Capitalism and imperialism
a Yemen that, sitting adjacent to oil trade routes, is influenced by Iran. For the USA, the support of whichever faction in the Middle East comes out on top, with the most control over oil supply and trade routes, as well as with the most political influence over its neighbours, is important to protect supplies of oil to the USA, and to protect their markets for arms exports.
Marshall Plan
After the Second World War, Congress signed a bill to allocate $13bn ($155bn in today’s money) to rebuild Europe. About 24% of that money went to Britain, then 20% to France, around 11% each to Italy and West Germany (in total, 16 European countries were recipients). The Marshall Plan has, for some obvious reasons, become a symbol of great American generosity. However, upon reflection, and even at the time, there were serious misgivings. What actually happened was that the funds were a small amount that neither started nor sustained the recovery. This is not the primary problem. The primary problems are what it did do. It served to implement American finance capital at the heart of Europe, and established the basis of today’s multin ational corporations by giving US companies contracts to expand their services in Europe. It acted to counteract the growth of European finance capital in America, because the European bourgeoisie had been investing in growing US industry and in New York banks. It resulted in the rebuilding of western European armies, allied to the USA, which were there to intimidate the Soviet Union and to prevent communist uprisings in western Europe. Pre- war, communist movements were pretty widespread in western Europe, and they played a significant role in liberating Europe from fascist clutches, especially in France and Italy. The Americans set up CIA propaganda fronts to counteract communist rhetoric, as in the case of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist group exposed as CIA-funded in 1966. European states were forced to comply with Washington’s line for fear of the aid being revoked or because of the financial pressure posed by loans. Indeed, today, western Europe follows the foreign policy of the USA, and is dominated by US finance capital, which own significant portions of most industries. Whatever else it did, the Marshall Plan was effective at establishing American, bourgeois power on the European continent.
The IMF
Today, loans of the IMF do similar things to the Marshall Plan, and they bring about debt traps. It is worth asking: who owns the IMF? Jacob Lew, former Treasury Secretary of the USA, said in 2015 that the USA had a ‘leadership role’ in the IMF and, indeed, we know that the USA has, b y far, the most influence. The IMF assigns voting power based on a country’s role in the world economy, which inevitably means that it will always serve to protect the interest of the richest countries and their own bourgeois classes. The Director, always a member of the European political and financial elite, runs the show with the First Deputy, always an American citizen. The Americans even have influence over individual deals between the IMF and various nations, and the IMF’s political and economic line is their line. The IMF is the tool by which the USA forces nations to adopt free-market policies, leaving their economies vulnerable to American finance capital and multinational corporations who exploit them.
To give one example, Zambia’s ‘Structural Adjustment Plan’ reduced life expectancy, almost doubled infant mortality, increased poverty, and led to a decline in clean water access. 98.1% of the population was living on under $2 a day in 1998. Zambians could not tolerate this for long, and responded as, I
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