21 Oct 2024

IMF runs into deepening debt crisis and contradictions of global capitalism

Nick Beams


It is the result of the intensification of the contradiction between this historically progressive process with the outmoded nation-state system, which each of the imperialist powers, with the US in the lead, seeks to resolve by means of war.

It cannot be resolved under capitalism unless world war is considered be a “solution,” but only by the advance to a new and higher form of society, international socialism.

Of course, such a perspective, the only rational solution, cannot be advanced by the head of the IMF, one of the chief defenders of the capitalist order and so Georgieva advanced a totally unattainable perspective.

She said the reality of “fragmentation” should not become “an excuse to do nothing to prevent a further fracturing of the global economy” and that her appeal at the meeting would be “to work together, in an enlightened way to lift our collective prospects.”

A similar, equally bankrupt, perspective marked an editorial by the Financial Times (FT) on the IMF-World Bank meeting. Noting the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the two bodies at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 towards the end of World War 2, it said they had “filled a void where coordination was lacking.”

As the IMF and the World Bank gathered for the annual meeting, they confronted a new set of challenges that risked undoing what has been accomplished.

The conditions of intensifying trade war, a worsening situation in developing countries, problems of climate change, shocks from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and mounting debt problems, the FT said, underscored why global cooperation is such a “precious commodity” and that international problems “require international solutions.”

The world facing the IMF and the World Bank looked very different from today, it concluded, but the “spirit in which they were forged at Bretton Woods remains as important as ever.”

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