264/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!
and always focuses its attention on the need to develop awareness,
understanding of the issues at hand and mobilisation.
Through its work analysing the mechanisms of the Third World
debt, based on an ongoing study of the different players and the
policies they pursue, COCAD has had to broaden the scope of its
work. Talking about frontal attacks against the educational and
healthcare system, privatisation, unemployment and so on in the
Third World, might ring hollow if we are not also able to point to the
results of similar policies implemented at home; and if we are not
able to fight these policies with the same determination even if their
results are not (yet) as destructive as in other parts of the world.
In order to explain the need for a tax on speculative investment
on a world level, for example, we have to raise the question of
taxing wealthy estates in our own countries.
Last but not least, anyone intelligent enough to recognise the
injustice of the Third World debt also has the moral duty to
condemn the public debt in industrialised countries. Indeed, this
public debt is responsible for a similar transfer of wealth from
workers and small producers to the capitalist class.
Which brings to mind an unforgettable public debate between
COCAD and Philippe Maystadt - Deputy Prime Minister of the
Belgian federal government, Minister of Finance and Foreign
Trade, and president of the IMF's powerful interim committee.
Maystadt encouraged COCAD to continue and even to extend its
activities on the international stage. The Third World is so far
away, after all, and its debt amounts to peanuts! His nostrils flared,
however, when the author of this book (representing COCAD)
argued for decisive action against public debt in the North through
the implementation of hefty estate taxes (CADTM, 1998).
COCAD does not seek to take the place of other initiatives. It is
always at the ready to participate in coalitions set up in response
to key events or developments. It was in this spirit, for example,
that it got involved in the European Marches on Amsterdam in
June 1997.
Make no mistake, COCAD's activities fall well short of the
current challenge. There is an urgent need to build an interna
tional movement that is able to analyse the major global changes
currently underway while at the same time acting in response to
new problems. COCAD has provided proof, however modest, that
it is indeed possible to make progress towards the building of just
such a movement.