#parenti

"The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. The World Bank will lend money to this or that country to finance a huge dam project that displaces thousands of families while providing cheap irrigation for export agriculture and cheap power for a private company. Or a poor country may borrow from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it most borrow again, this time from the IMF. But the IMF imposes a 'structural adjustment programme' (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce local wages, and make no attempt to protect native enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers.

In accordance with SAP rulings, the debtor nations are pressured to privatise their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to transnational corporations. They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must reduce or eliminate subsidies for health, education, transportation, and food, spending less on public needs in order to have more money to meet debt payments. So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point at which debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries' export earnings—leaving the debtor even less able to provide for the minimal needs of its population."

The devastation of World War II added another heavy layer of misery upon the region, reducing hundreds of villages and many cities to rubble. It was the communists and their allies who rebuilt these societies. While denounced in the U.S. less for leaving their economies in bad shape, in fact, the Reds left the economy off Eastern Europe in far better condition than they found it.

The same was true of China. Henry Rosemont, Jr. notes that when the communists liberated Shanghai from the U.S.-supported reactionary Kuomintang regime in 1949, about 20 percent of that city’s estimated 1.2 million were drug addicts. Every morning there were special Street crews “whose sole task was to gather up the corpses of the children, adults, and the elderly who had been murdered during the night, or had been abandoned and died of disease, could, and/or starvation” (Z Magazine, October 1995).

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

Guardi il piatto, guardi loro, e pensi che "a posto" è un concetto decisamente relativo. Tipo i mobili dell'IKEA: sembrano stabili finché non provi a spostarli. Io la testa ce l'ho esattamente dove deve stare: sul collo, pronta a girarsi dall'altra parte quando partono queste domande...

Passatemi il vino, va'. Che per sopportare la stabilità altrui serve una discreta dose di squilibrio. 🍷😜

:(

Parenti has died. May he rest in peace, he introduced me and many others to Marxism-Leninism and Historical Materialism.