>Does anybody have any view on the West's apparent attempts to extinguish
>much of the >third world debt?
Yes, it's exactly that -- "apparent".
It's like a slave-driver on a Roman galley giving the rowers a day without
the whip, so they won't die on him. Sometimes the regime is "humane", like
this, and when sailors were given limes or pomegranates to keep them in
working nick, and sometimes not, when there are so many slaves that it
didn't matter one way or the other -- the Africans being transported to the
slave colonies, the poor sods digging the Panama Canal, etc.
And there's always some kind of alternation going on between bloodthirsty
repression and concessions to the masses. Except, interestingly enough,
under Stalinism, where, say, Chrushchovite or Gorbachovite concessions
hardly got started before they ended up in the Hungarian revolution on the
one hand and capitalist restoration (for lack of revolutionary working
class leadership) on the other.
So a workers state with a bureaucratic regime will tolerate concessions to
capital (see China and Cuba) but not concessions to the interests of the
working masses.
But note that these interests are materially served by the workers state as
such, as long as it survives. The citizen's place in the production set up
is guaranteed by the constitution, any unemployment or banishment from
production is a brutal violation of the foundations of the state, requiring
a huge oppressive apparatus to perpetuate. The kind of "concessions" in
question here are not the material ones of capitalism (not in the same way,
anyhow) but the political ones of organization and socialist democracy.
As for the debt, it's not the actual absolute figures that matter, but the
relation of indebtedness and dependency. There's no attempt at all on the
part of the West to do anything in the slightest about this, the root cause
of the "debt problem". The only answer is to do it the Latin American
revolutionary way (ie not Castro's or Lula's or the Sao Paulo forum's way)
and demand the Non-Payment of the Foreign Debt -- and the Domestic Debt too
while you're at it.
And this of course demands the full support of those of us in imperialist
countries. We're defeatist about the solvency and prosperity of "our"
financial institutions and companies. They have no solutions. We do. And
our solutions involve their abolition. Poof, gone!
Cheers,
Hugh
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