gloander

GLOBALIZATION BRINGS OUT THE HUMAN GENIUS FOR CONFLICT Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh with Thea Lee and the Institute for Policy Studies. FIELD GUIDE TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY. Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. New York: The New Press, 2000.

1. "FREE TRADE" LOOKS LIKE "UNFAIR TRADE"

This graphically rich and very readable little book sets out to define economic globalization. It asks what is new about the global economy. It analyzes 10 putative benefits of globalization and finds each of them problematic. It asks who is driving globalization. It describes a set of critical responses by various players who object to the negative social, environmental, and economic impacts of globalization. It looks hopefully at a "turning point" wherein opposition to a "rigid free trade and investment formula" (121) has come to a head. And it concludes by urging that an alternative doctrine of "fair trade" replace the present "free trade."

Fair trade (as opposed to mere protectionism, which the authors reject) would oppose the "plunder" of resources and the exploitation of workers. It would work toward "sustainable economic activity that roots capital locally and nationally." (122) Fair trade would transform trade and investment from ends in themselves into the means for encouraging advancement toward social betterment and political democracy both in the US and throughout the world.

If you are looking for a balanced guide to the benefits and problems of economic globalization, this is not the book for you. Anderson, Cavanagh, and Lee (AC&L) present instead a vigorous polemic against untrammeled corporate development around the globe. You will have to look elsewhere for an equally vigorous case for corporate globalization in its present form. (Sample it in an advertisement from ExxonMobil, published in advance of the Quebec Summit.)

The anti-free-trade viewpoint advocated by AC&L does not prevent their book from usefully delimiting and defining globalization as a concept. They show little interest in the more complex cultural issues of "identity" vs. "difference" that Fredric Jameson and others explore when addressing globalization. For AC&L, it's the economy, period.

The defining feature of the post-1989 globalization system, in their view, is not merely the fluidity of capital made possible by digital technology. More important, from their perspective, is the removal of national controls on international investment. Through NAFTA and "trade-related investment measures" of the World Trade Organization (32), foreign investment has been free to roam through the world. (Thomas L. Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree likens this to an "electronic herd.") The consequences of this exclusive emphasis on openness to capital investment, regardless of social or environmental damage or national fiscal health, rivets the concern of AC&L.

It is that concern that leads them to fault ten major claims made for free trade. Those claims are as follows (36-63):

1. Increased trade = more jobs at higher wages.

2. As trade spurs economic growth, governments invest more in the environment.

3. Foreign investment automatically raises living standards.

4. Free trade is the consumer's best friend.

5. Globalization lifts all boats.

6. What's good for General Motors is good for the rest of us.

7. It's fine that poorer nations produce goods in sweatshops; the US developed that way.

8. Immigrants are a drain on the US economy.

9. Trade = democracy.

10. Superior productivity will protect US workers from globalization.

Given their viewpoint, you may be certain that AC&L refute these assertions with copious data in the form of charts and dramatic examples. You might worry that their data and drama do not present a balanced picture. But the cumulative effect of their indictment is at least to make you want to question the more celebratory versions of the globalization story.

When they set out to say who is driving globalization, AC&L locate the main responsibility in giant transnational corporations and transnational banking institutions. In their view, the large international public institutions dealing with global economic activity--World Bank, IMF, GATT, WTO--abet these corporate giants at the expense of workers, national governments, and environmental quality.

The authors make much of the growing backlash against globalization. A statement by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan at Harvard in 1998 keynotes their discussion of the backlash. He delivered it in the aftermath of financial meltdowns in Mexico, several Asian countries, Russia, and Brazil. It is a useful observation to refer to when you are trying to weigh the benefits and problems generated by economic globalization. Annan said:

Throughout much of the developing world, globalization is seen, not as a term describing objective reality, but as an ideology of predatory capitalism. Whatever reality there is in this view, the perception of a siege is unmistakable. Millions of people are suffering; savings have been decimated; decades of hard-won progress in the fight against poverty are imperiled. And unless the basic principles of equity and liberty are defended in the political arena and advanced as critical conditions for economic growth, they may suffer rejection. Economic despair will be followed by political turmoil and many of the advances for freedom of the last half-century could be lost. (92)

AC&L are pleased about the successful protest against President Clinton's bid for fast-track trade rules and against a multilateral agreement on investment. (94-5) They describe various international activities by workers against globalization. They tout shareholder power, voter power, consumer power, student power, "people power," local power, and artist power--all arrayed to resist the destructive effects of free transnational trade and investment. (94-120)

The anti-free-trade viewpoint of this little book is associated with The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a 37-year-old self-described "progressive think tank" in Washington, DC. IPS compares itself on its website with other think tanks as follows: "At a time when other think tanks celebrate the virtues of unrestrained greed, unlimited wealth, and unregulated markets, IPS is striving to create a more responsible society - one built around the values of justice, nonviolence, sustainability, and decency." It says it accepts no corporate or governmental funding and invites individual contributions. It does not say it does not accept funding from labor organizations.

Anderson is in charge of IPS's "Global Economy" project to promote socially and environmentally responsible economies. The aim is to reduce inequality and protect the environment. The project seeks to lay out alternative agendas for the IMF and other global institutions and conducts research and education programs.

end of 1. "FREE TRADE" LOOKS LIKE "UNFAIR TRADE"

go to 2. THOUGHTS WHILE TEAR GAS LINGERED

GLOBALIZATION BRINGS OUT THE HUMAN GENIUS FOR CONFLICT Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh with Thea Lee and the Institute for Policy Studies. FIELD GUIDE TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY. Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. New York: The New Press, 2000.

2. THOUGHTS WHILE TEAR GAS LINGERED

The Institute for Policy Studies and the authors of this book exemplify the spreading opposition to doctrinaire free trade. For the major leaders of the world, both governmental and corporate, this doctrine has become an article of faith. It is the foundation of the "globalization system" and the vehicle for its future development. At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec on 20-22 April 2001, both the opponents and the proponents of the free trade doctrine dramatized their respective commitments.

The tear gas lingered as President Bush and his fellow hemispheric leaders signed their agreement to pursue the Free Trade Area of the Americas. And the weekend's events made me wonder at humankind's genius for conflict.

The end of the superpower standoff of the Cold War and the power of information technology have shrunk the boundaries of space and time. This has made possible a global interconnectedness of human beings never before imagined. With that possibility has come new hope for improving the lot of the world's oppressed and deprived.

At the same time, the discrediting of the socialist alternative to economic development has left the free market system as the only option. The world's leaders now universally subscribe to the free market system (granting a Chinese variant and residual pockets of the old command economics in North Korea and Cuba). Meanwhile, transnational corporations, even within the constraints of existing tariffs and trade restrictions, already have brought about a revolution in the organizational breadth of market enterprise and its impact on the peoples of the globe. Broadening the freedom of corporations to do business by further removing national restrictions seems like a rational next step.

Conflict, arise.

Proponents of the doctrine of unadulterated free trade, whose aim is profit, insist that the free flow of capital investment will produce collateral social and political improvement in the long run. They believe that to target social improvement as an immediate end in itself would prevent free global capitalism from achieving its long-term destiny. Proponents urge that human and environmental damage is a manageable price to pay for the long-term improvement that free capital development will produce.

Opponents of course object to the immediate collateral damage to people and the environment that such a rigid application of free capital investment brings. They have yet to develop an alternative theoretical system that would oppose capitalism (and replace the now-discredited old socialist system). Their strategies therefore take two interrelated forms of resistance within the prevailing system.

One strategy is to organize the negative protest movement--"just stop!" In this strategy, opponents urge nations to maintain their control over corporate investment and development. They make this an issue of national sovereignty: do not hand over your sovereign power to international trade authorities that can override your national protections of people and environment.

The other strategy acknowledges the hegemony of transnational capital but seeks to negotiate ameliorative changes to the laissez-faire doctrine. These changes would minimize short-term harm by providing a safety net for people and the environment--even at the expense of transnational corporate profit.

Lacking a theorized alternative economic system to offer, opponents seeking amelioration reach for statements of principle that would restrain the uncontrolled freedom to invest capital at any human or environmental price. They would replace "free trade" with "fair trade" and "fairness agendas."

Where will the conflict go? Clearly, it will not go away. The unadulterated doctrine of the free market system on a global stage is simply incapable, in itself, of generating the general good for humankind that it holds out in theory. The theorists of economic globalization fail so far to acknowledge the complexity and the urgency of human need at the basic material level. Through the free trade doctrine, they are striving to put that complexity and urgency into a systemic picture that nations can endorse and that people will accept. But we don't yet know if they will succeed; the voices of protest continue to rise. Additionally, they fail to see the continuing power of geopolitics to preempt and confound the smooth-running economic machinery of their vision.

A further thought came to me as the tear gas lingered: what an old story this new story of globalization appears to be. It is as old as capitalism itself, as old certainly as Marx's Das Kapital. It is as old as the visions of global commerce that were maturing after the worldwide revolution of workers failed to occur in 1870 (visions that died in World War I).

And then a final thought: this really is new! What is new is the immediacy of information around the world, the organizational sophistication of transnational corporations, and the absence of systemic alternatives to capitalism.

Regardless of traces to the past, globalization in its current form has never happened before. This thought leads to radical speculations. Will transnational corporations "morph" into new sovereignties, minimizing the old national powers? Can they diversify their reasons for being beyond profit for shareholders? Can the humane and environmental values espoused by the opponents somehow infiltrate and transform corporations into entities never before seen on the globe? If the free trade orthodoxy holds firm and the opposition to it worldwide grows in response to that intransigence, will a renewed revolutionary movement of international scope take shape?

One way or the other, the continuing globalization process assures that the human genius for conflict will have a lively outlet. It will go far toward defining the political, social, and cultural developments of the world in the years ahead. We will hear more from voices of opposition such as those of Anderson, Cavanagh, and Lee. But they will fail to silence the drums of global free market advocates. Because the conflicts over values, resources, and sovereignty will continue, we can be certain that the era of globalization will never reduce to a plain vanilla uniformity of culture around the globe.

end of 2. THOUGHTS WHILE TEAR GAS LINGERED

go back to 1. "FREE TRADE" LOOKS LIKE "UNFAIR TRADE"