What's more, Washington demanded that its "allies" pay off their wartime debts as well. London owed the U.S. rulers some $90 billion in current dollars, about half its national income in 1929, and France owed the equivalent of about two-thirds of its national income. And when some voices in Washington floated the idea of forgiving these "inter-Allied" debts, President Calvin Coolidge spoke for bondholders the world over in snapping: "They hired the money, didn't they?" (In the end, not only Berlin, but London and Paris as well, defaulted on their wartime debts in the early 1930s.)

Today massive Third World debt remains the source both of enormous potential economic breakdowns of the world capitalist monetary system and of imperialist military interventions as well. The pressures that come down on bourgeois governments in the colonial world to devalue their currencies, or to impose sharp austerity measures in order to avoid devaluation, are enormous--wreaking havoc on the living standards of the toilers and broad layers of the middle classes.

Over the past fifteen years, a hammerlock has often been placed on the victims in the name of the International Monetary Fund and its "structural adjustment" programs. That seemingly appeared less crude than overt action by Wall Street backed by the Pentagon. But as we are seeing in Mexico, at some point in the capitalist crisis the niceties were bound to give way. Now it is the U.S. ruling class directly that is dictating the terms. The same Yankee bondholders and bankers who so eagerly thrust the loans on their Mexican "colleagues" to begin with will now demand a program of "frugality" and further inroads for U.S. finance capital into Mexico's national patrimony. And to pay off the new debts, there will be further loans down the line--and the cycle will start all over again. This is the plan, the anticipated pattern.

This is always the pattern. That is why what will "develop" and "emerge" in today's world are the conditions for new debt balloons and new collapses. This is the outcome of the lawful functioning of parasitic imperialism. This is the result of the rivalry among the ruling families of finance capital to intensify their exploitation of the toilers the world over, increase their market share, collect on their debts, and enhance their profit rates. There is no plot. There is no mystery to it; it is perfectly comprehensible.  
 

Struggles engendered by capitalism

What is less comprehensible to the rulers--and more comprehensible to workers--are the struggles these workings of capitalism will engender. What's more, this imperialist reality is also a damned good reason for the toilers to overthrow those who benefit from and defend the capitalist system.

The leadership of the Cuban revolution had absorbed the political implications of this reality in the 1950s. That helped make it possible for them to lead the workers and farmers to power in 1959 and organize the toilers to uproot capitalist property relations over the next two years. In 1962 Cuba's communist leadership, based on their own experiences, reaffirmed this fundamental lesson in a revolutionary manifesto for the Americas known as the Second Declaration of Havana. "Experience shows that in our nations [the national bourgeoisie], even when its interests are in contradiction to those of Yankee imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it," the declaration said, "for the national bourgeoisie is paralyzed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the cry of the exploited masses."¹

The Second Declaration of Havana is a call by the leadership of the Cuban revolution to toilers throughout the Americas to confront what faces them everywhere. It explains why the only class that can point a way forward is the working class. That is because workers are the only class with no interest in exploitation of any kind--and with no stake in trying to make capitalism work. In fact, when our class gets suckered into trying to help the capitalists make their system work, the bosses always make sure that every step along the way is to their advantage and to our detriment.

So, the exploiters do have a nightmare. The nightmare is what began happening in Chiapas exactly one year ago, when peasants and rural workers said no to the accelerated pace at which they were being driven off the land.

The nightmare is what happened in Argentina, also about one year ago, when workers in the northern province of Santiago del Estero, seemingly out of the blue, rose up and took over government buildings for several days to protest that they had not been paid since the previous August. Smaller explosions then developed elsewhere in that region and in the province of Tucumán over the next month or so.² To the Argentine capitalists, these rebellions were completely unexpected. In fact, however, they were the product of the buildup of unbearable conditions over a period of years.

And if that is what the capitalists got a taste of in early 1994, when Argentina, Mexico, and Chile were still being heralded as the trinity of the market's miracles in the Americas, then we can wager they are worried even more about what is coming in the months and years ahead.

The Santiago del Estero events reminded Argentina's rulers of an even worse nightmare. That one exploded in 1969 when rising workers struggles, backed by students, culminated in a general strike in the country's second largest city, Rosario, and in a massive working-class uprising in the big industrial city of Córdoba. The Cordobazo, as that explosion came to be known, opened a prerevolutionary situation in the Southern Cone of South America. The capitalist rulers only succeeded in snuffing it out through savage military coups in Bolivia in 1971, Chile in 1973, and Argentina in 1976.

Anybody who was alive and politically aware in those times can never forget what happened, as the working class rose in major cities, not just in one country but in several--especially if you had comrades and knew revolutionists in Argentina and elsewhere in South America. For revolutionary-minded workers, such events confirm what our class is capable of and what we know is coming sooner or later in every country of the world. But for the capitalist rulers throughout Latin America, that memory is a recurring nightmare.

Because equally as lawful and inevitable as the workings of capitalism and its sudden breakdowns is the resistance, mobilization, and organization of its gravediggers produced by that very social system.  
 
 

1. The Second Declaration of Havana (New York: Pathfinder, 1962, 1994). Pathfinder published a new French edition in 1995 as well, entitled La deuxième déclaration de La Havane, and a Spanish edition, La segunda declaración de La Habana, in 1997.

2. In response to intensifying government and employer assaults on living standards, strikes and demonstrations erupted across Argentina in the first half of 1995. Actions took place in at least twelve Argentine provinces, from Tierra del Fuego in the far south, to Córdoba, to renewed protests in Santiago del Estero. During a one-day general strike in Córdoba in June 1995, the offices of the Radical Civic Union, the governing party in that province, were set on fire after cops fired rubber bullets into a mass workers demonstration.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home