the complicity of the US-led IMF-WBG and Southern ruling classes in creating poverty for the people, prosperity for the elites, the climate crisis, and further facilitating the entry of capital into the Global South for the continued plundering of resources.
The ILPS calls on its member organizations and the people, social movements and civil society to join the global Reclaim Our Future campaign to resolutely fight against the IMF-WB’s impunity for economic crimes against the people and planet, its support for imperialist wars, dictatorships, and despotic regimes and its reinforcement of a system of plunder and poverty. Only through banding together and expanding our broad anti-imperialist united front of all struggling peoples will we be able to end the IMF-WB, defeat imperialism and win our socialist future for humanity and the planet!
Signed:
Len Cooper
ILPS Chairperson
7/29/24
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