Singapore, 19-20 Sept.: Shut down the meeting of the IMF and the World Bank!

//WORLD REVOLUTION //International Coordination Comittee //2005-09-12

On 19-20 of September the IMF and the World Bank will gather in Singapore for another of their annual top meetings. This is the meeting of the leaders of the trans and multinational corporations and banks in alliance with capitalist politicians from all over the globe. Behind an agenda which claims goals for the meeting such as “promoting public-private partnerships to foster sustainable development” stands the same neo-liberal institutions that have helped the strongest capitalist powers in the world of today to super-exploit and rob the third world of its labour and resources.

Institutions of super-exploitation and robbery!

This is done mainly through political pressure on and deals with governments in Third World countries. In the 1980's and onwards so called “structural adjustment programmes” were signed between the IMF/WB and a number of countries in the global South. In return for billion dollar loans from Western big bankers and investors behind the IMF and WB, these countries implemented those programmes. This always meant attacks on state budgets, on corporate taxes, on restrictions protecting farmers and small businessmen from cheap imports; attacks on tariffs for export of goods, making it cheaper for Western multinationals to take with them the country's resources and sell it on their home markets; and the carrying out of large-scale privatisation of state owned companies, of education, of pension systems and so on...

The policies of the IMF and WB have, not surprisingly, had disastrous effects for their victims. A country such as Indonesia for example has got about 132 billion dollars in foreign debt due to its deals with these institutions. Most of these loans where taken during the dictatorship of Suharto (1965-1998). Its government annually pays about 10 times more in repayments than it invests in social services. Most of the repayments are going towards paying only the rents on these loans. Indonesia , like many other countries in the part of the world being super-exploited and robbed by imperialism, faces enormous levels of inequality and oppression, deep poverty for the most of the working class and peasantry, high levels of unemployment, lack of access to clean water for the majority of its population, illiteracy for almost 30 million of its inhabitants etc. Under a neo-liberal government the needs of the poor are being far from met - quite the opposite! Only in this year workers have had to resist further attempts from the governments to attack wages, pensions and working conditions. Students have been forced to fight ever increasing pressure on them from the universities, almost completely privatised and subordinated to capital. And so on.

Far from “fostering sustainable development” the policies of the IMF and the WB has led to the opposite. And it has led to resistance. The uprising against the neo-liberal president Fernando de la Rua in Argentine in 2001 was both levelled at the enormous rate of corruption as well as the policies deriving from deals with these institutions (the main cause for a lot of the corruption). The dictates from the IMF and WB had by that year effectively broken the back off the Argentinian economy, robbed even the middle classes and led to rising levels of poverty, unemployment and working insecurity. The revolt of the students, workers and poor in Argentine inspired and sharpened resistance in many other Latin American countries and also on other continents.

Adding to this resistance the rise of a new global resistance movement in the late 1990's was increasingly targeting these institutions and gatherings of the neo-liberal elite with the weapon of internationally coordinated resistance. At Seattle , mass demonstrations forced the cancellation of the 1999 WTO summit. Further protests followed around the world against meetings of the IMF, World Bank, World Economic Forum and G8. In 2001 in Genoa , 300,000 marched in the face of bloody repression. REVOLUTION has been involved in this resistance from the very beginning. We have stood in the frontlines of the street battles that erupted in many different cities where these institutions gathered, defending ourselves and the right to protest as the state turned against the protesters, protecting the rich as usual.

In taking part in this movement we are not only fighting against the institutions of global capitalism – we argue that this fight must be integrated in an all-out fight against the very system of capitalism itself! We want to replace the system of global capitalism, imperialist war and corporate super-exploitation and robbery with a socialist system based on democratic planning, solidarity between the working class in every part of the world and fight for an end to the dictatorship of capital. We are not there yet – but we clearly think that this is the way forward for our movement.

In the here and now we declare our complete solidarity with our comrades and all the others who will gather in protests, for example in Batam Island ( Indonesia ) and in Singapore itself, to protest against the meeting of the IMF and WB. We condemn the government of Singapore , a puppet government of US imperialism, for its banning of all demonstrations against the top summit and declare our solidarity with all who resist this despite the threat of repression. We need to stop these meetings and we need to tear down these institutions in the fight against capitalism and imperialism. We need to force the governments in the countries dependent on the loans of the IMF and WB not to pay back one more cent. We need to an ever greater extent the working class and oppressed to make this fight its own.

In these protests and in this movement we need to raise the banner of solidarity with all oppressed working class people and poor over the world in the fight against imperialist and neo-liberal super-exploitation and domination, against imperialist wars and occupation. The movements of young people, often both the most oppressed by capitalism and the most radical fighters at the forefront of the struggles against it, should form a revolutionary youth international. This can co-ordinate resistance against capitalism internationally and be a catalyst towards uniting the movement of workers, youth and the oppressed in a new Fifth International, a world party of socialist revolution to lead the masses to victory in the struggle against our enemy – global capitalism!