ABSTRACT
The critical burden of "The Ruling Class Does Not Rule" is that some people called "instrumentalists" adhere to the reductionistic view that farsighted and completely class-conscious capitalists directly dominate the American government by telling government officials what to do. This chapter focuses on the actual process through which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created in 1944 as an institution to facilitate currency exchanges, encourage stability in exchange rates, and sustain world trade through currency loans to countries with temporary deficits in their balance of payments. It shows the inadequacy of the analysis of the IMF that led Block to think in terms of state autonomy in the first place. The chapter presents Block's claims about the origins of postwar plans for the IMF. It also shows how corporate planners from the war—peace study groups of the Council on Foreign Relations helped to create the IMF as one part of their larger economic plan for the postwar world.
