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Title: On the Other Hand....
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: April 28, 2005
Language: en
Topics: free trade
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/04/on-other-hand.html

Kevin Carson

On the Other Hand....

Before I get too carried away, I also spotted this quote from Alex

Singleton:

According to Alex Singleton, the report’s author: “The Trade Justice

Movement thinks the world economy would work better if it were centrally

planned. We saw central planning in the Soviet Union and all it produced

was poverty. The only trade that has ever lifted countries out of

poverty is free trade.”

Ah, well, comrades--two steps forward, one step back....

As far as I can tell, the present world economy goes a long way toward

being centrally planned--and most of it’s done by the sort of corporate

CEOs and neoliberal politicians who talk most about “free trade.” This

quote from Sean Gabb deserves another reading:

If you think that I came here tonight to defend multinational

corporations and the international government institutions, you have

chosen the wrong person. These are dishonest. They are corrupt. They are

incompetent. They have blood on their hands.

But do not suppose for a moment that the world trading order as it

actually exists is liberal or more than incidentally connected with free

markets. A free market is a place where individuals and groups of

individuals come together to transact voluntary exchanges without any

backing of government force. To call the actually existing order liberal

– or “neo-liberal” – is as taxonomically accurate as calling the old

Soviet Communist Party syndicalist. That order is based on tariffs,

subsidies and a web of other often invisible regulations. The

international institutions are a projection of Western states. The

multinational corporations are creatures of these states. They shelter

behind the privilege of limited liability. They get their political

friends to cartelise markets, and do favours in return.

We’ve seen about as much of free trade in the post-1945 world (or the

post-1500 world, for that matter) as we did of syndicalism in Stalinist

Russia. “Free trade” is something that’s allowed to operate within the

interstices of state capitalism, and tolerated only to the extent it’s

compatible with a larger state capitalist agenda. So long as corporate

elites--our class enemy--are able to determine the strategic framework

within which “free market reform” is selectively introduced, the “free

market” activity that exists will simply be an engine harnessed to turn

the wheels of a state-enforced system of class exploitation. Any

description of the benefits of free trade to the Third World, therefore,

should be in the subjunctive.