The Plan to Save the World: Poor and Working Class People Look the IMF in the Eye (and Don't Blink)

This is the first episode of the audiofeed for The Demos, a series about an anarchist's strategy for how to end finance capitalism, replace it with real democracies, from the bottom up and then from the top, down. In my thinking, all of the many goals binding activist groups everywhere depend ultimately on how the institutions and policies at the heart of international relations are structured to function. If we fix those, we can begin to address all of our individual concerns with hope for success. Those institutions and policies are comprised primarily of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which were designed at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. The conference was held in the US, so that the Allied powers could decide on a new international monetary system to re-organize international power at the end of World War II. But because the US had the most money and power at that time, the monetary system that was chosen was one that served to write US dominance in stone, rather than to actually create a foundation for regulation and balance among global states. There was, however, a proposal at that conference, for an international currency union (ICU), which establishes equality within a common law, equally applied to all members, by all members, and that plan can still be tried today. However, it will take a global movement to insist that the IMF and World Bank transform in that way, and the only group of people big and wise enough to build that movement is us: the poor and working class people, by writing the petition, building the tools those institutions will need to transform, and then holding the line with labor strikes and economic boycotts to show our numbers if our petition and infrastructure are not quickly accepted and put to good use.