[Translation of a broadcast by Gegenstandpunkt - Kein Kommentar! July 6, 2005]
It is time again for debt relief for the so-called “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries” (HIPC). Great Britain, in charge of the next summit meeting of the G8 in July, has set it on the agenda, and it is, as they say, only on the modalities. This initiative will be welcomed in principle and should speak well for the good intentions of the “economic leading nations.” The well-known Bob Geldof, who on this occasion again organizes a major charity concert, sees this as first a victory for the NGOs, which are always involved:
“This is already a victory for the millions of people around the world who participate in debt relief campaigns…”
And certainly it is a magnificent deed for the poor in these countries:
“Tomorrow, 280 million people will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny from the burden of debt that has crippled them and their countries for so long.” (The Guardian, June 13 2005)
This good man concerns himself no further with the fact that the number of eligible heavily indebted poor countries has continuously increased, although there was already debt relief a few years ago and debts to individual countries are also routinely crossed out, but he wants only to “look ahead” and very firmly believe that for the “poorest of the poor” it can now only get better. Isn’t it beneficial for them if they now have to cope with a smaller mountain of debt? No, it is not.
The African Nations, which the G-8 initiative is primarily about, sought over the decades credit from the “developed nations” in order to finance “national development” on their part. These nations, which were still called “developing countries,” wanted to make themselves suited with these loans for participation in the world market; they took as their model the “leading industrial nations” with which they – in the idealism of “development” of those times – would draw closer. These “industrial nations” provided quite significant sums of credit for it: this was basically of benefit to the local state powers there because this was first to ensure a certain order and secondly initiate the beginnings of real growth. It was thought that they had a good precondition for it, namely their so-called “natural wealth.” But for that they had no use; as recently liberated colonies they had no industries for which these natural resources could have been productively useful. So they had to sell them to the businessmen of the countries where such industries were located. The sales of the raw materials should serve to enable the developing countries to get closer to the “man-made” wealth that really counts in the capitalistic world, namely the money of other nations. And this should be the means for the ex-colonies to be developed, i.e. into industrial countries. –So it was always sworn in the conferences on aid for development in the decades after decolonization.
The result is to seen not only in the poorest heavily indebted countries, but also in a long line of states that are only marginally above them. They arranged with the “development aid” loans to make their “natural wealth” capable of sales in export on the world market – on which only the “industrial states” became richer that bought theses “goods” at prices obviously only favorable to them. The “developing countries” have not got a step closer to their goal of “development,” by which they meant the development of a capitalist economy, but rather this export has only made them ever poorer. The proceeds from these “natural commodities” is completely dependent on the calculations of the business people who sit in the nations that are already capitalistically developed; they pay for these “goods” just the price that ensures they are being used in their production process to increase their wealth, and the demand for these “goods” is also still dependent on the ups and downs arising from their business life. Conversely, the “developing countries” dependent on the sale of their raw materials were and are at their mercy. They can not make their sales conditional on the prices of their outwardly credited “advances” for development and infrastructure, as well as bring in their expenses for rule again, because they must sell due to the compulsion of servicing the debt. No wonder only one thing developed in the “developing countries”: mountains of debt and with it the need to repeatedly reschedule debt payments, thus to have to apply for new loans in order to service the old ones. Full and unconditional debt forgiveness by the credit lenders is out of the question for the credit lenders when it is clear to all concerned that the debtor countries will never be in a condition to pay their debts on schedule and erase them. Because even “nonperforming” loans still do good political services for the creditor states. They serve to exert an influence on the insolvent countries. This summit in the homelands of imperialism is held under the highly respected title of "the fight against corruption.”
Therefore, a debt cancellation is never simply a ruling out of the accumulated debts in order to make a debt-free fresh start possible. In the symbolic language of debt forgiveness from the year 2000, adopted by the G7 in Cologne, this was expressed as: the “debt-export-ratio” should be lowered for those countries from around 200%. That means: even after the decree their debts are still twice as high as their income from the export of their “natural riches.” The export of this “wealth” has continued to increase their debts, the partial cancellation has changed only one thing: it has reduced the rate of growth of the debt – only temporarily. The credit that has been given to them has always worked in only one direction: it provided for a certain stability of the political rule, which in turn guarantees the production and transportation of the “goods” that are needed in the capitalist production process. The resulting sponsored dependency and the economic benefits they drew from these countries were thus for the imperialist overlords worth a constant renewal of loans. If the income of these countries from exports is not sufficient to pay the interest on the loans granted to them, the imperialist states explain not the bankruptcy of their pupils, but attend – mediated through their credit agency, the IMF – ever more to the debt service, and pay, usually in very complicated agreement, their interest themselve.
The new debt relief terminates this technique of credit prolongation. US Treasury Secretary John Snow says the “rich countries” have grown “impatient” with “the ‘endless cycles of borrow and forgive’ and accept instead that the debts that are never to be paid are written off once and for all” (ibid.). What might sound like a resigned insight is a damning indictment. The crediting of these countries has not made them viable, but has not excluded them as unfit from the capitalist world economy either; they have participated in it – and everything capitalistically exploitable has been squeezed from them. These states, whose now forcibly recognized over-indebtedness is nothing other than the result of their deemed as indispensable and judicious level of indebtedness, now get – after the IMF controlled their efforts for many years with its notorious “conditions” – a cancellation of debts. With it the old credit or debt regime is repealed, the deficit that these states have accumulated is qualified as finally uncollectible and a part of it is cancelled. This does not mean that they are creditworthy again. Although sometimes, especially the NGOs, make it out as if “new resources” flow to the states with the cancellation – even the reduced deficits express nothing more than their economic ruin. Reduced interest payments also change nothing in this – provided that these states generally still pay interest. Now this ruin is written down in the form of a new deficit as a kind of declaration of bankruptcy, as a document of the conclusively deadlocked impasse, world- and financial world-publicly. An international bankruptcy proceeding has been opened over these states, and thus also over the “280 million Africans” who will wake up tomorrow, according to the crazy idea of Bob Geldof, “without the debt pressing on them.” This proceeding is about what statehood, i.e. what kind of state force and what range in state tasks, is still deemed necessary for these poorhouses of imperialism, is still necessary for them to rule over. The philanthropic dressed up and nevertheless at the same time treacherous high title under which this goes is "fighting poverty.” The states should be responsible for nothing more than the containment and control of the enormous misery in them. In first place stands AIDS because the disease should ultimately remain in Africa; then the impoverished masses should get the minimum subsistence, that was obvious before; then still a little education ... Although they get – maybe – also “help” in the form of “donations” or “grants,” these are cash allowances to be sharply distinguished from credit, over which the recipient has no free disposal in its use but rather is decided by the donor. This money is part of the control that is exercised from the outside: it insist that the states get their own ambitions, in particular those reminiscent of the old idealism of “development,” out of their heads – and if they do not go into debt, thus practice total subjugation, one gives them the label “good governance” and perhaps a handful of dollars more.
During these bankruptcy proceedings, in addition to the “donations” and “grants,” money then nevertheless flows once again: $ 1.3 billion over the next 3 years, raised from the G8. This comparatively ridiculous amount – whose funding and distributing is vehemently argued over – is of course not for the heavily indebted poor countries, but serves a common imperialist purpose. The victims of the bankruptcy proceedings are not these countries – which has indeed been proven to be just a “blessing” for them – but the "international financial institutions," the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. Those now missing interest from the previous prolongations or rescheduling of debts raise the question what and whether they should continue to receive and, if so, from whom. The dispute over this money has therefore a particular acerbity because the USA wants to pay nothing at all in the first place: since the inception of its “war against terror” it sets only moderate importance on imperialist community institutions because in them a certain language about “partners” – i.e., competitors – is always institutionalized, which is not compatible with its claim to a monopoly over the world order and why they prefer to bring down these institutions. This controversy next entails: who from supervising powers has how much to join in with the new control of the just decreed poorhouses – this is also reflected in the dogged haggling over shares of the interest payment, new “facilities,” etc. The USA has softened up and stood for a portion of the cancelled interest. They have a shady and a good reason. The shady one is that George Bush's friend Tony Blair, chairman of the summit, also sometimes needs a feeling of success, namely that the great partner on the other side of the Atlantic hears him for a change – this polishes up the image of Great Britain within the G8 and Europe, which ultimately also benefits the United States. The good reason is: Africa is considered a consummate “swamp of terrorism” and the USA can represent the debt relief initiative with all its details as fitting into its “anti-terror war,” meaning: it functionalizes it and inserts the competing supervising powers into it. It comes with a final honor for the heavily indebted poor countries: they serve as material for an inter-imperialist competitive affair. This is all held in the beautiful glow that it is only about “help for Africa,” obviously. And that is why “280 million Africans” can sleep better?