Good evening. Let’s talk about free trade!
Last time,
we discussed Marc-William Palen’s
Pax
Economica
,
which looks at how the cause of free trade was taken up by a motley crew
of anti-imperialists, internationalists, pacifists, marxists, and
classical liberals in the nineteenth century. Protectionism was the
prerogative of empire—only available to those with a navy—and it so it
makes sense that idealists might support “peace through trade”. So how
did free trade go from a cause of the “another world is possible” crowd
to the halls of the WTO? Did we leftists catch a case of buyer’s
remorse, or did the goods delivered simply not correspond to the order?
To make an attempt at an answer, we need more history. From the acknowledgements of
Quinn
Slobodian’s
Globalists
:
This book is a long-simmering product of the Seattle protests against
the World Trade Organization in 1999. I was part of a generation that
came of age after the Cold War's end. We became adolescents in the
midst of talk of globalization and the End of History. In the more
hyperactive versions of this talk, we were made to think that nations
were over and the one indisputable bond uniting humanity was the
global economy. Seattle was a moment when we started to make
collective sense of what was going on and take back the story line. I
did not make the trip north from Portland but many of my friends and
acquaintances did, painting giant
papier-mâché
fists red to strap to
backpacks and coming back with takes of zip ties and pepper spray,
nights in jail, and encounters with police—tales they spun into war
stories and theses. This book is an apology for not being there and
an attempt to rediscover in words what the concept was that they went
there to fight.
Slobodian’s approach is to pull on the thread that centers around the
WTO itself. He ends up identifying what he calls the “Geneva School” of
neoliberalism: from Mise’s circle in Vienna, to the International
Chamber of Commerce in Paris, to the Hayek-inspired Mont Pèlerin
Society, to Petersmann of the WTO precursor GATT organization, Röpke of
the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, and their lesser
successors of the 1970s and 1980s.
The thesis that Slobodian ends up drawing is that neoliberalism is not
actually a
laissez-faire
fundamentalism, but rather an ideology that
placed the value of free-flowing commerce above everything else: above
democracy, above sovereignty, above peace, and that as such it actually
requires active instutional design to protect commerce from the dangers
of, say, hard-won gains by working people in one country (Austria,
1927), expropriation of foreign-owned plantations in favor of landless
peasants (Guatemala, 1952), internal redistribution within countries
transitioning out of minority rule (South Africa, 1996), decolonization
(1945-1975 or so), or just the election of a moderate socialist at the
ballot box (Chile, 1971).
Now, dear reader, I admit to the conceit that if you are reading this,
probably you are a leftist also, and if not, at least you are interested
in understanding how it is that we think, with what baubles do we
populate our mental attics, that sort of thing. Well, friend, you know
that by the time we get to Chile and Allende we are stomping and
clapping our hands and shouting in an extasy of indignant sectarian
righteousness. And that therefore should we invoke the spectre of
neoliberalism, it is with the deepest of disgust and disdain: this
project and all it stands for is against me and mine. I hate it like I
hated Henry Kissinger, which is to say,
a lot, viscerally, it hurts now
to think of it, rest in piss you bastard
.
two theologies
And yet, I’m still left wondering what became of the odd alliance of
Marx with Manchester liberalism. Palen’s
Pax Economica
continues to
sketch a thin line through the twentieth century, focusing on showing
the continued presence of commercial-peace exponents despite it not
turning out to be our century. But the rightward turn of the main
contingent of free-trade supporters is not explained. I have an idea
about how it is that this happened; it is anything but scholarly, but
here we go.
Let us take out our coarsest brush to paint a crude story: the 19th
century begins in the wake of the American and French revolutions,
making the third estate and the bourgeoisie together the revolutionary
actors of history. It was a time in which “we” could imagine organizing
society in different ways, the age of the utopian imaginary, but
overlaid with the structures of the old, old money, old land ownership,
revanchist monarchs, old power, old empire. In this context, Cobden’s
Anti-Corn Law League
was insurgent, heterodox, asking for a specific
political change with the goal of making life on earth better for the
masses. Free trade was a means to an end. Not all Cobdenites had the
same ends, but Marx and Manchester both did have ends, and they happened
to coincide in the means.
Come the close of the Great War in 1918, times have changed. The
bourgeoisie have replaced the nobility as the incumbent power, and those
erstwhile bourgeois campaigners now have to choose between idealism and
their own interest.
But how to choose?
Some bourgeois campaigners will choose a kind of humanist notion of
progress; this is the thread traced by Palen, through the
Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace
, the Young Women’s Christian
Association, the
Haslemere
Group
, and others.
Some actors are not part of the hegemonic bourgeoisie at all, and so
have other interests. The newly independent nations after
decolonization have more motive to upend the system than to preserve it;
their approach to free trade has both tactical and ideological
components. Tactical, in the sense that they wanted access to
first-world markets, but also sometimes some protections for their own
industries; ideological, in the sense that they often acted in
solidarity with other new nations against the dominant powers. In
addition to the new nations, the Soviet bloc had its own semi-imperial
project, and its own specific set of external threats; we cannot blame
them for being tactical either.
And then you have Ludwig von Mises. Slobodian hints at Mises’ youth in
the Austro-Hungarian empire, a vast domain of many languages and peoples
but united by trade and the order imposed by monarchy. After the war
and the breakup of the empire, I can only imagine—and here I am
imagining, this is not a well-evidenced conclusion—I imagine he felt a
sense of loss. In the inter-war, he holds court as the
doyen
of the
Vienna Chamber of Commerce, trying to put the puzzle pieces back
together, to reconstruct the total integration of imperial commerce, but
from within
Red Vienna
.
When in 1927,
a court decision acquitted a fascist milicia that fired
into a crowd, killing a worker and a child
, the city went on general
strike, and workers burned down the ministry of justice. Police
responded violently, killing 89 people and injuring over 1000. Mises
was delighted: order was restored.
And now, a parenthesis. I grew up Catholic, in a ordinary kind of way.
Then in my early teens, I concluded that if faith meant anything, it has
to burn with a kind of fervor; I became an evangelical Catholic, if such
is a thing. There were special camps you could go to with intense
emotional experiences and people singing together and all of that is
God, did you know? Did you know? The feelings attenuated over time but
I am a finisher, and so I got confirmed towards the end of high school.
I went off to university for physics and stuff and eventually,
painfully, agonizingly concluded there was no space for God in the
equations.
Losing God was incredibly traumatic for me. Not that I missed, like,
the idea of some guy, but as someone who wants things to make sense, to
have meaning, to be based on something, anything at all: losing a core
value or morality invalidated so many ideas I had about the world and
about myself. What is the good life, a life well led? What is true and
right in a way that is not contingent on history? I am embarrassed to
say that for a while I took the UN declaration of human rights to be
axiomatic.
When I think about Mise’s reaction to the 1927 general strike in Vienna,
I think about how I scrambled to find something, anything, to replace my
faith in God. As the space for God shrank with every advance in
science, some chose to identify God with his works, and then to
progressively ascribe divine qualities to those works: perhaps commerce is
axiomatically Good, and yet ineffable, in the sense that it is Good on
its own, and that no mortal act can improve upon it. How else can we
interpret Hayek’s relationship with the market except as awe in the
presence of the divine?
This is how I have come to understand the neoliberal value system: a
monotheism with mammon as godhead. There may be different schools
within it, but all of the faithful worship the same when they have to
choose between, say, commerce and democracy, commerce and worker’s
rights, commerce and environmental regulation, commerce and taxation,
commerce and opposition to apartheid. It’s a weird choice of deity. Now
that God is dead, one could have chosen anything to take His place, and
these guys chose the “global economy”. I would pity them if I still had
a proper Christian heart.
means without end
I think that neoliberals made a miscalculation when they concluded that
the peace of
doux commerce
is not predicated on justice. Sure, in the
short run, you can do business with Pinochet’s Chile, privatize the national mining companies, and cut unemployment benefits, but not without incurring moral damage;
people will see through it, in time, as they did in Seattle in 1999.
Slobodian refers to the ratification of the WTO as a Pyrrhic victory; in
their triumph, neoliberals painted a target on their backs.
Where does this leave us now? And what about Mercosur? I’m starting to feel the shape of an answer, but I’m not there yet. I think we’ll cover the
gap between Seattle and the present day in a future dispatch. Until then, let’s
take care of one other; as spoke the prophet Pratchett, there’s no
justice, just us.
