Would Lenin have approved of the IMF?

 A simple-minded answer to the question is, No. The IMF is entirely dedicated to  preserving the world capitalist system and any socialist must disapprove of it.  I think this answer is wrong. But before I explain it, I have say a few words about the Fund.

Recently, I have been involved more with the IMF and have witnessed how keen they are to remain an influential player in the 21^st century. Moreover, to do that as a truly international organization under the conditions of extraordinary high worldwide tensions, threats of wars, and mercantilist trade policies.

My relations with the Fund go back to my early years in the World Bank. In those days, the Fund missions would ask the World Bank to provide one of their (junior) economists to join the Fund ostensibly to maintain communication and give to the World Bank the appearance of some decision-making role regarding social sectors and public expenditures. I thus went, very young, to about five or six Fund missions to Turkey.  

The Fund missions were impressive. They benefited from an unparalleled access to government officials and to the data, but they also had excellent people to study these data. Their great advantage was (and is) access to government knowledge and information; their great disadvantage was/is lack of contact with the rest of the country. Yet, as I will argue, this was never Fund’s mission—nor should it be.

The Fund’s  mandate was, and I hope stays, narrow, In that I am interestingly I am in full agreement with Adam Posen from the Peterson Institute in Washington who at a recent conference at the IMF called on the Fund to remain focused on its core mission and avoid both politization and the “mission creep” into the areas for which the Fund is neither the best vehicle nor has the expertise. Adam wrote eloquently about the difficulties of doing so under the present extremely politicized conditions:

The increasing politicization of international finance and commerce by China, the European Union, and the United States has, however, put at risk the IMF’s ability to assist member countries and limit exploitative behavior by the governments of the three largest economies. For the sake of global economic stability, the IMF must get out in front of these dangers.

The core mission of the International Monetary Fund is so simple that can be understood by any high-school student.

Make sure that the borrowed money is paid back;

Do not spend (over a cycle) more than you have collected in taxes;

Maintain macroeconomic stability.

Most of the critique of the Fund comes from the failure to understand its core mission. It is a mission of disciplining  people and countries. That particular mission is, given the capitalist world system, meant to reinforce the capitalist system and discipline workers. Austerity, often brought about by Fund’s policies is not, as Clara Mattei in The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism and Mark Blyth Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea have rightly reminded us, politically neutral.  But that mission, if the system were different, would be equally needed. Socialism is not general irresponsibility. What Lenin most emphatically stressed in his 1922 speech to the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), at the time of New Economic Policy, was the need for fiscal responsibility, discipline and orderly international trade:

We are going to Genoa [a conference on post-War rebuilding of Europe—a Bretton Woods that failed] as merchants for the purpose of securing the most favourable terms for promoting the trade which has started, which is being carried on, and which, even if someone succeeded in forcibly interrupting it for a time, would inevitably continue to develop after the interruption.

We must start learning [economic management] from the very beginning. If we realise this, we shall pass our test; and the test is a serious one which the impending financial crisis will set—the test set by the Russian and international market to which we are subordinated, with which we are connected, and from which we cannot isolate ourselves. (See the whole text here)

The organization that enforces this discipline is needed in any system. If the world has gone Leninist, and Lenin had found the IMF around, he would have taken it entirely as is and the Fund  would have played exactly the same role that it has played in the past eighty years.

That role is both ideologically neutral and not. It is ideologically neutral because the three key rules mentioned above are the rules of discipline that must exist in any coherently organized system of governance; the role is not ideologically neutral once the overall context (the world capitalist system) is given. But the issue there is not the organization that is enforcing the rules, but the system. Thus if the critique be, it should be directed at the system, not at the enforcers.

Sun Yatsen had argued that there should be four branches of government. In addition, to the well-known three, he thought that there should be a control branch of government (the control Yuan) that would check the legality and transparency of the other three branches. The roots of the fourth Yuan go back deeply in Chinese history. Its quasi equivalent may be seen in the US Government Accounting Office, but the Yuan would be endowed with greater political and even some judiciary power. Within the Chinese Communist Party the same function is fulfilled by the Central Committee Disciplinary Commission.

Project the fourth Yuan to the global level. This is what the International Monetary Fund is. It checks whether the three simple rules are observed and thus makes the smooth functioning of the system possible.

Lenin, the old-fashioned supporter of discipline and order (the son of a school inspector), would have loved it. It would serve his purposes, but the approach, the seriousness with which questions are examined, the narrow-minded dedication to the three top issues, would be all the same. Lenin would have kept the same people and the same approach. Whether the IMF  would have been located in Washington D.C., is difficult to say because Lenin never thought much beyond Eurasia. But if the Fund even moves to Beijing, it will remain the same. Because it fulfills the function that the world needs.

The ideology of Donald J. Trump

 Does Donald J. Trump have an ideology, and what it is? The first part of the question is redundant: every individual has an ideology and if we believe that they do not have it, it is because it might represent an amalgam of pieces collected from various dialogical frameworks that are simply rearranged, and thus hard to put a name on. But that does not mean that there is no ideology. The second part is a million-dollar question because if we could piece together Donald J, Trump’s ideology, we would be able to forecast, or guess (the element of volatility is high) how his rule over the next four years might look like.

The reason why most people are unable to make a coherent argument about Trump’s ideology is because they are either blinded by hatred or adulation, or because they cannot bring what they observe in him into an ideological framework, with a name attached to it, and to which they are accustomed.

Before I try to answers the question, let me dismiss two, in my opinion, entirely wrong epithets attached to Trump: fascist and populist. If fascist is used as a term of abuse, this is okay and we can use it freely. But as a term in a rational discussion of Trump’s beliefs it is wrong. Fascism as an ideology implies (i) exclusivist nationalism, (ii) glorification of the leader, (iii) emphasis on the power of the state as opposed to private individuals and the private sector, (iv) rejection of the multi-party system, (v) corporatist rule, (vi) replacement of class structure  of society with unitary nationalism, and (vii) quasi religious adulation of the Party, the state and the leader. I do not need to discuss each of these elements individually to show that they have almost no relationship to what Trump believes or what he wants to impose.

Likewise, the term “populist” has of late also become a term of abuse, and despite some (in my opinion rather unsuccessful) attempts to define it better, it really stands for the leaders who win elections but do so on a platform that “we” do like. Then, the term becomes meaningless.

What are then the constituent parts of Trump’s ideology as we might have glimpsed during the previous four years of his rule?

Mercantilism. Mercantilism is an old and hallowed ideology that regards economic activity, and especially trade in goods and services between the states as a zero-sum game. Historically it went together with a world where wealth was gold and silver. If you take the amount of gold and silver to be limited, then clearly the state and its leader who possesses more gold and silver (regardless of all other goods) is more powerful.  The world has evolved since the 17^th century but many people still believe in the mercantilist doctrine. Moreover, if one believes that trade is just a war by other means and that the main rival or antagonist of the United States is China mercantilist policy towards China becomes a very natural response. When Trump initiated such policies against China in 2017 they were not a part of the mainstream discourse, but have since moved to the center. Biden’s administration followed them and expanded them significantly. We can expect that Trump will double-down on them. But mercantilists are, and Trump will be, transactional: if China agrees to sell less and buy more, he will be content. Unlike Biden, Trump will not try to undermine or overthrow the Chinese regime. Thus, unlike what many people believe, I think that Trump is good for China (that is, given the alternatives).

Profit-making. Like all Republicans, Trump believes in the private sector. Private sector in his view is unreasonably hampered by regulations, rules, taxes. He was a capitalist who never paid taxes which, in his view, simply shows that he was a good entrepreneur. But for others, lesser capitalists, regulations should be simplified or gotten rid of, and taxation should be reduced. Consistent with that view is the belief that taxes on capital should be lower than taxes on labor. Entrepreneurs and capitalists are job-creators, others are, in Ayn Rand’s words, ”moochers”. There is nothing new there in Trump. It is the same doctrine that was held form Reagan onwards, including by Bill Clinton. Trump may be just more vocal and open about low taxes, but he would do the same thing that Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr. did. And that liberal icon Greenspan deeply believed.

Anti-immigrant “nationalism”. This a really difficult part. The term “nationalism” only awkwardly applies to American politicians because people are used  to “exclusive” (not inclusive) European and Asian nationalisms. When we speak of Japanese nationalism, we mean that such Japanese would like to expel ethnically non-Japanese either from decision-making or presence in the country. The same is true for Serbian, Estonian, French or Castellan nationalisms. The American nationalism, by its very nature, cannot be ethnic or blood-related because of enormous heterogeneity of people who compose the United States. Commentators have thus invented a new term, “white nationalism”. It is a bizarre term because it combines color of the skin with ethnic (blood) relations.  In reality, I think that the defining feature of Trump’s “nationalism” is neither ethnic nor racial, but simply the dislike of new migrants. It is in essence not different from anti-migrant policies applied today in the heart of the socio-democratic world, in Nordic and North Western European countries where the right-wing parties in Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark believe (in the famous expression of the Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders) that their countries are “full” and cannot accept more immigrants. Trump’s view is only unusual because the US is not, objectively by any criteria, a full country: the number of people per square kilometer in the United States is 38 while it is 520 in the Netherlands.

A nation for itself. When one combines mercantilism with anti-immigrant nationalism, one gets close to what US foreign policy under Trump will look like. It will be the policy of nationalist anti-imperialism. I have to unpack these terms. This combination is uncommon, especially for big powers: if they are big, nationalist and mercantilist, it is almost intuitively understood that they have to be imperialist. Trump however defies this nostrum. He goes back to the Founders’ foreign policy that abhorred “foreign entanglements”. The United States, in their and in his view, is a powerful and rich nation, looking after its interests, but it is not an “indispensable nation” in the way that Madeleine Albright defined it. It is not the role of the United States to right every wrong in the world (in the optimistic or self-serving view of this doctrine) nor to waste its money on people and causes which have nothing to do with its interests (in the realist view  of the same doctrine).

Why Trump dislikes imperialism that has become common currency for both US parties since 1945 is hard to say but I think that instinctively he tends to espouse values of the US Founding Fathers and people like the Republican antagonist to FDR, Rober Taft who believed in US economic strength and saw no need to convert that strength in hegemonic political rule over the world.

This does not mean that Trump will give up the US hegemony (NATO will not be disbanded), because, as Thucydides wrote: “it is not any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go”. But in the light of Trump’s mercantilist principles, he would make US allies pay much more for it. Like in Pericles’ Athens, the protection will no longer come for free. One should not forget that the beautiful Acropolis that we all admire was built with gold stolen from the allies.