Éric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist with a PhD from the universities of Paris VIII and Liège. He is spokesperson for the CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt) – formerly called Committee for the cancellation of Third World debt – international network, of which he is one of the founding members, and he took part in the process that launched the World Social Forum in 2001.
For more than twenty years his economic analyses and reviews have been widely read in the press and on the Internet. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent being Greece 2015 There was an alternative, Resistance Books, the IIRE and the CADTM, London, 2020. The previous ones were: The Debt System. A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019 Bankocracy (2015); and The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014). Several of his books have been published in more than a dozen languages and have become reference works on questions of debt and International Financial Institutions: Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers (2010); and The World Bank: A Critical Primer (2008). He has taken part in producing two manuals for conducting citizens' audits.
Biography
Born in Namur in 1954, Éric Toussaint lived in the mining village of Retinne, near Liège (Belgium), where his parents were teachers. Retinne had a population of 2,500 people of more than thirty different nationalities. At the age of thirteen, already present in the struggles of that time (opposition to the war in Vietnam and racism, and supporting workers' struggles and the Prague Spring among others), he joined the students' union branch of the FGTB. In 1968, he took part in launching a pupils' movement that spread to several schools. It was the start of many struggles. In 1970, Éric joined the IVth International and helped to create the "Workers Revolutionary League" (Ligue révolutionnaire des travailleurs – LRT) in May 1970, and became a member of the Politburo alongside Ernest Mandel. Since 1980, he has been a member of the 4th International's United Secretariat and International Committee.
Professional and political work
Éric Toussaint held senior positions in the public service union CGSP – teaching branch. Between 1975 and 1994, he actively participated in numerous popular mobilizations (teachers, steelworkers, municipal workers ...). The 1980s were marked by numerous strikes, either to improve public services (including public education), or for structural anti-capitalist reforms, or again to resist the neoliberal offensive. He was particularly active in strikes and workers' movements in Liège (where he was a teacher) where the population was overwhelmed by the burden of the city's public debt throughout the 1980s.
The notion of international solidarity has had an ever growing influence in his activities and reflections: solidarity with the strikers in Poland in 1980, the British miners in 1984–1985, support for revolutionary experiences by organizing voluntary work brigades to help the farmers in Nicaragua between 1979 and 1989, solidarity against the repression used to quell the "Tiananmen square demonstration" in 1989, opposition to the blockade imposed on Cuba by the United States government, support for the Palestinian struggle and many other struggles around the world.
In 1990, he contributed to the creation of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM – Henceforth 'Committee for the abolition of illegitimate debt') and became its president. This committee is now an international network that operates in thirty countries on four continents. In 1999, he participated in the creation of ATTAC Belgium and the World Social Forum in Brazil and its international council in 2001, the European Social Forum in 2002, and the Alter Summit in 2012.
Since 2000, he has been involved with leftist governments and popular movements in Latin American and elsewhere on the themes of debt, the Bank of the South and other alternatives.
In 2003, he advised the new Timor-Leste government on relations with the IMF and the World Bank. In 2005, and in 2008, he was invited by the Economic Commission of the African Union to present propositions on the abolition of illegitimate debts demanded from African countries. In 2005, he took part, with left wing Argentine economists, in the creation of the International Debt Observatory.
With the North in the throes of a debt crisis since 2007–2008, Toussaint has worked for the launching and strengthening of citizens' debt audits in Europe.