Good evening. Tonight, we wrap up our series on free trade and the
left. To recap where we were, I
started by retelling the story that
free trade improves overall
productivity
,
but expressed reserves about the way in which it does so: plant closures
and threats thereof, regulatory arbitrage, and so on. Then we went back
in history,
discussing the progressive roots of free trade as a cause
of the peace-and-justice
crowd
,
in the 19th century. Then we looked at the
leading exponents of free
trade in the 20th century, the neoliberals
,
ending in an odd place: instead of free trade being a means for the end
of peace and prosperity, neoliberalism turns this on its head, instead
holding that war, immiseration, apartheid, dictatorship, ecological
disaster, all are justified if they serve the ends of the “free market”,
of which free trade is a component.
When I make this list of evils I find myself back in 1999, that clearly
“we” were right then to shut down the WTO meetings in Seattle. With the
distance of time, I start to wonder, not about then, but about now: for
all the evil of our days, Trump at least has the virtue of making clear
that trade barriers have a positive dot-product with acts of war. As
someone who lives in the
banlieue
of Geneva, I am always amused when I
find myself tut-tutting over the defunding of this or that institution
of international collaboration.
I started this series by calling out four works.
Pax Economica
and
Globalists
have had adequate treatment. The third,
Webs of
Power
, by Starhawk, is one that I
have long seen as a bit of an oddball; forgive my normie white boy
(derogatory) sensibilities, but I have often wondered how a book by a
voice of “earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion” has ended up on
my shelf. I am an atheist. How much woo is allowed to me?
choice of axiom
Conventional wisdom is to treat economists seriously, and Wiccans less
so. In this instance, I have my doubts. The issue is that a neoliberal
is at the same time a true believer in markets, and a skilled jurist.
In service of the belief, any rhetorical device is permissible, if it
works; if someone comes now and tries to tell me that the EU-Mercosur
agreement is a good thing because of its effect on capybara populations,
my first reaction is to doubt them, because maybe they are a neoliberal,
and if so
they would literally say anything
.
Whereas if Starhawk has this Earth-mother-spiritual vibe... who am I to
say? Yes, I think religion on the whole is a predatory force on
vulnerable people, but that doesn’t mean that her interpretation of the
web of life as divine is any less legitimate than neoliberal awe of the
market. Let’s hear her argument and get on with things.
Starhawk’s book has three parts. The first is an as-I-lived-it
chronicle, going from Seattle to Washington to Prague to Quebec City to
Genoa, and thence to 9/11 and its aftermath, describing what it was like
to be an activist seeking to disrupt the various WTO-adjacent meetings,
seeking to build something else. She follows this up with 80 pages of
contemporary-to-2002 topics such as hierarchy within the movement,
nonviolence vs black blocs, ecological principles, cultural
appropriation, and so on.
These first two sections inform the last final 20 pages, in which
Starhawk attempts to synthesize what it is that “we” wanted, as a kind
of memento and hopefully a generator of actions to come. She comes up
with a list of nine principles, which I’ll just quote here because I
don’t have an editor (the joke’s on all of us!):
-
We must protect the viability of the life-sustaining systems of the planet, which are everywhere under attack.
-
A realm of the sacred exists, of things too precious to be commodified, and must be respected.
-
Communities must control their own resources and destinies.
-
The rights and heritages of indigenous communities must be acknowledged and respected.
-
Enterprises must be rooted in communities and be responsible to communities and to future generations.
-
Opportunity for human beings to meet their needs and fulfill their dreams and aspirations should be open to all.
-
Labor deserves just compensation, security, and dignity.
-
The human community has a collective responsibility to assure the basic means of life, growth, and development for all its members.
-
Democracy means that all people have a voice in the decisions that affect them, including economic decisions.
Now friends, this is Starhawk’s list, not mine, and a
quarter-century-old list at that. I’m not here to judge it, though I
think it’s not bad; what I find interesting is its multifaceted nature,
that when contrasted with the cybernetic awe of late neoliberalism, that
actually it’s the Witch who has the more down-to-earth concerns: a
planet to live on, a Rawlsian concern with justice, and a control of the
economic by the people.
which leaves us
Former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi published a
report
some 18 months ago diagnosing a European malaise and proposing a number
of specific remedies. I find that we on my part of the left are oft
ill-equipped to engage with the problem he identifies, not to mention
the solutions. The whole question of productivity is very technical, to
the extent that we might consider it owned by our enemies: our instinct
is to deflect, “productivity for what”, that sort of thing. Worse, if
we do concede the problem, we haven’t spent as much time sparring in the
gyms of comparative advantage; we risk a first-round knockout. We come
with Starhawk’s list in hand, and they smile at us condescendingly:
“very nice but we need to focus on the economy, you know,” and we lose
again.
But Starhawk was not wrong. We do need a set of principles that we can
use to analyze the present and plot a course to the future. I do not
pretend to offer such a set today, but after having looked into the free
trade question over the last couple months, I have reached two simple
conclusions, which I will share with you now.
The first is that, from an intellectual point of view,
we should just
ignore the neoliberals; they are not serious people
. That’s not a
value judgment on the price mechanism, but rather one on those that value
nothing else: that whereas classical liberalism was a means to an end,
neoliberalism admits no other end than commerce, and admits any means
that furthers its end. And so,
we can just ignore them
. If
neoliberals were the only ones thinking about productivity, well, we
might need new branches of economics. Fortunately that’s not the case.
Productivity is but one dimension of the good, and it is our
collective political task to choose a point from the space of the
possible according to our collective desires.
The second conclusion is that we should take back free trade from our
enemies on the right. We are one people, but divided into states by
historical accident. Although there is a productivity argument for
trade, we don’t have to limit ourselves to it: the bond that one might
feel between Colorado and Wyoming should be the same between Italy and
Tunisia, between Canada and Mexico, indeed between France and Brasil.
One people, differentiated but together, sharing ideas and, yes, things.
Internationalism, not nationalism.
There is no reason to treat free trade as the sole criterion against
which to judge a policy. States are heterogeneous: what works for the
US might not be right for Haiti; states differ in the degree that they
internalize environmental impacts; and they differ as regards public
services. We can take these into account via policy, but our goal
should be progress for all.
So while Thomas Piketty is right to
decry a kind of absolutism among
European decisionmakers regarding free
trade
,
I can’t help but notice a chauvinist division being set up in the way we
leftists are inclined to treat these questions:
we
in Europe are one
bloc, despite e.g. very different carbon impacts of producing a
dishwasher in Poland versus Spain, whereas a dishwasher from China
belongs to a different, worse, more sinful category.
and mercosur?
To paraphrase Marley’s ghost,
mankind is my business
. I want an ever
closer union with my brothers and sisters in Uruguay and Zambia and
Cambodia and Palestine. Trade is a part of it. All things being equal,
we should want to trade with Chile. We on the left should not oppose
free trade with Mercosur out of a principle that goods produced far away
are necessarily a bad thing.
All this is not to say that we should
just doux
it
(although, gosh, Karthik is such a worthy foe); we can still participate
in collective carrot-and-stick exercises such as carbon taxes and the
like, and this appreciation of free trade would not have trumped the
campaign to boycott apartheid South Africa, nor would it for apartheid
Israel. But our default position should be to support free trade with
Mercosur, in such a way that does improves the lot of all humanity.
I don’t know what to think about the concrete elements of the
EU-Mercosur deal. The neoliberal play is to design legal structures
that encase commerce, and a free trade deal risks subordinating the
political to the economic. But unlike some of my comrades on the left,
I am starting to think that we should want free trade with Bolivia, and
that’s already quite a change from where I was 25 years ago.
fin
Emily Saliers famously
went seeking
clarity
; I fear I have
brought little. We are still firmly in the world of the political, and
like Starhawk, still need a framework of pre-thunk thoughts to orient us
when some Draghi comes with a new four-score-page manifesto. Good luck
and godspeed.
But it is easier to find a solution if we cull the dimensionality of the
problem. The neoliberals had their day, but perhaps these staves may be
of use to you in exorcising their discursive domination; it is time we
cut them off. Internationalist trade was ours anyway, and it should
resume its place as a means to our ends.
And what ends? As with prices, we discover them on the margin, in each
political choice we make. Some are easy; some less so. And while a
list like Starhawk’s is fine enough, I keep coming back to a
simpler question:
which side are you on?
The sheriff or the union?
ICE or the immigrant?
Which side are you
on?
The question cuts
fine. For the WTO in Seattle, to me it said to shut it all down. For
EU-Mercosur, to me it says, “let’s talk.”
