State-primacy and third world debt

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 300-314

  Carter, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039297088     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2265.00052     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. See Karl Marx, 'Preface to the Critique of Political Economy' in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), especially p. 389.
2. The appearance of technological determinism is even stronger in The Poverty of Philosophy, where Marx writes: 'The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.' Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), p. 103.
3. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' in Marx, Selected Writings, p. 224.
4. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
5. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, p. 160.
6. V. I. Lenin, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 6.
7. See Michael Taylor, 'Structure, Culture and Action in the Explanation of Social Change', Politics and Society 17 (1989), pp. 124-6.
8. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 122.
9. See Alan Carter, 'The Nation-State and Underdevelopment', Third World Quarterly 16 (1995), pp. 595-618.
10. It is worth bearing in mind that in the same year the United States' public debt exceeded $2 trillion. See Susan George, A Fate Worse than Debt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 12.
11. 'In the five years between 1982-87 Third World countries as a group, including the most impoverished and crisis-ridden in Africa, sent us $220 billion more than we sent them ... Never before in history have the poor financed the rich on such a lavish scale.' Susan George, 'Several Pounds of Flesh', New Internationalist 189 (November 1988), p. 18.
12. This has been the demand of organizations as diverse as the World Development Movement, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth. For one defence of the unconditional cancellation of Third World debt, see Barry Wilkins, 'Debt and Underdevelopment: The Case for Cancelling Third World Debts' in Robin Attfield and Barry Wilkins (eds.), International Justice and the Third World: Studies in the Philosophy of Development (London: Routledge, 1992).
13. George, A Fate Worse than Debt, p. 18.
14. And as several commentators have observed, the IMF and the World Bank act 'as accessories to US policy'. Robert Cox, quoted in Leo Panitch, 'Globalisation and the state' in Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, Socialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism (London: Merlin Press, 1994), p. 69.
15. The World Development Movement, Piggy Banks (London: WDM, 1991), p. 12.
16. As Jane Mansbridge writes: 'Every American schoolchild knows that when you set up a democracy you elect representatives - in school, the student council; later, senators, representatives, councilmen, assemblymen, and aldermen. When you do not agree, you take a vote, and the majority rules. This combination of electoral representation, majority rule, and one-citizen/one-vote is democracy. Because this conception of democracy assumes that citizens' interests are in constant conflict, I have called it "adversary" democracy.' J. J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 3.
17. See Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, Food First (London: Abacus, 1982), p. 287.
18. Susan George, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 206.