Why the World Bank can't lead us to a just world order

Abstract

Gail Omvedt makes some telling points in her critique. Dependency theorists have been too quick to discount the possibility of capitalist development in the Third World. It is good to be reminded ofthe dangers ofallowing wishful think­ ing to color our assessments ofpopular struggles, and it is useful to have our attention drawn to how elites often use populist rhetoric to mask their defense of power and privilege. In a number ofrespects, however, I fmd Omvedt's analysis flawed and even troubling. Omvedt argues that we should not reject structural adjust­ ment (SA) out of hand, but look at the specific requirements ofany structural adjustment package. Ifthe SA calls for hurting the people on the bottom of the social order, then we should oppose it; if it eliminates corrupt or inefficient bureaucracies or elite privileges, then we should favor it. This argument, however, ignores the undemocratic nature ofthe whole process. Structural adjustment programs represent demands imposed from the outside, not on the basis ofany democratic principles, but on the basis of control of capital. The World Bank is not responsible to the people of the world, or even to the U.N. General Assembly where nation, one vote obtains; rather it is controlled by those who put up the money on the principle of dollar, one vote. This is dictatorship pure and simple, no less dictatorial for its reliance on economic coercion than on guns and tanks. It is true that sometimes the dictatorial demands ofthe Bank will be good and sometimes bad, but that's true about any dictatorship. Some of Mussolini's domestic policies were posi­ tive; it's good to have the trains running on time. It would be foolish to reflexively say anything Mussolini did was ipso facto a bad policy. It would be quite right, however, to say that Mussolini's rule had no moral legitimacy, and that we didn't want him ruling at all. To have denounced the new train sched­ ules would be silly; to have protested Mussolini's claim to power would have been eminently reasonable.