October 2006

Introduction (excerpt)

A debt is the commitment of a debtor towards a creditor. In principle the debtor is the one who has freely agreed to contract the debt and who benefi ts from it. But on the scale of the global system, debt is no longer a private affair because it now has a political dimension which concerns all people and all societies. The indebtedness of most countries of the South is becoming all the more unbearable because the repayments and interest payments demanded by the creditors are beyond their means and prevent all forms of development.

So it is essential to put the history of Third World debt into the context of bad development, of a capitalist system in crisis and of the unequal distribution of wealth (about one person in two in the world lives on less than two dollars a day… and these fi gures certainly underestimate the extent of poverty) and of a system of domination which is reproduced within each country.

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