Re: Monbiot on the WTO

[Peter Dorman <dormanp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here are some thoughts on Monbiot and some of the pen-l responses.

1. I think Monbiot came to the right answer, but mostly for the wrong
reasons.  He is in grave danger of falling in with Oxfam and other
internationally minded NGOs who have bought into the notion that what
poor countries most need is unfettered access to rich country markets.
From there it is one short step to signing on to the Cairnes group,
etc.  He hasn't looked deeply enough into *why* poor countries are so
desperate for export markets.  In other words, he hasn't incorporated an
understanding of the post-debt-crisis financial framework into his
analyis of trade.  He is quite right to argue for a transformation of
poor countries from resource to industrial exporters, but this makes
sense developmentally only in terms of a coherent domestic
transformation on all levels: domestic markets, domestic capabilities,
etc.  If industrialization serves mainly as an export-directed
phenomenon, bereft of local linkages, for the purposes of servicing
debt, then "free trade" in such products is part of the problem, not the
solution.

2. Obviously (to me anyway), if the gross financial and trade imbalances
need to be fixed, and if some unspecified debt reduction and capital
flow regulatory framework is the answer on the finance side, then an
international organization that coordinates trade balances -- keeps them
within acceptable bands that have been openly negotiated -- is the
answer on the goods and services side.  In my make-believe world, this
is above all what the WTO would be doing.

3. The institutional problem of environmental and social standards is
huge.  The ILO (which I will be working for once again over the summer)
is admirable in many ways, but only because it is largely powerless.  It
benefits from the importance of being unimportant.  The WTO is fatally
flawed because it rests on the foundation of trade ministers, the
designated corporate gofers within any government.  On top of that, it
is the product (as are all really important international organizations,
unlike the ILO, UNESCO, etc.) of global power imbalances.  I cannot
begin to imagine anything good coming from this organization under these
circumstances.  The sort of democratic and accountable global governance
we need will require much more radical changes at the national level in
the US and other great power countries.  In the meantime, I believe
there is lots of unutilized potential for creating "shadow" institutions
(paralleling the WTO, IMF etc.) from below, based on hard-nosed
negotiation between groups representing democratic interests in
different countries.  To really be effective, these alternative groups
would have to actually take concrete positions on specific issues as
they arise; i.e. they would have to cooperate on a detailed program and
not just on their opposition to the status quo.  This is something
effective political groups have always done on a local and national
level; now global capitalism has forced the same necessity on us
internationally.

4. In the end, I think there really is a case for substantial
relocalization, but it should be the result of a sane trading framework,
not an imperative imposed on it.  Once the debt treadmill is smashed,
and once the false economies based on hyper-exploitation of populations
and resources are ended, most of the impetus for destructive trade will
cease.  Then it will be enough to build up healthy local economies on
their own merits, through the methods some communities are beginning to
pioneer.

I apologize for the soapbox tone of this e-mail.  I guess I must be
pretty opinionated about this stuff.

Peter