[DEBATE] : Ruling class offensive?

[LFC Scally]

The FT has been the most amazing read this past 8 months of the crisis with the key writers/business eladwers et al  all over the place reflecting the fact that the ruling class is divided over how to deal with the crisis...some calling for Keyens to the rescue others Schumpter and on FT editorial saying 'nationalise the banks to save the market' and arch-Blairite Philip Gould  saying 'hnag the bankers' (I kid you njot) but there are signs they are getting back to their old ways.... 

 

The question I posed at the end an introductory economics course last term was 'who is going to pay for the crisis?' as the money will have to come from somewhere for the bailouts of the banks. 

 

Writing of the mess in public finances  here is what Martin Wolf said last Friday:

 

" That is what happens to a country that has not only spent freely, but now finds itself far poorer than it had hoped. It is clear what this must mean: a sustained freeze on the pay bill; decentralised pay bargaining; employee contributions to public pensions; and a pruning of benefits. It is obvious, too, that this will mean massive and painful conflict between governments and public workers....The next prime minister is likely to end up quite as hated as Margaret Thatcher was. But, as she liked to say, there is no alternative. 

See http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7ab01302-3b36-11de-ba91-00144feabdc0.html 

 

Peter Dwyer


 
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--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: pbond at mail.ngo.za
To: 
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 12:10:47 +0200
Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Religion and left impotence, by Saral Sarkar

(This fine author welcomes feedback: saralsarkar at t-online.de)
 
The Power of the Religions and the Helplessness of the Leftists
 
Saral Sarkar
 
The power of the religions, that makes us concerned for quite some time 
now, is manifested in three phenomena: religious fundamentalism, 
political religion (e.g. political Islam) and religiously motivated 
violence. All big religions have one or all of these expressions of 
power for quite a long time, more or less. Already in 1947, the power of 
militant political Islam led to the partition of the Indian 
subcontinent, the then British India, and the creation of the Islamic 
Republic of Pakistan. The initially socialist (in Algeria) or 
half-socialist (in Egypt) Arab nationalism has long been edged out by 
radical Islamism. Today, the Arab struggle against imperialism and 
Israeli colonialism is being led mainly by militant Islamists. The 
Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century among the European 
Christians is being repeated, so to speak, in Northern Ireland. In the 
USA, the fundamentalist Evangelicals, who want to christianize the whole 
world, have taken over power.
 
What is needed in this situation is not just to be agitated but deep and 
concerned thinking on these phenomena. For they not only represent a 
second defeat of socialism, they also mean that the spirit of the 
Enlightenment is increasingly losing ground.
 
 
Search for the Causes
 
Many among us cannot understand, that anybody at all believes in a God 
and a religion. But let us not make it so easy for ourselves. A deep 
root of religiosity lies in the human condition itself. We do not know 
everything. What science tells us about the origin of the universe and 
life on earth are after all only the most plausible hypotheses at the 
moment. Moreover, several fundamental questions remain unanswered: Why 
did all that originate at all? What is the purpose, the meaning of all 
that, of life? And what is the purpose of human life? Where do we have 
our consciousness from, our intelligence, our sense of morality? Are we, 
the human species, only an accidental product of evolution? If yes, why 
do members of such a species, only one among several millions, have a 
sense of morality? Cats, for example, do not bother about other 
populations of the cat species, about nature or about the future 
generations. Why do some humans suffer and the others don't? What is 
death? Is there anything after death?
 
Such questions can lead one straight into believing in God(s) and a 
religion or, in the most favourable case, to harmless spirituality. 
Especially an oppressed and exploited human or one who is shattered 
through cruel strokes of fate needs a source of consolation. When that 
cannot be found in this world, then it is understandable that such a 
human believes he has found it in the hereafter, where a God allegedly 
loves him unconditionally or where he would be happy at long last. As we 
know, the young Gautam's (later the Buddha) search for insight into the 
human condition and his passage to religiosity began when he for the 
first time saw a seriously ill person, then a very frail old man, and 
then a corpse. After the collapse of the Soviet Union large numbers of 
formerly atheist and now destitute Russians thronged the newly opened 
churches again. Marx had already realized that Religion is "the 
expression of real distress", "the sigh of the oppressed creature".
 
According to Marx, religion is also "opium". But he also recognised that 
it is not always just the sigh or opium. It is also "protest against 
real distress". It is better to say that it can also be that. In fact, 
in history it has often goaded humans to protest, in many forms 
including violent ones In the 16th century, Martin Luther led the revolt 
against the corrupt Christian religious hierarchy. Thomas Müntzer, a 
protestant reformer led a peasant revolt. Some Marxists see him as a 
precursor in the struggle for a classless society. In the 18th century, 
in eastern India, a group of Sannyasins (Hindu monks) led a revolt 
against foreign rule. In the 19th century, in Sudan, Muhammad Ahmed Ibn 
'Abd Allah – a Sufi, who gave himself the title Mahdi – led a mass 
movement and a revolutionary army in order both to reform Islam and to 
liberate his country from the oppressive rule of foreigners, namely the 
Egyptians.
 
Müntzer, the Sannyasins and the Mahdi led an armed struggle against a 
worldly order that they, for various reasons, held to be unbearable. And 
Luther had been the spiritual leader of the kings who carried out the 
military revolt against the rule of the Pope. The Mahdi and his 
followers wanted to lead Islam back to its pristine form, in which the 
Prophet wanted it to be practised. They were therefore, in today's 
jargon, fundamentalists. What these examples say, is that in history 
often militant religious fundamentalists or only religiously motivated 
political activists, who had not necessarily been fundamentalists, 
fought in various ways against some real or felt injustice or some 
deplorable state of affairs.
 
 
The Betrayed Enlightenment, the Betrayed Human Rights, the Violated Dignity
 
Since the Age of Enlightenment and since the various declarations of 
human rights, at the latest since the world-wide spread of the 
revolutionary socialist movement after the Second World War, there 
should not have been any need for any religious drive for such 
struggles. But the Enlightenment as well as the human rights and 
socialism were betrayed by the very peoples who had brought forth these 
ideals, namely the Euro-American ones. In the name of the white man's 
burden and his alleged civilising mission these peoples waged colonial 
wars. The peoples of the conquered countries were not only exploited but 
also treated in racist ways. The slave trade went on till 1864. France 
waged a brutal war until 1962 in order to maintain her colonial rule in 
Algeria.
 
Already the armed struggle of the Mahdi was directed not only against 
the Egyptian rule in Sudan, but also against the British imperialists, 
who supported the Egyptians. The British colonel Gordon, who went to 
Sudan for saving the Egyptian rule there, was killed after being taken 
prisoner. But why did the Mahdi have to be a religious fundamentalist? 
It is perhaps a law of social history that a people, or at least a part 
of it, thinks about its own religious-cultural tradition whenever, even 
without foreign rule, its general condition appears to it to be 
miserable, whenever it sees itself as living in a materially desolate or 
morally decadent state, particularly when, in our times, the promises of 
the modern age prove themselves to be illusory. It then wants to revive 
the supposedly golden age of its own history, which must not be 
understood only in the material sense.
 
This orientation does not always appear as an additional aspect of the 
struggle for worldly power. Also in an independent country in which some 
kind of crisis situation is obtaining, it can come up with the goal of a 
peaceful socio-cultural renaissance. Thus in India, in the 19th century, 
some Hindu leading personalities started the Aryasamaj and Brahmasamaj 
movement in order to reform Hinduism on the basis of the ancient Vedic 
literature. In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded, which strove 
for establishing the Koran and the Hadith as the source of guiding 
principles for a healthy and modern Islamic society. A similar 
development can be observed today among the Christian fundamentalists, 
who feel a deep disquiet over the moral degeneration of modern Western 
societies and therefore want to lead them back to Biblical values. And 
in today's India many Hindus have reacted to the moral degeneration of 
their society by envisioning the revival of the mythical Ramarajya, the 
ideal kingdom of God incarnate Rama. the hero of their epic Ramayana. Of 
course, many politicians instrumentalize these feelings, thoughts, and 
dreams. But they do exist.
 
For us the recent history of Algeria is the most instructive. After a 
successful liberation war, a socialist state was founded in this 
predominantly Islamic country, which was, to boot, blessed with a large 
oil wealth. Of course, there were some purely economic causes of the 
crisis of Algerian society, but the leading, westernised francophone 
stratum of the ruling FLN was also morally degenerated. Against this 
background, the underprivileged strata – particularly their youth 
suffering from mass unemployment, whose absolute number as well as share 
in the population rapidly increased – could be easily won over by the 
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) for its politics. FIS achieved this in the 
name of panarabism and upholding the religious-cultural identity of the 
people. The rest of the story – civil war and reciprocal massacres – is 
well known.
 
As we know, the Islamic terrorists of today do not generally come from 
the poor underclasses, but, in their majority, rather from the educated 
middle and upper classes. If they could come to power in any country, 
they would not abolish the exploitation of the underclasses by the upper 
classes. Here many western including leftist observers make an error in 
their reasoning. In the case of Islamic terrorists, their motive force 
is not primarily anger against economic exploitation and their primary 
goal is not redistribution of the wealth of the world or of one's own 
country. What drives them is their sense of dignity and hate and revenge 
as two means of restoring lost dignity. Anyhow, the sense of 
dignity/honour of the Arabic/Islamic peoples, actually of all Third 
World peoples, is continuously being violated because of material 
underdevelopment. Additionally, since long, it is being violated by 
Western imperialist countries, to which also Israel belongs. Although a 
few bombs or Katyusha rockets will not enable them to defeat 
imperialism, they will at least assuage the thirst for revenge of these 
humiliated peoples. This is the more important purpose of the violent 
attacks of the militant Islamists against westerners. Only so can one 
explain the murder of Theo van Gogh.
 
It is obvious that the motivation for satisfying this kind of needs 
cannot come from the ideals of Enlightenment and socialism, but it can 
very well be drawn from fundamentalist interpretations of the great 
religions (except Buddhism) and nationalism or ethnic loyalty. The 
motivation for the Islamists' struggle against the West and that of the 
Chechnians against the Russians is fed by both of these sources.
 
It is not without reason that one hardly thinks of a Turk when one hears 
the term "Islamist terrorist", although there has also been two bomb 
attacks in Turkey perpetrated by Turkish Islamists. Turkey has never 
been a colony or semi-colony. On the contrary, it was itself a colonial 
power. And today it is a member of the OECD and the NATO. Turkish 
political Islam can therefore take on a mild form. That shows that only 
the combination of being a Muslim and origin or roots in a 
(neo)colonially humiliated country makes one particularly susceptible to 
militant Islamism.
 
 
The Function of Identity
 
The FIS could successfully utilise the religious-cultural identity 
"Arabic-Islamic", because the identity preferred by the leftists, namely 
"worker", had been of little use to the Algerian under-classes in their 
struggle against the FLN bigwigs and the upper classes, who claimed to 
be socialists. It was of little use especially because class differences 
existed even within the working class. The identity "worker" has also 
been of no use in the struggle against imperialism, because, seen 
objectively, Euro-American workers are beneficiaries of the modern 
imperialist system. So the Islamists became stronger. By using the 
identity-term "Islamic" they could also sweep the class problem within 
their own ranks under the carpet. It is a weakness of the leftists 
generally, and of the Euro-American leftists in particular, that they 
would not believe the objectively existing conflict of interests between 
the working classes of different nations and regions, particularly 
between those of the imperialist countries and those of the Third World 
countries. They still shout the slogan "workers of all countries unite!" 
But they do not care to ask why this unity has not materialised yet.
 
 
What Is To Be Done?
 
What should we do in the face of these phenomena? Everybody knows that 
the vast majority of the believers do not take their holy scriptures 
very seriously. They are realistic, pragmatic people. Live and let live, 
that is their attitude towards people of other faiths. Although we have 
to tolerate their being religious, co-operation in political matters is 
possible. In Algeria, the masses, who were more or less devout Muslims, 
supported the initially socialist policies of the FLN. Likewise, 
Christians have their Liberation Theology and political groups calling 
themselves Christians for Socialism. In practical political work, we can 
negate the importance of the question of religion; we can reduce it to a 
private matter. We can take an agnostic position; we can say that we do 
not and cannot know whether there is any God or Gods. And we can finally 
put the rhetorical question: even if He exists, why should we rack our 
brains over the question when we know that He cannot help us?
 
But we must also differentiate. The fundamentalists, who want to impose 
on society the (often only supposed) dictates of their holy scriptures – 
the Koran , the Sharia or the Bible – as laws for everyday life, must be 
opposed. But there are also those who for their struggle against the 
numerous evils in this world do not find any other source of strength 
and inspiration than their religion. To them we must offer a different 
source of inspiration. The Dutch journalist Joost Kircz deplored:"The 
left cannot offer any alternative to the young people influenced by 
Islam. .... There are also no comparable heroic struggles against the 
prevailing conditions, struggles in which the youth could learn a new 
emancipatory purpose and try it out" (SoZ 12/04). This deficit of ours 
must be overcome soon.
 
------------------OOO--------------
 
The German original was written in December 2004
English translation made in February-March 2009.
 


--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: pbond at mail.ngo.za
CC: 
To: 
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 12:15:59 +0200
Subject: [DEBATE] : CCS Seminar: Tony Clarke on world water wars, Friday, 15 May, 12:30-2

Join us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society for
a seminar about water and civil society
 
Seminar: "New water wars, from city to countryside"
Speaker: Tony Clarke, Polaris Institute, Ottawa
Date: Friday, 15 May 2009
Time: 12:30-2pm
Venue: CCS/SDS seminar room, Memorial Tower Building Room F208
University of KwaZulu-Natal Howard College Campus
 
Queries: poonenh at ukzn.ac.za or 031-260-3195
 
Since the April 2000 battle of Cochabamba, Bolivia, most of the major 
struggles over the control of water have been in urban settings, 
focusing on the privatization [or corporate takeover] of public water 
systems. Yet, with the explosion of mega cities around the world, 
notably in the global south, established urban water sources are rapidly 
drying up, thereby creating conditions for a massive transfer of 
freshwater from the countryside. In effect, more and more freshwater is 
being stolen from the lands traditionally occupied by peasants and 
indigenous peoples, thus setting the stage for major conflicts with 
urban workers. The case of Mexico will be used to illustrate this 
emerging phenomena and how work is being done to re-organize and 
re-unite urban workers with rural peasants and indigenous around a 
common struggle for water justice.
 
Tony Clarke is the founder and director of the Polaris Institute in 
Canada which works with social movements in developing strategies and 
tools for social change on water, energy and trade policy issues. He 
holds a masters and doctorate in social ethics from the University of 
Chicago and is the author or co-author of several books including Blue 
Gold: The Battle Against the Corporate Theft of the World's Water [2002; 
Inside the Bottle: Exposing the Bottled Water Industry [2005/7]; and Tar 
Sands Showdown: Canada and the new Politics of Oil in an Age of Climate 
Change [2008]. In 2005, he was awarded Sweden's Right Livelihood Award 
[better known as the 'alternative Nobel prize'] for his contributions to 
the global water and trade justice movements.
 
 
 


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From: pbond at mail.ngo.za
CC: 
To: 
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 12:19:21 +0200
Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Monsanto needs investigating - please agree

http://www.activist.co.za/campaigns/2009/investigategm.php
 
May 2009
 
CALL FOR INDEPENDENT SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION INTO GM CROP FAILURE AND 
ESTABLISHMENT OF INDEPENDENT MONITORING PANEL,
 
Three varieties of Monsanto’s genetically modified maize failed to 
produce crops during the 2008/9 growing season, leaving up to 200 000 
hectares of fields barren of cobs and crop losses across several 
provinces in South Africa. According the GRAIN SA, the varieties are: 
MON 810, NK 603 and MON 810 x NK 603. These seeds were sold to 
commercial maize farmers and provided to resource poor farmers in South 
Africa.
 
Monsanto has compensated commercial farmers who lost their yield, and 
barred these farmers from speaking to the media or public. Monsanto has 
claimed that a mistake was made in the breeding process. No further 
details regarding this mistake or how it might have similarly affected 
all three varieties has been forthcoming from Monsanto. Why the veil of 
secrecy on Monsanto’s part and the gagging of affected commercial crop 
producers?
 
The South African biosafety regulatory authority, which approved the 
commercial release of these three maize varieties, has not seen fit to 
make any statement regarding the crop failure to the consuming public. 
Should we assume that the regulatory authority has uncritically accepted 
the Monsanto explanation? South Africa is a signatory to the Cartagena 
Protocol on Biosafety, and is therefore obliged to implement an 
effective precautionary approach to monitor and regulate GMOs. What 
confidence can we, the consuming public, have that our regulatory 
authority is effectively fulfilling this role in an independent and 
transparent fashion?
 
Concerned scientists have long since warned that commercialisation of GM 
plants is premature given the attendant uncertainties and imprecision of 
genetic crop modification. The impact of these “mistakes” in producing 
these GM maize crops was smoothed out this time by compensation from 
Monsanto to affected commercial farmers. How might other mistakes impact 
on farmers and consumers and who will pay the price? What steps has 
Monsanto taken to protect the interests and reimburse the loss of 
affected resource poor farmers? These and other questions remain unanswered.
 
WE, THE CONCERNED PUBLIC, CALL ON OUR GOVERNMENT TO MAKE PUBLIC WHAT IT 
KNOWS ABOUT THE CROP FAILURES AND TO SUPPORT THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A 
PANEL OF INDEPENDENT EXPERTS TO INVESTIGATE THESE CROP FAILURES AND ACT 
AS A MONITORING BODY FOR ALL GMOS RELEASED INTO OUR ENVIRONMENT.
Please distribute through your networks!
 
Click here to sign on
http://www.activist.co.za/campaigns/2009/investigategm.php
 


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From: pbond at mail.ngo.za
CC: 
To: 
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 13:00:51 +0200
Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) G20 deconstruction (by Paul Cammack)

(What we've been awaiting: a total demolition job of G20 rhetoric... now 
up to us to demolish the reality!)
 
All Power to Global Capital!
 
Paul Cammack
 
Manchester Metropolitan University
 
Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, No. 10
ISSN: 1755-6740 (online)
 
All Power to Global Capital!
Paul Cammack
 
It is one of the key precepts of the 'political economy of reform' that 
every crisis is an opportunity to be exploited to drive reform forward. 
True to form, the international organisations and their G-20 allies have 
used the current crisis to their advantage. They have greatly reinforced 
the power of the IMF in particular, with the intention of tightening 
further the disciplinary power of capital, in line with a project under 
way for two decades. In this context, proposals to introduce an 
unconditional IMF Flexible Credit Line and to democratise the Bretton 
Woods institutions are traps for the unwary. Rather than empowering the 
poor in the developing world they legitimise and intensify mechanisms 
that subject them to closer control and exploitation by capital. The 
response of the IFIs to the global crisis - highly successful so far - 
has taken the form of a carefully staged illusion dependent on the 
magician's art of misdirection. However, their own recent publications, 
analysed here, give their secrets away. As a general rule, the more 
progressive these proposals for reform seem to be, the more dangerous 
they are.
 
Introduction: 'IMF is back!'
 
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, was jubilant in 
the wake of the recent G-20 Summit: Maybe some of you were in the IMF 
press conference at the end of the Annual Meeting last October. And if 
some of you were there, then you may remember that what I said at that 
time is that IMF is back. Today you get the proof when you read the 
communiqué, each paragraph, or almost each paragraph - let's say the 
important ones - are in one way or another related to IMF work (IMF,
2009d).
 
He was right, as has been widely recognised. The return of the IMF to a 
central role in the governance of global capitalism is the result of a 
carefully orchestrated process which has been going on behind the scenes 
within the IMF itself and between the IMF, other international 
organisations such as the OECD and the World Bank, and the UK government 
in particular over the last eighteen months - sketched out at the London 
G20 meeting and elaborated upon at the April 2009 Spring Meetings of the 
IMF and the World Bank. These recent developments build in turn on a 
longer-term project, under way since the late 1980s, aimed at promoting 
capitalism on a global scale - one that incidentally bears little 
resemblance to the 'Washington Consensus' which critics of the Bretton 
Woods institutions commonly denounce.
 
This paper argues that an inadequate understanding of the character of 
the project is dangerous, because it leads to a fatal misinterpretation 
of the significance of the principal proposals currently being put 
forward. Specifically, the two developments that have been promoted and 
cautiously accepted by some as the most progressive - the elimination of 
conditionality in the IMF's new Flexible Credit Line, and the plans for 
strengthened representation of developing and emerging economies in the 
IMF and the World Bank - are the most insidious.
 
The Global Project
 
The widely accepted notion of the 'Washington Consensus' - often reduced 
to a formula of privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation, or the 
subordination of states to markets - never captured the essential 
components of the development strategies promoted by the IMF and the 
World Bank from the late 1980s onwards, for two reasons. First, it made 
no reference to the central idea of the project - that, to quote the 
1990 World Development Report, the only route to the abolition of 
poverty was to "promote the productive use of the poor's most abundant 
asset - labor" (World Bank, 1990: 3). The engagement of the world's poor 
in productive labour (or the creation of a genuinely global proletariat) 
has remained the central objective of the project ever since. Second, it 
gave the impression that the project was focused exclusively on what may 
variously be called poor and middle income countries, developing 
societies or 'emerging economies'. Yet in precisely the same period a 
parallel strategy was promoted - principally by the EU and the OECD - 
for the developed economies as a group, and the member countries of the 
European Union in particular. This strategy, spelled out in the EU's 
1993 White Paper on Competitiveness and the OECD Jobs Strategy of 1994, 
and reflected today in the EU 'Lisbon Agenda for Growth and Jobs' and 
the OECD's annual series Going for Growth, has exactly the same focus on 
the need for an active state that promotes integration into the global 
capitalist economy, competitive product markets, and in particular the 
maximisation of the number of people in work and the productivity of 
their labour. The key theme running through all of these proposals is 
not privatisation, or liberalisation, or deregulation, but 
competitiveness - the creation of national environments characterised by 
competitive product and labour markets, in a global system regulated in 
such a way as to boost the level of competition on a global scale 
(Cammack, 2006).
 
Underpinning these initiatives, then, is not a project for the 
developing world, or the emerging economies, or the developed world, but 
a universal project aimed at maximising the level of competitiveness 
throughout the global capitalist economy. I characterise its underlying 
objective, therefore, as 'universal convergence on competitiveness'.1 It 
is a global project, promoted principally by and through the 
international organisations. Its principal precepts, in brief, are that 
national governments should not be passive in the face of the market but 
should maintain macro-economic stability, while directing spending 
towards social safety nets and infrastructure programmes that favour the 
creation of productive jobs; that they should also provide basic 
programmes of health and education, while engaging the private sector 
extensively in financing and delivering services; that they should 
support the private sector and maintain a 'good climate for investment'; 
and that they should take ownership of the project, rejecting 
protectionism and committing to open goods and capital markets. At the 
same time, donors, whether international organisations, governments, or 
NGOs, should coordinate their activity, and should increase the aid 
directed to these ends; and the multilateral institutions should lead 
the global project. All of these elements, spelled out years ago in the 
World Development Reports of 1990 and 1991 (World Bank, 1990, 1991; 
Cammack, 2002), will be familiar to anyone who has been engaged in 
development work or debate over the period. It is striking, therefore, 
that the 2009 Global Monitoring Report presented by the World Bank and 
the IMF to the 2009 Spring Meeting, prefaced by the new mantra that "a 
global crisis requires a global solution", continues to promote exactly 
the same programme (Box 1).
 
***
 
Box 1: Priorities for Action in the World Bank/IMF 2009 Global 
Monitoring Report
 
The report sets out six priority areas for action to confront the 
development emergency that now faces many of these countries. First, we 
must ensure an adequate fiscal response in developing countries to 
protect the poor and vulnerable groups and to support economic growth. 
Priority areas must be strengthening social safety nets and protecting 
infrastructure programs that can create jobs while building a foundation 
for future productivity and growth.
 
The precise fiscal response needs to be tailored to individual country 
circumstances, consistent with maintenance of macroeconomic stability. 
Second, we must provide support for the private sector and improve the 
climate for recovery and growth in private investment, including paying 
special attention to strengthening financial systems. Helping small and 
medium enterprises get access to finance for trade and investment is 
vital for job creation. But the crisis has also underscored the 
importance of broader reforms to improve the stability and soundness of 
the financial system. Third, we must redouble efforts in human 
development and recover lost ground in progress toward the MDGs. We can 
do this not only by strengthening key public programs for health and 
education, but also by better leveraging the private sector's role in 
the financing and delivery of services.
 
In support of these efforts to help developing countries, the report 
emphasizes three key global priorities. Donors must deliver on their 
commitments to increase aid. Indeed, the increased needs of poor 
countries hit hard by the crisis call for going beyond existing commitments.
 
National governments must hold firm against rising protectionist 
pressures and maintain an open international trade and finance system. 
Completing the Doha negotiations expeditiously would provide a 
much-needed boost in confidence to the global economy at a time of high 
stress and uncertainty. Finally, multilateral institutions must have the 
mandate, resources, and instruments to support an effective global 
response to the global crisis. The international financial institutions 
will need to play a key role in bridging the large financing gap for 
developing countries resulting from the slump in private capital flows, 
including using their leverage ability to help revive private flows.
Source: World Bank, Global Monitoring Report 2009: A Development 
Emergency, p. xii.
 
***
 
In short, far from backing off from the aim of subjecting all peoples to 
the disciplines of the world market, the IFIs have seized the 
opportunity to advance it. Three conclusions emerge: first, the project 
pursued by the international financial institutions is part of a broader 
global project addressed as much to the developed as the developing 
world; second, its focus is on promoting competitiveness at national and 
global levels, with the emphasis upon maximising the number of people in 
work and the productivity of their labour; and third, the IFIs have 
seized the opportunity of the current crisis to press ahead with the 
project. The need for more effective regulation of global financial 
markets has been recognised, but the objective behind it is to set the 
project on a sounder footing, not to revise let alone abandon it.
 
'An Opportunity to Make Progress on Seemingly Intractable Issues'
 
The international organisations have been united, most noticeably when 
the heads of the ILO, IMF, OECD, World Bank and WTO all joined Angela 
Merkel in Berlin on 5 February 2009, in their conviction that this is "a 
global crisis [that] needs global solutions" (Presseund Informationsamt 
der Bundesregierung, 2009), and quick to put themselves forward to 
provide them. IMF Executive Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and World 
Bank President Robert Zoellick have been the most active both in public 
and behind the scenes, along with OECD Executive Secretary Angel Gurría, 
the originator of the suggestion that the international organisations 
should position themselves as "strategic partners in the political 
economy of reform" (OECD, 2007: 5). In the run-up to the G-20 summit 
their constant refrain was that there should be no going back on global 
capitalism. In this scenario the potential villains were not only the 
usual suspects - populists and anticapitalists - but also governments, 
whether pushed by popular protest or spurred by hope of national 
advantage. The spectre the international organisations evoked was 
protectionism, the self-defeating beggar-my-neighbour policies 
identified with depression, fascism, and world war. And they professed 
to hold out an alternative vision of "a stronger, cleaner and fairer 
economy", in which "the needs of poor countries and vulnerable 
populations" would be addressed (ibid).2 The strategic thinking behind 
their campaign is spelled out clearly in an IMF document produced in 
February 2009: Initial Lessons of the Crisis for the Global Architecture 
and the IMF. Its most telling passage comes in the last paragraph, which 
reads as follows: Bottom line. The crisis has revealed flaws in key 
dimensions of the current global architecture, but also provides a 
unique opportunity to fix them. On the flaws, surveillance needs to be 
reoriented to ensure warnings are clear, successfully connect the dots, 
and provide practical advice to policy makers. An effective forum for 
policy makers with the ability and mandate to take leadership in 
responding to systemic concerns about the international economy is key. 
Ground rules for cross-border finance need to be strengthened. And, 
given the growing size of international transactions, resources 
available for liquidity support and easing external adjustment should 
augmented and processes for using them better defined so they are more 
readily available when needed. These are all ambitious undertakings. But 
the damage wrought by the crisis provides an opportunity to make 
progress on seemingly intractable issues. The moment should not be 
missed (IMF 2009a: 13).
 
For the IMF, then, the crisis represents an opportunity to perfect the 
'global architecture', by improving its powers of surveillance and 
policy influence and increasing the resources behind them. The document 
begins not with a careful consideration of the merits or otherwise of 
the policies promoted in recent years, but with the assertion that the 
traction of IMF surveillance (its ability to persuade governments to 
listen to and act upon its advice) needs to be improved (ibid: 1). 
Accepting the failure of the organisation to identify in time the level 
of systemic risk, it goes on to call for "a less fragmented and more 
pointed surveillance system" (ibid: 6), with a focus as much on the 
advanced as the emerging economies. It traces a "lack of global policy 
coordination" to "the absence of an effective forum where relevant 
policy makers could actively engage", and criticises the split between 
the IMF Board on the one hand, and the "purely advisory" International 
Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) of "ministers and [Central Bank] 
governors with the power to act" (ibid: 7) on the other. According to 
this analysis, individual governments tended to respond to the crisis 
with unilateral measures, rather than in a collaborative and coordinated 
manner - and when the need for cooperation was finally recognised it 
came, regrettably, through the "improvised" mechanism of the G-20 meeting
(November 2008), rather than through the the IMF, "the institution 
mandated to coordinate efforts to preserve global financial stability" 
(ibid: 8). For the Fund to reclaim this role, the Report concludes, it 
needs to address "deficits in ownership and effectiveness"; and the 
crisis presents an opportunity: Coordination inherently constrains the 
freedom of action of governments; thus it is understandable that they 
only engage in it sparingly, as a matter of necessity. But crises are 
opportunities to overcome this resistance and progress to building more 
coordination into the international architecture. … Unlike alternative 
groupings, the Fund has the mandate, analytical wherewithal and 
institutional capacity to play this role, but reforms are clearly needed 
(ibid: 8, emphasis in the original).
 
It is this logic which underpins the call which follows immediately for 
the reform of quota shares, and representation on the Board and the 
IMFC. In addition, the report proposes "a high profile forum for focused 
interactive deliberations and policy follow-up" for IMFC ministers and 
governors, along with other governance reforms intended to make the Fund 
"a trusted actor at the center of the system" (ibid: 9). Significantly, 
it takes a low-key approach to improving cross-border financial 
regulation (despite its centrality to the current crisis), accepting 
that "a harmonized bank resolution regime may prove ambitious", and that 
"fundamental improvements in the institutional and legal setting - 
culminating in a binding code of conduct across nations - would largely 
be a political task beyond the capacities of regulators and supervisors" 
(ibid: 10). It turns its energy instead to the case for increased 
resources for the Fund. The issues identified here are the absence of 
standing dollar liquidity facilities, the absence of any large insurance 
mechanism for emerging market countries, and the stigma of fund lending: 
"it is no secret that members resist approaching the Fund for financing 
due to the political stigma of such borrowing" (ibid: 11): This points 
to the need to tailor the Fund's lending from general resources to the 
varying strength of members' policies and fundamentals by reforming 
conditionality and to allow flexibility on access levels and repayment 
terms in lending instruments that are designed to meet any type of 
external problem'. Consideration should be given to establishing an 
effective crisis prevention instrument catering to highperforming 
members. For other members, the scope for access to high-access 
precautionary arrangements should be clarified (ibid: 12, emphasis mine).
 
It is clear, then, that the proposal for a new crisis prevention 
instrument "to provide assurances to members with a strong policy track 
record and sound fundamentals of rapid, large and upfront access to Fund 
resources with no ex post conditionality" (ibid) is not a waiving of 
conditionality, but a form of advance conditionality aimed to support 
and protect already unconditional adherents to the global project. It 
complements the second leg of the system, the used of strategically 
targeted conditionality to exploit an external crisis to leverage 
desired reforms from lower-tier countries "that do not qualify for the 
new instrument". The whole scheme depends upon securing "resources 
commensurate to the magnitude of the problems at issue" (ibid: 13), and 
the report makes that its final point, immediately before the concluding 
paragraph quoted in full above (p. 6).
 
Three further conclusions emerge at this point: first, the IMF has been 
explicit in its identification of the crisis as an opportunity to 
restore its influence and the resources available to it, and thereby 
advance its global project; second, the proposed reforms to 
representation and conditionality are seen as essential means to these 
ends; and third, the proposed Flexible Credit Line is not a waiving of 
conditionality but a reward for unconditionality - unconditional 
adherence to the global project. The Flexible Credit Line, approved by 
the IMF Board on 24 March, was described as "designed to provide large 
and upfront financing to members with very strong fundamentals and 
policies", with the added comment that "as access to the FCL is 
restricted to those members that meet strict qualification criteria, 
drawings under it are not tied to policy goals agreed with the country" 
(IMF, 2009e). The report of the Committee on IMF Governance Reform 
(chaired by another 'unconditional', South Africa Finance Minister 
Trevor Manuel), was published at the same time, its brief stated as 
being "to come up with a broad package of reform measures that would 
help bring the Fund back to the centre of the world economy" (Manuel, 2009).
 
The Art of Misdirection: the G-20 Meeting (April 2009)
 
World Bank President Robert Zoellick ran through the emerging IFI script 
on 31 March, just prior to the G-20 meeting, at Canary Wharf, at the 
heart of London's financial centre, - beginning with the obligatory 
evocation of St. John Maynard Keynes, newly beatified as the patron 
saint of global capitalism,3 and going on to call for new powers for the 
multilaterals across the board: "a WTO monitoring system to advance 
trade and resist economic isolationism, while working to complete the 
Doha negotiations to open markets, cut subsidies, and resist 
backsliding"; "a monitoring role for the IMF, to review the execution of 
.. stimulus packages and assess results, calling for further action if 
necessary"; IMF and World Bank Group monitoring of actions and results 
in the banking sector, with financial sector assessments to be extended 
to developed countries, "with the results published, taken seriously, 
and followed up"; an overhaul of the financial regulatory and 
supervisory system" in which "most of the actual authority over 
regulation will rest with national governments", but within which an 
expanded FSF "could become another important institution of a stronger 
multilateral system, working with the IMF and the World Bank Group on 
implementation"; and a global fund to support developing countries, "to 
invest in infrastructure projects that can create jobs while building a 
foundation for future productivity and growth".4 Behind the scenes at 
the Cabinet Office, in the meantime, the emphasis in the run-up to the 
G-20 Summit was equally on the need to extend the powers of surveillance 
of the international organisations, led by the IMF, and to use the 
opportunity afforded by the crisis and the Summit to press ahead with 
the promotion of competitiveness. The Final Report of Working Group 3, 
set up in November to consider the reform of the IMF, reaffirmed the 
central role of the organisation, and called for the strengthening of 
its surveillance function (G-20, 2009b: 5). The fuller Co-Chairs' Issues 
Paper attached to the Report spoke of the need for an institution that 
"provides support to countries facing balance of payments difficulties 
so that they can avoid policy responses with adverse effects on other 
countries" (ibid: 13), and stressed the need for confidence-boosting 
results: To deliver a confidence boosting message at the G-20 London 
Summit, it will be important to identify and build consensus around 
concrete measures which demonstrate, particularly in the context of the 
crisis, that the Fund will operate more effectively (ibid: 14, para. 34).
 
This approach (known as 'quick wins' in the jargon of the political 
economy of reform) reflected the central strategic goal of restoring the 
authority and legitimacy of the IMF. In the same vein, the Co-Chairs' 
paper reflected that the IMF "does not have the power to compel 
nation-states to act in accordance with the IMF Board's conclusions" 
(ibid: 13), and noted both concurrent IMF consideration of the 
"hesitancy by some emerging market countries to approach the Fund 
because of the stigma associated with a Fund program" (ibid: 20), and 
"calls for Fund staff and management to be more independent in the 
conduct of surveillance and engage more directly in 'ruthless 
truth-telling'" (ibid: 26).
 
Here and elsewhere, the Report of Working Party 3 endorsed the parallel 
discussions taking place within the IMF itself, equally envisaging a 
stronger IMF within which poorer and emerging economies would feel 
greater ownership, and in which backsliders would be firmly admonished 
while it would be made easier for star pupils in temporary difficulty to 
approach the Fund for support. The parallel Final Report of Working 
Party 4, on the World Bank and the Multilateral Banks, focused on the 
need to help low-income countries "protect development expenditures in 
key areas such as health, education, nutrition and safety nets", while 
otherwise promoting the leveraging of private sector finance, including 
"assisting investors from developed and emerging economies willing to 
invest in poorer countries during difficult times" (G-20, 2009c: 9-10) - 
again explicitly endorsing the global project outlined above.
 
It was no surprise, then, that the measures announced at the end of the 
summit not only made new resources available to the IMF, but also 
invited it to assess the actions taken and required to restore growth 
(para. 10), and called for "candid, even-handed, and independent IMF 
surveillance of our economies and financial sectors, of the impact of 
our policies upon others, and of risks facing the global economy" (para. 
12). As noted above, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn could 
scarcely contain his glee at the turnaround in the organisation's 
fortunes - indeed, he had difficulty remembering every element in the 
goody bag that had fallen into his lap (IMF, 2009d).
 
However, the public language in which the outcomes were announced 
differed substantially from the private deliberations that had preceded 
the summit. The final communiqué spoke of "the needs and jobs of 
hard-working families, not just in the developed countries but in 
emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too",
11 and held out the prospect of a "fair and sustainable world economy" 
(G-20, 2009a: paras 3 and 25). The emphasis was placed upon providing 
short-term support to prevent the crisis from wreaking havoc on poor and 
emerging economies. Gordon Brown went further, and announced in his 
closing press conference that The old Washington consensus is over. 
Today we have reached a new consensus - that we take global action 
together to deal with the problems we face; that we will do what is 
necessary to restore growth and jobs; that we will take essential action 
to rebuild confidence and trust in our financial system, and to prevent 
a crisis such as this ever happening again (Brown, 2009).
 
Quite what Brown (or his speech-writers) understood by this claim is 
open to speculation. But it was part of a concerted effort to portray 
the summit outcomes as a break with a neoliberal past and an act of 
benevolence towards the poor and the developing world, while less widely 
circulated briefings addressed to the global policy community 
highlighted the new role envisaged for the IFIs (Ishwaran, 2009).
 
According to some commentators, the Summit did little to address the 
crisis (Bretton Woods Project, 2009; Financial Times, 2009; Giles, 2009; 
Landler, 2009, Munchau, 2009; Wall Street Journal, 2009). And indeed, 
the gathered leaders failed to agree a new fiscal stimulus to boost 
global demand, or to restart the stalled Doha trade round. They did 
nothing about the mass of worthless assets dispersed through the global 
financial system, nothing of consequence to impose new regulations on 
the financial sector, and nothing to reverse the old and new 
protectionism across the developed and developing world.
 
Did nothing much happen, then? On the contrary, what was pulled off at 
the Summit was a stunningly successful illusion - a classic piece of 
misdirection (the magician's practice of directing attention away from 
the key moves upon which the surreptitious achievement of the desired 
outcome depends) which affected to signal a change of course and offer 
relief to poor and emerging economies, but in fact confirmed and 
reinforced the ruthless logic of capitalist competitiveness on a global 
scale.5 At this point, then, three further conclusions impose 
themselves. First, the IMF and the World Bank succeeded, perhaps beyond 
their expectations, in imposing their agenda on the G-20 Summit; second, 
they did so, in large measure, because of the support they received from 
Gordon Brown and the Cabinet Office, who acted consistently to further 
the IFI project; third, in part by trading on the misleading notion of 
the 'Washington Consensus', the protagonists were able to pass off the 
intensification of their neoliberal global project as a break with it. 
And as with all successful illusions, this one benefited from the 
planting of willing accomplices in the audience - in this case, three 
Mexican stooges.
 
The Three (Mexican) Stooges
 
According to an online Magicians Dictionary, a stooge is an 'audience 
member who is actually planted as part of the act and who acts in a 
cooperative manner with the magician' 
(http://www.glossarycentral.com/magic/stooge.html). There were three 
such stooges at the G-20 Summit, Mexico's President, Felipe Calderón, 
Finance Minister, Agustín Carstens, and Central Bank Governor Guillermo 
Ortiz Martinez. They had a history. Calderón had hosted World Bank 
President Robert Zoellick, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn 
and Interamerican Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno at the 
First Meeting of Latin American and Caribbean Finance Ministers in 
Cancún in June 2008. He used the occasion to parade his credentials as 
an IMF-World Bank poster child, and to call for increased powers for the 
international financial organisations.6 Ortiz was a former Mexican 
ambassador to the IMF; and Carstens, present in Cancún as well as at the 
G-20 Summit, was Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, no less, from 
2003-2006 before he left to join Calderón's campaign team and 
government, and the current chair of the influential IMF-World Bank 
Development Committee which produced the report cited on p. 4 above. 
Echoing Gurría's view of the OECD as a strategic partner of 
decision-makers in the political economy of reform', Carstens, while in 
office as IMF Deputy Managing Director, had described the Fund as 
"charged with helping countries to take difficult decisions in the 
macroeconomic arena" (Carstens, 2004). He now played his part in a 
carefully prepared coup de théâtre: the announcement that Mexico would 
be the first country to sign up to the IMF's new Flexible Credit Line. 
And, word-perfect with the new script, he celebrated the agreement as an 
endorsement of the soundness of Mexico's economy and its policy stance, 
turning the idea of a 'stigma' attached to recourse to the IMF on its 
head.7 One final conclusion: at the heart of the G-20 meeting was a 
painstakingly mounted and breathtakingly audacious illusion, and the 
carefully rehearsed and scripted introduction of the Flexible Credit 
Line, with a team of unconditional Mexican supporters of the IMF and its 
policies primed to volunteer for it, put the finishing touch to it. And 
the lesson? The servants of global capital are not to be underestimated.
 
Breaking the Code
 
To see through the illusion that threatens to restore and perpetuate the 
power of global capital, one needs to break the multilaterals' code - or 
to locate their current proposals within the broader project, under way 
for two decades, to force the pace of development of capitalism on a 
global scale. Its logic of 'universal convergence on competitiveness' 
differs from the Washington Consensus not because it has replaced it, 
but because the Washington Consensus was a partial synthesis that did 
not capture the strategy espoused by the World Bank, the EBRD, the EU 
and the OECD in the early 1990s - one that took the macro-economic 
discipline promoted by the IMF as an essential startingpoint, but went 
beyond it to insist on the need for micro-structural reform in product 
and labour markets, along with widespread changes in taxation and 
welfare policies, in order to prompt the structural and behavioural 
changes in the developed and developing world that would embed the 
disciplines of capitalist competitiveness everywhere.
 
Wherever one looks, then, one finds a consistent perspective aimed at 
furthering the development of capitalism on a global scale. Fundamental 
to this project was the revamping of the international organisations, in 
order to enhance their disciplinary power.
 
The international organisations in focus here have long been committed 
to a global perspective whose logic is the promotion of forms of 
competitiveness at national level which simultaneously enhance 
competitiveness in the global capitalist economy. The objective is that 
the disciplines of capitalist competitiveness, actively promoted and 
superintended by states, should be introduced and deeply embedded on a 
global scale.
 
They have struggled to assert themselves, but their project has been 
substantially furthered by their concerted response to the current 
crisis. The slogan around which they have united - All Power to Global 
Capital - points the way clearly to the terms on which opposition must 
be mounted.
 
***
 
NOTES
 
1 The Washington Consensus as described by Williamson highlighted nine 
key features: fiscal discipline, tax reform, financial liberalisation, 
competitive exchange rates, trade liberalisation, free entry and equal 
conditions for foreign direct investment, privatisation of state 
enterprises, deregulation, and secure property rights. In contrast, the 
ten principal elements of the Universal Convergence on Competitiveness 
are as follows: All countries must pursue competitiveness in the global 
economy; country ownership is essential; international institutions are 
'strategic partners in the political economy of reform'; their task is 
to promote national reforms that contribute simultaneously to national 
and global competitiveness; sound macro-economic policies are still the 
indispensable starting point; beyond that, governments must create and 
maintain a good climate for investment; it must then provide an abundant 
and productive labour force; public expenditure should be directed to 
growthsupporting infrastructure and accelerated human capital formation; 
entrepreneurship and innovation should be promoted at all levels; and 
there should be a particular focus on the empowerment of women.
 
 
2 The final point (Point 5) of the Berlin press release read: "The 
financial crisis and the global economic downturn have had far-reaching 
effects, especially on developing countries. Against this background, it 
is more important than ever that the inter-national community remain 
committed to its goals of fighting poverty and promoting economic 
development in poorer countries, thereby resolutely advancing the 
implementation of the Millennium Development Goals in particular. We 
welcome the new crisis-facilities launched by the World Bank Group for 
trade finance, infrastructure, bank recapitalization, and microfinance 
and support its ongoing work to ensure that all regions of the world can 
share in long-term, global prosperity."
 
3 "Keynes wanted to save the market economy and feared the political 
consequences - in an era of Communism and Fascism - of failing to do so. 
His calls to overcome narrow interest went unheeded. Governments reacted 
ineffectively to the Depression. Countries indulged in competitive 
beggar-thyneighbor policies. And catastrophe came."
 
4 The full paragraph in which this proposal was advanced read as 
follows: "During the 1997-98 crisis, China's investments in roads, 
ports, airports, energy, and telecommunications supported employment 
while boosting growth over the next decade. With financial support and 
good governance, other countries can do the same, building productive 
capacity to pay back loans. As they do so, developing countries will 
boost global demand, including for capital goods and services from 
developed countries. Indeed, investments in infrastructure in developing 
countries probably have a greater potential to boost productivity and 
growth than "bridges to nowhere" in developed economies".
5 The logic of enforcement of a politics of global competitiveness was 
apparent in advice addressed to the G-20 in a volume produced jointly by 
the Atlantic Council and the Royal Institute for International Affairs 
(Chatham House): "The IMF (helped by the World Bank and OECD) needs to 
re-engage in structural issues. Countries with looming pension or 
health-care imbalances, barriers to productivity growth and 
competitiveness, and poor environments for doing business need to come 
up with concrete commitments to change. The IMF is not equipped to do 
this on its own. Rather, crisis teams including the World Bank and OECD 
will need to work off the example of collaboration on Financial Sector 
Assessment Programmes to construct structural recovery programmes" 
(Schadler, 2009: 42).
 
6 "Nuestros países enfrentan el reto de remover los obstáculos que 
frenan el crecimiento y la competitividad. Por eso en México estamos 
impulsando reformas estructurales que fortalecen los cimientos de 
nuestro desarrollo a futuro. … Para cumplir con los objetivos comunes de 
nuestra agenda, de crecimiento económico con justicia, los organismos 
financieros internacionales tienen un importante papel que jugar como 
aliados que puedan proporcionar asesoría valiosa, financiamiento y 
liderazgo, precisamente al abordar esos problemas. Mas allá de la 
indispensable reforma de las instituciones globales, es fundamental que 
éstas sean capaces de articular en el presente un mayor liderazgo ante 
las nuevas circunstancias de la economía mundial" (Calderón, 2008). See 
also Herrera Beltrán and Gonzalez Amador, 2008.
 
7 As Carstens told Mexican journalists in London: "México fue 
considerado para esta línea de crédito, porque se caracteriza por un 
manejo de política económica sólida y cuenta con una estructura 
económica en las mismas condiciones. Destacó que esta es la primera vez 
que el Fondo Monetario Internacional ofrece cerca de 50 mil milliones de 
dólares sin condicionalidad, lo que representa que es 'un tributo' a la 
fortaleza de la economía mexicana" (El Mañana, 2009).
 
Further Reading
 
I have not burdened the text or the argument here with excessive 
references to theoretical sources. But for those interested, I would 
recommend Braunmühl (1978), Burnham (1994) and Holloway (1994), along 
with Cammack (2002, 2003, 2006) for my own approach.
 
References
 
Braunmühl, Claudia von (1978) On the Analysis of the Bourgeois Nation 
State within the World Market Context', In John Holloway and Sol 
Piccioto, eds, State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London: Edward Arnold).
 
Bretton Woods Project (2009) 'G20 'trillion' dollar magic trick: reforms 
remain house of cards', 3 April, at 
http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-564159, accessed 9 April.
 
Brown, Gordon (2009) 'Transcript of G-20 press conference given by the 
Prime Minister in London on Thursday, 2 April 2009' at 
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18934.
 
Burnham, Peter (1994) 'Open Marxism and Vulgar International Political 
Economy', Review of International Political Economy, 1: 2, 221-231.
 
Calderón, Felipe (2008) 'El Presidente Calderón en la Cena Inaugural del 
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Caribe', Cancún, 23 June, at 
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accessed 7 April.
 
Cammack, Paul (2002). 'Attacking the Poor', New Left Review, 2/13, 
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Cammack, Paul (2003). 'The Governance of Global Capitalism', Historical 
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Cammack, Paul, (2006). 'The Politics of Global Competitiveness', Papers 
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Carstens, Agustín (2004) 'Remarks by Agustín Carstens', WCC-World 
Bank-IMF High- Level Encounter, Geneva, 22 October, at 
http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/
2004/102204a.htm El Mañana (2009) 'Carstens: Crédito del FMI no 
compromete política económica', 1 April, at 
http://www.elmanana.com.mx/notas.asp?id=113044, accessed 7 April.
 
Financial Times (2009) 'The first bricks in a new world order', 
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G-20 (2009a) The Global Plan for Recovery and Reform, Final Communiqué, 
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Giles, Chris (2009) 'G-20 has little impact on global economics', 
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IMF (2009e) 'IMF Overhauls Nonconcessional Lending Facilities and 
Conditionality', Public Information Notice (PIN) 09/40, 3 April.
 
Ishwaran, Mallika (2009) 'The London Summit: International Financial 
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http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3416, accessed 4 April.
 
Landler, Mark (2009) 'Parsing the G-20's $1 Trillion Pledge', New York 
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accessed 7 April.
 
Manuel, Trevor (2009) Cover letter from Mr Trevor Manuel to Mr Dominique 
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Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness Institute for Global 
Studies Manchester Metropolitan University e-space Open Access 
Repository http://e-space.openrepository.com/e-space/ ISSN: 1755-6740 
(online) Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness
1. The Politics of Global Competitiveness Paul Cammack Nov 2006
2. UN Imperialism: unleashing entrepreneurship in the developing world 
Paul Cammack Dec 2006
3. Forget the Transnational State Paul Cammack Jan 2007
4. Class Politics, Competitiveness, and the Developmental State Paul 
Cammack Feb 2007
5. Competitiveness and Convergence: the Open Method of Coordination in 
Latin America Paul Cammack March 2007
6. Competitiveness, Social Justice, and the Third Way Paul Cammack April 
2007
7. RIP IPE Paul Cammack May 2007
8. Competitiveness and the New Labour Project Alex Nunn Oct 2007
9. Restructuring the English Working Class for Global Competitiveness 
Alex Nunn May 2008 © Paul Cammack 2009. May not be used for commercial 
purposes. May be freely copied and distributed provided that the 
original author is given credit.
 
Cite as: Paul Cammack, 'All Power to Global Capital!', Papers in the 
Politics of Global Competitiveness, No. 10, Institute for Global 
Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, e-space Open Access 
Repository, 2009.
 
This document was produced using Open Office Writer, an Open Source 
programme which is part of the Open Office Suite 
(http://www.openoffice.org) Papers in the Politics of Global 
Competitiveness, No. 10
 

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