RE: Henwood: Collapse in Cancun

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Julio:
> First, Henwood's point that the WTO has a governance structure that gives 
> less leverage to the rich countries in the negotiation process is obvious.

Somebody made a point here, or on Henwood's list, about whether UN 
decision-making based solely on the General Assembly rather than the 
Security Council would be better. I suppose that this might be a slight 
improvement, but most of these countries take their marching orders today 
from the US Embassy rather than a non-existent Tricontinental Congress or 
some other bloc of nations forged during the radical 60s. The fact that 
Angola nearly decided to back the US war in Iraq should tell you something 
about the relationship of forces today.

> Nowhere Henwood says the WTO has an ideal democratic structure.  He just 
> says that the U.S. (among others) would rather have something like the IMF 
> and the World Bank, where they clearly call the shots.  As far as striking 
> trade deals, the U.S. obviously prefers to arm-twist each country 
> separately.  A movement seeking to advance the interest of the workers in 
> the poor countries needs to take this into account and not just have a 
> knee-jerk reaction approach to everything that smells like "corporate 
> globalization."  Else the movement plays in the hands of the rich in the 
> rich countries.  The G22 -- an obviously progressive coalition -- are 
> taking advantage of the WTO's structure to defend their interests.

What I found most shocking about Henwood's article is its identification 
with the corrupt bourgeois leaderships, but non-imperialist, in the WTO--as 
if decisions made by Vajpayee, Fox and Mbeki about trade were more 
enlightened than their imperialist masters.

There were essentially 3 players in this WTO drama: the imperialist core, 
the comprador bourgeoisie and the miserable peasants who were not invited 
to the banquet behind the barbed wire. Their interests have to be fought 
for, not the crummy prime ministers who speak in their name.

Whatever the failure of the global justice activists in terms of ideology, 
they at least have their loyalties to the right class. To understand where 
Henwood is coming from ideologically on this, you have to read 
Hardt-Negri's "Empire" which is written as if we were in 1848 and barriers 
to free trade--opposed by Karl Marx in those days--were holding back the 
socialist revolution. These post-Marxists retain the enthusiasm for free 
trade but not the socialist project that it was once associated with long ago.

> Third, the point Henwood makes about subordinating the interest of Korean 
> farmers to those of producers where the conditions of production may be 
> more favorable responds precisely to the point José Pérez makes about Cuba 
> -- namely that Cuba is in a more favorable position to produce sugar 
> (because of soil, climate, technology, productive traditions, etc.), but 
> that the blockade and the attempts of imperialism to strangle the 
> revolution are in the way of basic economic rationality.  Can anybody 
> think of a more egregious violation to the rules of free trade than the 
> blockade and other hostile acts against Cuba by the U.S. and European 
> accomplices?  The implicit argument here is that, if the international 
> division of labor where to be based on competitive advantage and the rules 
> of trade (as opposed to being imposed by imperialism), it'd be best for 
> everyone to have Cuba produce sugar for others.

Actually, that decision is up to Cuba. The problem with the WTO and all 
these other multilateral trade agreements is that they operate within the 
context of capitalism. COMECON, by contrast, put the development needs of 
each nation first. That was one of the main complaints of the Soviet 
"reformers"--that the Kremlin was wasting money on Cuba and other poorer 
trading partners. Here's something from Michael Yates's "Naming the System: 
Inequality and Work in the Global Economy" that might be helpful:

THE   INTERNATIONAL TRADE  ORGANIZATIONS

A fundamental theme of this book is that the poor countries are poor 
because they have been exploited by the rich nations. This exploitation has 
taken place in many ways. Initially, the rich nations directly controlled 
the poor ones through colonization. Later, when the poor countries won 
political independence, they were still controlled through the economic 
power of the rich countries and the collaboration of their own local 
elites, the latter having now become an independent source of growing 
inequality and poverty. At the end of the Second World War, the rich 
countries, led by the United States and to a lesser degree by Great 
Britain, established international organizations to help them manage the 
world economy in such a way as to insure their dominance. A set of 
institutions were set up for this purpose?the World Bank, the International 
Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

The World Bank employs more than 11,000 people and dispenses many billions 
of dollars in loans to member countries, of which there are 181. The bank 
is financed by the member nations and by the sale of World Bank bonds on 
international capital markets. The United States, as the largest economy 
and contributor, dominates the bank's decisions. The bank makes 
"development" loans to poor countries. These loans have invariably financed 
large projects such as dams and power plants, as well as export 
agriculture. One of the bank's goals is to promote foreign investment, and 
this has meant that the projects its loans finance have been a bonanza for 
corporations in the rich nations. These corporations supply the equipment 
and expertise for the projects and take home the lion's share of any 
profits the projects generate. It has been estimated that for every one 
dollar the bank loans, U.S. corporations get $1.30 in procurement 
contracts. These projects have had almost no positive impact on the WTO 
"trade experts," appointed by the WTO without any democratic process and 
meeting in secrecy in Geneva, Switzerland, determine whether a country has 
violated WTO rules.

The WTO wields enormous power. If the WTO rules against some practice of a 
country that it says restricts trade, the aggrieved nation can impose stiff 
penalties on the violating nation. For example, the United States filed 
charges against several European countries for favoring banana imports from 
their former colonies in the Caribbean. Although the United States is not a 
banana producer, a powerful U.S. company, Chiquita, owns banana plantations 
in the region, and this company put strong political pressure, backed by 
campaign contributions, on the U.S. government to file the WTO complaints. 
Similarly, Mexico filed WTO charges against a U.S. rule that prohibited the 
purchase of tuna caught in nets that were not built to protect dolphins 
from inadvertent capture.

The WTO has enabled corporations to resist any rule or law passed by a 
country that in any way denies the free entry of foreign capital into a 
domestic economy. Businesses are trying to extend the WTO's power to deny a 
country the power to regulate capital in any way, whether it be through 
shorter patent periods (to allow, for example, the earlier production of 
cheaper generic drugs), any and all environmental regulations, even 
national health care and minimum wage laws.

In Chapter Eight we will examine the growing movements against these 
institutions of global dominance. In response to them, the World Bank, the 
IMF, and the WTO have been forced to address issues of inequality and 
poverty. While their studies are not likely to get to the roots of the 
problems, they do provide us with some excellent data and perhaps give the 
various protest movements some space to push their agenda forward, provided 
that they do not get co-opted by facile rhetoric about concern for the poor.



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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