On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, Nikolai S. Rozov wrote:
> Dear Bruce,
> your question is quit legal
>
> > Some would argue that the system of multi-national economic
> >institutions including the IMF, World Bank, Trans-National Corporations,
> >and others *are* one of the principle problems. You are supposing that
> >they can be reformed to provide part of the solution. I can't address
> >your argument that they can be reformed in this way until I see it.
> I shared our dialogue with a friend who proved your position telling about
> deplorable results of IMF activity in Africa (f.e. Mosambique): deepening
> social gap, bloody conflicts, etc
> He also noted that IMF is just an instrument of the system and
> the agenda is how to change the system, not instrument. I agree.
> This point makes our discussion very close to the thread of Wagar/Chase-Dunn
> w-party. See my sketch of principal strategy 'how to change the system'
> in my recent answer to Chris.
I read the sketch of the principle strategy. The question I am
posing is at a more detailed level. Given a strategy to divide the
vested interests in support of the status quo system, what is the reason
for suspecting that the IMF / World Bank / Transnational Corporate
elements of those elites are the ones that can be targetted?
> At the same time 'reforming an instrument'(say, IMF) can and should
> be, from my viewpoint, one of partial activities in this strategy.
> What I mean here, can be named "an academic monitoring of
> international institutions' policies".
> The main task is to organize a regular comparing of
> real results of these activities in various countries with proclaimed
> goals and philosophy of given institution.
> The left tradition is to make this work a crushing critique of
> 'an obstacle for progress'. According to the approach of 'splitting
> elites' and 'new-coalition-making,' that I keep trying to promote in
> wsn, I suggest to "pack up" this monitoring as a cooperation, an academic
> responsible aid (non-excluding definitely addressed criticisms).
> As far as I know experts of very high range (mainly from Harvard,
> London School of Economics, etc) do their best in IMF. It seems they
> know nothing of WST, at best they take it as one of many left
> post-Marxist approaches that can be neglected. This attitude should
> be changed after meeting with well-based theoretically and
> empirically analyses of their activities.
This is where we start to stumble into the mine-fields of paradigm
self-defense. For the experts that are economists, the question is
whether they will view WST as well-based theoretically. And the
empirical analyses, when evaluated from a different theoretical
perspective, might be evaluated as not supporting the conclusions WS
theorists have drawn from it. It is not unknown for researchers trained
in the currently dominent tradition in a discipline to torture
inconvenient information until it confesses its heresy and recants.
> Their work in IMF is temporal (not more than 3? years). They
> are all very anxious of their future career, their names, etc.
> That's why I think these folks cannot neglect such academic
> initiative, because without communication and cooperation the public effect
> of such monitoring can occur very troublesome for them personally.
For the economists in particular, I doubt that the influence of WS
theorists on their future career prospects is going to weigh heavily on
their mind. I don't see that it could do any harm to try, but I wouldn't
be very hopeful of success in those terms.
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au