Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 24
June 11 – U.S. bankers, supported in a large measure by British and West German bankers, are spearheading a worldwide anti-labor offensive in all the metropolitan imperialist countries.
The drive has been initiated under the cover of two Western financial and economic organizations which have great prestige in bourgeois financial and political circles. One is the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the other is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Both the BIS and the OECD have in recent years increasingly come under the influence of U.S. bankers and industrialists. While ostensibly they have been engaged in statistics-gathering and presenting data on fiscal and monetary matters for purposes of predicting trends in the world capitalist economy, they have in recent years acted more and more as vehicles for promoting the fundamental politics of U.S., British, and West German finance capital.
The reports released by both the BIS and the OECD, made public during the first week of June, have all the earmarks of an economic program, worked out by the giant banks and multinational corporations, to reduce the living standards of the working class and the mass of the population as a whole. It is to be noted that these reports were issued a bare couple of days prior to the meeting of the OPEC countries and contain warnings and threats by the bankers against the oil-producing countries.
The BIS report, for instance, makes no bones about advocating a long period of high unemployment as a means of fighting inflation and cutting dependence on imported oil. Dropping the usual efforts at restrained language and speaking in coded terms, the bankers demand that the imperialist countries commence “a period of painfully slow growth for the Western industrial world.” (New York Times, June 9, 1980) This is thinly-disguised phraseology for vast unemployment resulting from huge layoffs. It is all supposed to be in the name of fighting inflation.
The report admits that this would “raise critical problems,” but doesn’t say for whom – the workers and oppressed. But it urges the capitalist governments to persuade the masses to accept continuing “high rates of unemployment.” The report contains crocodile tears for the “social and human costs” borne by the workers and expresses confidence that the capitalist governments can deal with it. It is to be noted, however, that the report conspicuously omits any mention of practical help to alleviate the proposed worsening condition of the working class.
The OECD report speaks in a similar vein and, under the cover of its authority as representing 24 capitalist countries, it pushes hard for the austerity programs promoted by the bankers. It even finds it particularly encouraging that “in many industrialized nations the trade unions are accepting a cut in the purchasing power of their members’ wages as part of the anti-inflation drive.” (New York Times, June 5, 1980)
It endorses the basic line of the BIS, which is a private banking group of the giant conglomerates of finance. But as a governmental body the OECD speaks in softer, more camouflaged terms in pushing the hard austerity line which it recommends in its report.
The predominance of the huge banks and industrialists in these two organizations and especially the increasing leverage of the U.S. banks has become noticeable in the recent period. The bankers’ assault on the living standards of the mass of the workers was initiated originally by the heads of the First National City and Chase Manhattan banks.
Although the Carter administration has been occasionally criticized by the BIS and the OECD, the reactionary policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Secretary of the Treasury G. William Miller have been praised ever since they began their so-called anti-inflation drive.
It is considered most necessary by the bankers to launch their worldwide austerity program under cover of these two world organizations – the BIS and the OECD – so as to give this anti-working class offensive greater credibility. If such “advice” comes from seemingly objective statistics-gathering world organizations, it would be easier for the bankers to promote their attack on the masses’ living standards and make it more plausible and acceptable to the people as a whole.
In earlier years, reactionary and unpopular causes pushed by the bankers and industrialists usually originated in such bankers’ instrumentalities as the Trilateral Commission, which is mostly Rockefeller-controlled. However, the debacle suffered by David Rockefeller as a result of the overthrow of the shah during the Iranian Revolution, and the exposure of the Rockefellers’ deep connection with the shah, has somewhat discredited in the recent period the image which the financiers tried to give to the Commission.
The ultra-right and a variety of groupings now gravitating toward the Reagan camp have also attacked the Commission as an umbrella organization for the so-called Eastern establishment.
It should be noted that the BIS is fully owned by private Western bankers. But there is no question that it reflects the fundamental position of the central banks of Britain, West Germany, and the others, and certainly of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States.
The open endorsement by the BIS of the general direction of Western capitalist economic policy, which is being relentlessly pursued by all the imperialist governments, is an ominous development for the working class in all of the capitalist countries. It will certainly reverberate in all the oppressed countries and subject them to even more intense super-exploitation than is the case today.
By choosing the medium of these apparently innocuous organizations to promote such a serious policy shift, the bankers and industrialists hope to goad the capitalist politicians into pushing reactionary austerity measures hard upon the backs of the masses. By seemingly making the reactionary austerity policy worldwide an universal, as though it flows from some objective law or divine guidance, the bankers hope that the politicians will find it easier to shove it down the throat of the masses.
It is to be recalled that it was precisely in these banking circles that the first efforts at initiating an anti-labor austerity drive was proposed at the very beginning of the last recession in 1974-75. The bankers then, utilizing the oil crisis, also elaborated it into a general attempt at a historical reversal of the progressive improvement in workers’ living standards as a whole.
It was the bankers, especially David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan and Walter Wriston of First National City (now Citibank), who came out with the idea of ending the “era of rising expectations” and inaugurating the period of belt-tightening.
Unless the origins of the anti-labor drive are fully exposed, unless it is made clear that the capitalist class has no way of dealing with the economic crisis except by unloading it on the backs of the workers, it will be impossible to launch an effective counter-attack against the ruling-class efforts to salvage their class position at the expense of the working class. Exposure of the role of the capitalist government as the tool of the banking and industrial magnates is indispensable for the enlightenment of the working class in its struggle to push back the tide of economic decline, political reaction, unbridled militarism, and virulent racism.
Last updated: 11 May 2026