A week ago
we discussed free
trade
,
and specifically took a look at the classical mechanism by which free
trade is supposed to improve overall outcomes, as measured by GDP.
As I described it, the value proposition of free trade is ambiguous at
best: there is an intangible sense that a country might have a higher
GDP with lower trade barriers, but with a side serving of misery as
international competition forces some local industries to close, and
without any guarantee about how that trade advantage would be
distributed among the population. Why bother? And why is my news feed
full of EU commissioners signing new trade agreements? Where are these
ideas coming from?
stave 2
I asked around, placed some orders, and a week later a copy of
Marc-William Palen’s
Pax Economica
came in the mail. I was hoping for
a definitive, reasoned argument for or against free trade, from a
leftist’s perspective (whatever that means). The book was both more and
less than that. Less, in the sense that its narrative is most tightly
woven in the century before the end of the second World War, becoming
loose and frayed as it breezes through decolonization, the rise of
neoliberalism, the end of history, and what it describes as our current
neomercantilist moment. Less, also, in that Palen felt no need to
summarize the classic economic arguments for free trade, leaving me to
clumsily do so in the
previous
stave
.
And yet, the story it tells fills in gaps in my understanding that I
didn’t even know I had.
To pick up one thread from the book, let’s go back to 1815. British
parliament passes the
Corn
Laws
, establishing a price
floor for imported grain. This trade barrier essentially imposes a
significant tax on all people who eat, to the profit of a small number
of landowners. A movement to oppose these laws develops over the next
30 years, with Richard Cobden as its leading advocate. One of the
arguments of the
Anti-Corn Law
League
,
which was actually a thing, is that cheaper food is good for workers;
though wages might decline as bosses realize they don’t need to pay so
much to keep their workers alive, relatively speaking workers will do
better. More money left over at the end of the month also means more
demand for other manufactured products, which is good for growing
industry.
In the end, bad harvests in 1845 led to shortages and famine (
yes, that
one
) and
eventually a full repeal of the laws in 1846. Perhaps the Anti-Corn Law
League’s success was inevitable: a bad harvest year is a stochastic
certainty, and not having enough food is the kind of problem no
government can ignore. In any case, the episode does prove the Corn
Laws to be a front in a class war, and their repeal was a victory for
the left, even if it occured under a Conservative government, and even
if the campaign was essentially middle-class Liberal in character.
The repeal campaign was not just about domestic cost of living, however.
Its exponents argued that free trade among nations was an essential step
to a world of peaceful international cooperation. Palen’s book puts
Cobden in context by comparison to Friedrich List, who, inspired by a
stint in America in the 1820s, starts from the premise that for a nation
to be great, it needs an empire of colonies to exploit, and to conquer
and defend colonies, it needs a developed domestic industry and navy;
and for a nation to develop its own industry, it needs protectionism.
The natural state of empire is not exactly one of free trade with its
neighbors.
The “commercial peace” movement that Palen describes cuts List’s
argument short at “empire”: because there is no empire without war, a
peace movement should scratch away at the causes of war, and the causes
of the causes; a world living in
pax economica
would avoid imperial
conflict by tying nations together through trade. It sounds idealistic,
and it is, but it’s easy to forget that today we wage war through trade
also: blockades and sanctions are often followed by bombs. Palen’s book
draws clear lines from Cobdenism through such disparate groups as
women’s peace societies, Christian internationalists, pre-war German
socialists, and Lenin himself.
Marx understood history as a process of development, consisting of
stages through which a society must necessarily pass on its way to
socialism. This allies him with capitalism in many ways; he viewed free
trade as a step towards a higher form of capitalism, which would
necessarily lead to socialism. This, to me, is not a convincing
argument in 2026: not only has the mechanistic vision of history failed
to fruit, but its mechanism of plant closures and capital flight can be
cruel and hard to campaign for politically. And yet, I think we do need
a healthy dose of internationalism to remedy the ills of the present
day: a jolt of ideals and even idealism to remind us that we are all
travelling together on this spaceship Earth, and that those on the other
side of a political line are just as much our brothers and sisters those
on “our” side.
i went seeking clarity
When you tend Marxist, you know in your bones that although the road to
socialism is rough and winding, the winds of history are always at your
back; there is an in-baked inevitability of success that softens defeat.
There is something similar in the Christian and feminist narrative
strands that Palen weaves: a sense not that victory is inevitable, at
least in this lifetime, but that fighting for it is a moral imperative,
and that God is on your side. The campaign for free trade was a means
to a moral end, one of international peace and shared prosperity. And
this, in 2026, sounds... good, actually?
Again from our 2026 perspective, I cannot help but agree that a trade
barrier is often an act of war; preliminary, yes, but on the spectrum.
I have had enough
freedom
fries
in my life to have
developed an allergy to anything that tastes of
my-side-of-the-line-is-better-than-yours. Though I have not yet read
Klein and Pettis’s deliciously titled
Trade Wars are Class
Wars
,
I do know that among the
1.5 million people who died as a result of the
sanctions on Iraq in the
1990s
,
Saddam Hussein was not on the list. Sometimes I feel like we learned
the lessons of Cobdenism backwards: in order to keep the people
starving, we must impose anew the Corn Laws.
Palen’s book leaves me with one doubt, and one big question. The doubt
is, to what extent do the lessons of the early 1800s apply today?
Ricardo’s contemporary
comparative
advantage
theories
presupposed that capital was relatively fixed in space; nowadays this is much
less the case. The threat of moving the plant elsewhere is always
present in all union drives everywhere. Though history rhymes, it does not repeat; it will take some creativity to transplant
pax economica
to the soils of the 21st century.
The bigger question, though, is as regards the morality of protectionism
as practiced by more and less developed economies: when is it morally
right for a country to erect trade barriers? Palen’s book does not
pretend to answer this question. And yet, this issue was foremost in
our minds, as we shut down Seattle in 1999, as we died in Genoa in 2001.
(Forgive the collectivism, if you aren’t of this tribe (yet?), but it
was a lived experience.) Free trade was a moral cause in 1835; how did it become immoral in 1995, at least to us?
world without end
Well. To answer that question, we need a history that picks up where
Palen leaves off, and we have something like it in Quinn Slobodian’s
Globalists
, which
we will look at next time. But before we go, two reflections.
One, in Europe we have kept the Corn Laws on the books, in a way, in the
form of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In France the dominant
discourse is very much in opposition to the free trade agreement with
Mercosur, and the main reason is the threat to French farmers. The tradeoff to get the Mercosur agreement over the line were additional subsidies under the CAP, which are a form of trade barrier. And yet,
the way the CAP is structured allocates most of the money in proportion
to the surface area of a farm, which is to say, to the largest
agribusinesses and to the largest landowners. Greenpeace just put out an
excellent briefing arguing that the CAP is just a subsidy to the heirs
of the Duchess of Alba and their
ilk
. Again, are we running the 19th century in reverse?
Secondly, and harder to explain... in the 2000s I listened a lot to an
anarchist radio show hosted by Lyn Gerry,
Unwelcome
Guests
. (Have you heard
the eponymous
tune?
It makes me shiver every time.) Anyway I remember one episode which
discussed the gift economy and hunter-gather economics, in which a
researcher asked a member of that community what he would do if he came
into a lot of food at one time: the response, as I recall, was that he
would store it “in his brother”. He would give it to others. One day,
if he needed it, they would give to him.
I know that our world does not work this way, but there is an element of
truth here, in that it’s not reasonable for France to grow everything
that it eats, to never trade what it grows, to make all its own solar
panels, to write all software used within its borders. We live richer
lives when we share and learn from each other, without regards to which
side of the line our home is.
next
Still here? Gosh me too. Next time we will look at what the kids call
the “1900s” and perhaps approach present day. Until then, commercial peace be with
you!
Others are
exploring
what we can do with the animation capabilities of the new renderer. Expect these things to start showing up in apps over the next cycle.
