ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s the Italian Communist Party was undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. Italian Communists had no idea what to call whatever future Party might emerge from the ruins of the post-Gorbachev world. All countries must trade as much as they can and rely for their subsistence first on the world market, last on their own resources. If the world market is the Bank’s fundamental organizing principle, price is its instrument. In the Bank’s vocabulary, however, the biological meaning is replaced by a concept of never-ending growth. The Bank refuses to confront this last of all last things – not merely individual or societal death but the possibility of species extinction, including that of the human species. The very vagueness of the concept of development and the great number of candidates who hope to attain it legitimize the Bank’s functions, justify its existence and explain its power.
