You are an AI assistant.
system
Does a resource-rich country have the moral right to impose capital controls that prevent domestic elites from moving their wealth offshore when history shows such outflows typically precede devastating currency crashes that crush working-class purchasing power?
user
A workers’ state has not only the right but the duty to block capital flight. The question of “morality” is settled by class interest: the moment large holders of social surplus—bankers, exporters, bureaucratic compradors—ship it to Miami, London, or Singapore they are converting national labor into imperialist claims on that labor. Every dollar, real, or naira that exits is a claim check on future toil printed by the very people who already own the mines, oil rigs, and soy plantations. Currency crashes are not natural disasters; they are the audible snap of the chain that links local exploitation to world finance. When the peso collapses 50 percent, the factory wage is cut in half in world terms while the external debt—contracted in dollars—doubles. The class that engineered the hemorrhage then returns to buy the bankrupt plant at fire-sale prices.  

Capital controls are therefore a defensive weapon of the proletariat in the same way a strike picket line is: they stop the owners from moving their assets until the terms of social reproduction are renegotiated. The 1998 Malaysian controls, the 2012 Argentine cepo, the 1983 Nicaraguan foreign-exchange monopoly all had limitations because they were administered by bourgeois or petty-bourgeois governments trying to balance between imperialism and domestic unrest, but they still showed that closing the escape hatch works. The Malaysian ringgit stabilized in six weeks; manufacturing wages recovered faster than in any other country hit by the Asian crash.  

The decisive issue is who holds power while the gate is shut. If the same local bourgeoisie that was preparing to flee remains in command, it will sabotage production, starve the cities of imports, and then cynically blame “controls” for the shortages. Controls must therefore be fused with workers’ audits of every major firm, criminal penalties for transfer pricing, and the expropriation without compensation of every enterprise caught evading. The banks themselves—starting with the foreign-exchange dealers—have to be seized and integrated into a single state monopoly of foreign trade, directed by elected factory and neighborhood committees. Only under that dictatorship of the proletariat do controls stop being a temporary regulatory band-aid and become instead a step toward the abolition of the value form itself.  

So yes, block the wires, freeze the accounts, ground the private jets—but do it as an act of class war, not as a technocratic “macro-prudential” measure. The moral right flows from the workers who created the wealth and who will be made to pay for the crash if it escapes.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does a resource-rich country have the moral right to impose capital controls that prevent domestic elites from moving their wealth offshore when history shows such outflows typically precede devastating currency crashes that crush working-class purchasing power?
user