The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), being negotiated today in Quebec City, is one part of the overall trend to capitalist globalization. It is part and parcel with the WTO, and the same forces behind the WTO in the Americas are the ones behind the FTAA, while the same people and groups opposed to the WTO in the Americas oppose the FTAA too.
The agenda of the free traders, the globalizers, often referred to as ‘neo-liberalism’, has been brewing for atleast the past fifteen years. It was a response to the deep structural crisis of global capital, which had been building since the early ‘70s, and which was most spectacularly reflected in astronomical rates of public (government) debt which threatened to overwhelm overall profitability and the ability of the state to effectively intervene in and shape the economy in each country.
Neo-liberalism is thus not a policy of unrestricted greed on the part of gargantuan multi-national corporations with national states – which are the parties actually negotiating these free trade deals – as their puppets or lackeys, as many on the left suggest. The enormous profits many of these multi-national corporations have enjoyed in the past decade have resulted from several factors, including the various measures taken in the movement towards trade globalization and neo-liberalism. Other significant factors have been the massive restructuring of capital throughout the world as a result of the high-tech revolution -- which has permitted a huge increase in productivity – and the retreat of Stalinist state control of the economy in Russia and Eastern Europe. All of this has involved a massive shift of wealth away from the working class and the poor around the world to the most powerful capitals of the most developed countries.
Meanwhile, capitals in the
‘developing’ countries have largely missed out on this pillaging frenzy. Now,
because they are in such a weak position relative to their counterparts in the
most developed countries, they are clamouring to somehow get in on this
process, as it appears to be the only hope left to bring about economic growth
in their countries. For these ‘poor’ ruling classes, there appears to be no
alternative to free trade globalization and neo-liberalism.
Many opponents of globalization, who claim to stand in solidarity with these ‘developing’ countries against the multi-nationals, defend what they call ‘Fair trade’ against the agenda of ‘Free Trade’. But just what is ‘fair trade’? In a nutshell, the proponents of ‘fair trade’ wish to see bureaucratic state control re-imposed on the movement and functioning of capital, including various regulations and laws which will supposedly protect the environment and the rights of workers, defend national ‘sovereignty’ and attempt to balance the trade playing field in favour of the weaker capitals from the ‘developing’ countries. But such ‘fair trade’ will only lead back to the conditions of stagnation and slump, which Free Trade and neo-liberalism were supposed to overcome. The ‘fair traders’ have no agenda for fostering global economic growth. Their essentially social democratic agenda simply does not stand up as a viable strategy for the continued development of capitalism. Their attempt to find a middle ground between the extremes of neo-liberal ‘pure’ capitalism and genuine anti-capitalism does not hold water, in spite of its appeal to many with a fuzzy understanding of capitalism.
The real choice these days
is increasingly between pure capitalism and pure anti-capitalism (which can
also be described as anti-state communism). But is anti-capitalism a viable
option for humanity or only a utopian pipe dream? The definitive abolition of
capitalism would have to take place on a global level, a globalization of revolution.
To be definitive, it would involve the abolition of trade itself, as
well as the elimination of money, and commodities, as such, that is, the
elimination of the buying and selling of things and services. Instead of
capitals (both private corporations and state agencies and enterprises) trading
on world markets commodities produced by workers who have only their
labour-power to sell so that they can
live; production would have to be controlled by the workers themselves
collectively, within the guiding purpose of meeting the fundamental human needs
of all people on the planet and the integrity of our natural environment. Goods
and services would still be transported from the place of their production to
various places for their distribution and consumption – in fact, the degree of
global economic integration would far surpass the ‘globalized’ world today’s
capitalist leaders envisage -- but there would be no money, value-exchange or
debt involved; just the meeting of needs and preferences for all.
This is only a utopian fantasy for those who are incapable of envisioning a world in which profit, speculation, bureaucracy, wasteful and dangerous economic activity have been eradicated and the enormously powerful productive means developed under capitalism are used to eliminate scarcity, poverty and want across the world, in which no one is capable of buying the labour-power of another, because no one needs to sell it, since the means of production are under the control of the working class as a whole. This can only come about when a critical mass of working class people see ourselves and each other as one unified class, with shared interests opposed to all those who have power over us, and organize our struggles directly ourselves to assert our autonomous class power, capable of shutting down all major economic, government and public service activity and re-orienting it – which is our work, after all – so as to meet our own needs. Such a perspective can only result from the development of the class struggle, from lessons learned and new strategies developed as a result of the continued defeat of the limited, legalistic, primarily passive struggles we mostly find ourselves in today.
Wage Slave X