The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, held in New Hampshire in the United States (US), led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) after the Second World War. Across the decades, social movements especially in the global South have opposed the Bank and the Fund for their policies, programmes, and operations that violated people’s rights–economic, social, and cultural, to self-determination—and people’s sovereignty. Anti-imperialist social movements have also called out the IMF and World Bank for facilitating the interests of global powers, especially the United States (US) and of US monopoly capital. Criticisms have been raised against privatisation, deregulation, and liberalization; austerity; debt bondage and violations of sovereignty; facilitating resource plunder while hollowing out domestic agriculture and industries; socially and ecologically harmful infrastructure and energy projects; and even support for military dictatorships.

The year 2024 will mark 80 years since the original “Bretton Woods moment.” Recent years have been turning points for the Bank and the Fund. Amid multiple crises, the US in 2022 referred to the need for a “new Bretton Woods,” with an agenda of re-consolidating the legitimacy of the IMF-WBG. Common in Bank and Fund narratives is an erasure of the culpability of their own operations for the crises felt in the global South. Instead, the World Bank’s Evolution Roadmap rolled out in 2023 to supposedly reform its goals, operations, and financing, as a way to repackage its tools to ease conditions for the entry of capital of the financial oligarchy into the global South, towards extracting super-profits.

For social movements, progressive academics, and critical civil society, it will be crucial to mark the 80 years of the Bretton Woods from the perspective of peoples and their organisations who struggle against the Bank and the Fund for violating people’s rights and sovereignty. Today, a People’s History of the IMF-World Bank is best written by peoples and organisations in struggle themselves, as tools to further organise to reject the imperialist dictates of these institutions in the present – towards supporting the vision of shutting these institutions down to reclaim our future.

This initiative builds on the messages of the Reclaim Our Future Conference in October 2023, and its Conference Statement, which articulated a vision of rejecting neoliberal dictates, false solutions, and re-articulated the notion of shutting down the IMF-WBG.

Today, a People’s History of the IMF-World Bank is best written by peoples and organisations in struggle themselves, as tools to further organise to reject the imperialist dictates of these institutions in the present