Socialist Action /October 2000
Prague Bankers Insist they Really Want
to 'Help the Poor'
By GERRY FOLEY
The recent demonstrations in Prague against the
international capitalist financial institutions, like previous protests
against meetings of international bankers in other cities, have put the
issue of imperialist exploitation of the peoples of poor countries forcibly
before world public opinion.
The attempts of the capitalist press and governments
to portray these actions as emotional outbursts of antisocial "anarchist"
youth have not been able to obscure this basic message. Over the din of
media hype, the major organizers of these protests have made clear that
their method is mass demonstrations and not violence.
The capitalist press itself in its own way has
testified to the impact of these protests by going on a campaign to try
to show that the international financial institutions now have hearts.
For example, the Oct. 1 "News of the Week
in Review" section of The New York Times ran a substantial article
by Joseph Kahn saying that the world bankers had to back off from their
arguments about the laws of the market being the panacea for the poor:
"But as Prague sweeps up the shattered shop
window glass left over from the violence-plagued meeting of global aid
agencies last week, one thing has become clear: The old way of thinking
is now economically debatable and politically untouchable.
"In its place is emerging a new consensus
about helping the poor that shifts some of the burden to the rich."
Certainly the Czech authorities did not seem to
share any of the feelings of the protesters. They declared a state of siege
and mobilized huge numbers of police to try to overawe them. There were
more than 11,000 of police present on Sept. 26, almost equal to the 15,000
demonstrators.
Moreover, despite the fact that the Czech regime,
supposedly the star pupils of the capitalist marketeers, hosted the IMF-World
Bank meetings in the name of the internationalization of market relations,
they proved to be "protectionists" with the respect to the internationalization
of protests against the operation of the capitalist market.
Three hundred protesters were halted at the border.
Others were subjected to a long waiting game. And people from other East
European countries that wanted to join in the protests were denied visas.
The international bankers' party was deliberately
held in Prague to demonstrate the triumph of the world market over "Communism"
and as a tribute to the capitalist perspectives of the "post-Stalinist"
rulers of the countries in which capitalism had been abolished. Therefore,
the presence of protesters from these countries testifying to the catastrophic
effects of these attempts on the masses of working people in these countries
would strike the most discordant note possible.
But, as Kahn wrote in The New York Times, the discordant
notes in the global capitalist "harmony" have become too loud
for the administrators of the capitalist institutions to ignore. For example,
41 nations now have debt loads of more than 125 percent of their gross domestic
product:
"Rich nations have begun the slow process
of relieving this crushing burden, but the drumbeat to forgive much more
of the Third World's debt is deafening for government ministers, who seem
to up their pledges with every antiglobalization riot."
Kahn did not mention it, but certainly on the minds
of the international bankers was that the biggest "antiglobalization
riot" has been the recent mass upsurge in Indonesia, a country of over
200 million, which was directly provoked by IMF dictates.
That is where the IMF made its most rapid and notable
retreat, but basically the same policies by international capitalism and
its institutions are perpetuating and deepening the economic crisis in Indonesia
and in many other Third World countries, such as Ecuador, where an upsurge
that nearly became a revolution also recently took place.
These drumbeats of impending disaster are not going
to be changed by a little divertimento about the new "humanitarian
conscience" of the world bankers.
Socialist Action /October 2000 |