The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

It would be impossible to overestimate how important the World Bank and the IMF are to the countries of the G7. Not only did they become the most powerful tool in the fight against developmentalism, they also offered a spatial fix to the crisis of Western capitalism, which was bumping up against its own limits in the late 1970s. By turning poor countries into new frontiers for investment, extraction and accumulation, they allow Western capitalism to surmount its limits and carry on without having to confront its own internal contradictions – at least for the time being. It is not a real solution to the crisis, of course; it’s just a way of moving the crisis around geographically.44 But without it, capitalism in the United States and Europe would have crashed up against market saturation, ecological depletion and class conflict long ago, and may well have collapsed. This is why the World Bank and the IMF are so valued by the US government and Wall Street: they are essential to the continuity of the system.