Re: FW: [PEN-L] On free trade Re: Query from a Venezuelan

[Ian Murray <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Chris Burford writes:
> >The so-called free trade of the present period is no more than
> >international capital giving itself the freedom to price fix unhindered,
> >the freedom to exercise its plans without let, the freedom to use one
> >group of workers to compete against another on a world scale.
> >There is a historically progressive side to this and abstract opposition
> >or support is niether here nor there.

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I would simply add that it is not so much international capital giving itself freedom, but the enormous commodification of
international law in order to trump law-policy making in a whole host of settings by nation-states. As Susan Sell points out
in a forthcoming book that expands on an essay she wrote a couple of years ago, the TRIPS agreement was designed by the
CEO's-legal staff of 12 US corps., handed to the US negotiators as they went to Punta del Este, given the free riding
blessing of Japanese and European corps. and then rammed down the throats of the world's peoples. It is this kind of behavior
that calls for making methodological nationalism -as one of the main assumptions behind free trade arguments- a much more
problematized concept than has hitherto been explored in political economy and international relations theory.


Ian