160/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!
The IMF demands that the internal security apparatus be strength
ened: political repression - with the collaboration of Third World
elites - plays a supporting role for the parallel process of economic
repression. The tremendous despair of a people pauperised by the
market economy is a source of riots against SAPs and popular
uprisings. Funds and training are always set aside to ensure that
these acts of despair are brutally suppressed.
Structural adjustment is one of the main techniques for economic
constraint used by states in the centre against the periphery.
Structural adjustment - implemented in more than 100 countries
simultaneously - has a devastating social impact, negatively
affecting the living and working conditions of some four billion
individuals (Chossudovsky, 1994 and 1997).
The implementation of SAPs in many debtor countries leads to the
'internationalisation' of their macroeconomic policy, under the direct
control of the IMF and the World Bank - which represent powerful
financial and political interests (the Paris and London Clubs, the G7
and the closed circle of the main MNCs). This new form of political
and economic domination - a kind of market colonialism - oppresses
peoples and governments through the impersonal interaction (and
deliberate manipulation) of market forces. The Washington-based
bureaucracy is given the task of carrying out an overall economic
enterprise affecting the living and working conditions of more than
80 per cent of the world's population.
At no point in history has the 'free' market - given global reach
through macroeconomic processes - played such a huge role in the
destinies of 'sovereign' nations.
The restructuring of the global economy, under the watchful eye of
the Washington-based financial institutions, has increasingly denied
the countries of the Third World the possibility of building a national
economy. The internationalisation of economic policy has turned
these countries into economic open territory, and their national
economies into 'reservoirs' of cheap labour and raw materials.
Price Unification and Labour Market Compartmentalisation
While there are significant differences in the standard of living
between countries of the North and those of the South, the
devaluation of national currencies (see above) along with the deregu
lation of internal markets (through SAPs) lead to the dollarisation of