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EDITORIAL

DSK & the IMF

Published May 25, 2011 3:42 PM

When Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the “Communist Manifesto,” they derided the capitalist class for accusing communists of advocating “a community of women.” In fact, it was these same moralizing bourgeois moneybags who, “not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.”

What communists want, they explained, is to “do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.”

There was no International Monetary Fund in 1848, when they wrote these lines, and capitalism had not yet pulled the whole world into its mad stampede for profits. But it was well established in Europe, the bourgeoisie having just finally defeated the feudal landowning nobility to become the dominant political class. And its moral hypocrisy was already transparent.

Now, a century and a half later, we have Dominique Strauss-Kahn, just forced to resign as head of the IMF after being arrested on the charge of sexually attacking a young African housekeeper in a posh New York hotel. DSK, as he has become known in the tabloids, was considered a shoo-in to be candidate of the French Socialist Party in the next presidential election there.

Marx and Engels would roll over in their graves to hear that such a bourgeois party dares to call itself socialist.

There has been no trial yet, and almost all the information on this case reported in the press comes from the New York City police - certainly no champions of immigrant women workers, especially from Africa, the most plundered and oppressed continent in the world. So it is right to be wary at this point.

The Murdoch papers are having a field day of anti-French chauvinism, using pejoratives borrowed from the haughty and degrading lexicon of British imperialism to imply that only the French like Strauss-Kahn can be so disgusting. The ongoing Arnold Schwarzenegger “housekeeper” scandal shoots down that notion. And some French seem to believe that it all may be a plot by the political forces of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a right-winger and friend of George W. Bush who presides over an imperialist power every bit as aggressive as the U.S., especially in Africa.

However, facts are stubborn things and it seems that a lot of them have come out nailing DSK as a sexual predator with women he felt he could dominate. These included professional women under his chain of command at the IMF as well as other service workers similar to the housekeeper at the Sofitel hotel, where he was staying in a $3,000 a day suite of rooms.

Despite all the media craze around this case, there’s a lot that is not being talked about or speculated on. For example, very few point out that the woman in question is a union member whose contract specifies that worker allegations of sexual harassment or violence must be taken seriously and followed up on by management. Would she have dared to speak out otherwise?

But there’s a deeper issue that is completely ignored - and that is the role of the IMF in “raping” poor countries caught in the debt trap. Many books have been written showing that this institution, in the guise of bailing out the economies of countries impoverished by generations of colonial and neocolonial exploitation, in fact forces them deeper in debt by imposing “structural adjustment programs.”

These SAPs undermine local production, force privatization of public firms and services, and terminate subsidies on food and other necessities. As a result, the countries required to impose SAPs in order to get loans - most often so they can pay their “debts” to the imperialist overlords - have seen a sharp decline in health, education and other indices of the health of a society.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to become head of the IMF, must have had a strong résumé in being able to rationalize in elegant language why it is necessary to treat the people of the global South as expendable objects whose existence is tolerated in order to provide for the comforts and desires of the wealthy elite.

It is not necessary to believe that he raped this woman worker in order to hate him and his kind. But such heinous conduct is certainly consistent with the behavior of so many “great men” produced by this loathsome profit system. With Marx and Engels, we fight for a truly socialist society, freed of the parasitic capitalist class, in which women and workers of all nationalities will no longer be “mere instruments of production.”