You are an AI assistant.
system
Is it legitimate for a developing-country government to ban most consumer imports and ration foreign currency to protect scarce reserves, knowing the policy will instantly destroy urban small businesses and trigger mass layoffs in retail sectors?
user
No blanket “yes/no” can be given; everything depends on *which class* the government actually serves and *how* the resulting pain is distributed.

1. Foreign-exchange scarcity in a semi-colonial economy is not a technical mishap—it is the predictable result of imperialist domination: export prices set by monopolies, debt service fixed in hard currency, and a comprador bourgeoisie that bleeds the country through luxury imports and capital flight. The immediate crisis merely exposes the chronic structural hemorrhage. Any response that leaves the old property and trade relations intact is therefore doomed to fail, no matter how severe the import ban.

2. If the state is (or aspires to be) a dictatorship of the proletariat, it will:
   - Default or repudiate illegitimate external debt instead of squeezing the masses to keep bankers happy;
   - Institute state monopoly of foreign trade so hard-currency earnings are pooled and directed toward productive equipment and raw materials the country cannot yet produce;
   - Nationalize banking and large-scale distribution to cut out speculative intermediaries;
   - Immediately place affected retail workers on the state payroll at full wages and reassign them to distribution cooperatives or infrastructure projects instead of throwing them onto the street;
   - Channel scarce imports toward basic-needs production and *systematically* shift resources to heavy industry and agriculture so the country can reproduce its own material base instead of begging for dollars every year.

3. If, on the other hand, the government is merely a section of the national bourgeoisie trying to negotiate better terms with imperialism, the import ban functions as a regressive tax: petty traders collapse, urban unemployment explodes, and the black-market rate for dollars skyrockets, while big comprador firms get special quotas through state connections. Here the policy is “legitimate” only in the sense that every capitalist state eventually makes the working class pay for systemic crisis. It is not legitimate from the standpoint of proletarian politics.

4. Small shopkeepers and wage workers are both exploited by capital, but they are *not* strategic allies at the moment of foreign-exchange crisis. The petty bourgeoisie will, in the main, demand restoration of their small property and therefore press for the quickest return to open markets—even if that means IMF loans, mass privatizations, and deeper subjugation to imperialism. The proletariat’s interest lies in *breaking* that cycle, not in softening it. Consequently, a revolutionary government does not apologize for liquidating parasitic retail circuits; it compensates displaced workers, relocates them to socially necessary labor, and invites progressive elements among the lower petty bourgeoisie to join cooperatives under workers’ control. Those who resist in order to defend the right to speculate in imported perfume and cell phones are not “the people” but a reactionary street block.

Bottom line: the measure itself is neither inherently progressive nor reactionary; its class content is determined by the broader program in which it is embedded. If foreign-exchange rationing is the opening gambit of a planned transition to socialist accumulation—protected by workers’ militias and backed by the rural poor—it can be defended. If it is merely a fiscal tourniquet applied by a bourgeois regime that still kneels to Citibank and the IMF, it is simply one more episode in the constant transfer of crisis onto the backs of the working class and deserves only opposition.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Is it legitimate for a developing-country government to ban most consumer imports and ration foreign currency to protect scarce reserves, knowing the policy will instantly destroy urban small businesses and trigger mass layoffs in retail sectors?
user