I was watching this interview with Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff, and Hudson said something that I completely accepted at first, but mulling it over now it seems contradictory. He says that the IMF and World Bank, as neo-colonial powers, arrest the development of capitalism within the colonized countries, by enforcing austerity and making them privatize everything. He says that the purpose of doing this is to prevent the saturation that happens naturally as local finance capital develops and begins to deindustrialize the economy, which grinds industrial development to a halt as finance capitalists only exist as leeches that make their money by creating rents.
Now, where I take issue with this analysis, is that a great deal of what the IMF and World Bank do is steer countries into privatizing public healthcare, education, and other natural monopolies. When these services are public, they don’t hold industry back from booming because they take care of a significant social cost, so if the state takes care of them the state is subsidizing industry to keep developing. Yet when they’re private, they hold a monopoly position and exploit it to charge rent on everyone else because of the obvious necessity for these services. This keeps industry from developing.
If imperialists need the industrial capacity of the periphery, why kneecap it with privatization?
Yeah, I suppose you’re right. In the same interview I linked Hudson throws his hands up and exclaims basically the same thing, his job as an economist is impossible because the ruling class has blinded itself about its own interests and has now repeatedly failed to act in its own basic material interest. But it just seems like a critical failure of materialism as an analytic framework that you have to just accept that these people care more about ideas than facts.