The Debate Over Institutional Values

Sean Gonsalves

A few lingering thoughts on the whole WTO event: WTO supporters, which includes Clinton and his "liberal" media, say they are for freedom. Front-line and armchair protesters - not to be confused with the handful of vandals that destroyed property - say they're for freedom too. The crucial question is: freedom for whom? If you look at how the WTO operates, you will see that it stands for corporate license; autonomy for affluent consumers and permission for the wealthy to levy the heavy social costs of "development" and "globalization" on the shoulders of those least able to afford it.

Change and progress are not necessarily synonymous. And there's a qualitative difference between democratic freedom - the primary concern of WTO skeptics - and the market freedom being touted by business and thought-leaders.

Democratic freedom is the liberty of a people to have a genuine say-so in the social decision-making process; to allow for individual creative potential to flourish within various cultures clothes, Disney products or Zenith television sets. Why are those who make the important distinction between market freedom and democratic freedom ridiculed by the "liberal" media?

The Boston Globe called the demonstrators "Senseless in Seattle." Those who question the unaccountable power of the corporate-managerial class are either stupid or violently uncivilized, or both. In condescending tones, I've heard WTO cheerleaders try to explain David Ricardo's notion of "comparative advantage" in free-trade, failing to note that since capital is now mobile and labor is not, the central premise of Ricardo's argument crumbles. They refer to "evidence" that purports to show that "free markets" increase "living standards," as if the GDP is actually an accurate measure of well-being; as if we've ever had a real free-market. These neo-free-traders use words like "efficiency" and "specialization," scrupulously avoiding ethical questions like: why should efficiency be our foremost social value?

So while they seek to impose upon the entire globe this value of efficiency-no-matter-the-social-cost, with a straight-face, they talk about how wrong it is to impose our "higher values" on other nations, as if workers everywhere aren't opposed to child-labor, sweatshops, low-wages, polluted air, unhealthy water and plunder. And they go on and on ad naseum about "jobs."

Jobs? The Institute for Food and Development Policy notes that "whenever a larger economy is created, new economies of scale come into play. Large transnational companies who use automated mass production technology to produce goods at low per unit costs, flood local markets at prices that small, national companies using labor intensive production practices cannot compete with.

"As witnessed in Mexico under NAFTA, these smaller companies go out of business and hundreds of thousands of people are laid off as new high tech factories hire far fewer workers. One result is fewer jobs are needed to manufacture the same quantity of goods....Profits shift from nationally-owned companies, which tend to re-invest locally, to transnational companies based in distant nations, who rarely re-invest in the affected country."

The top 200 global corporations employ one-half of one-percent of the global work force. So this isn't about trade. It's about deregulated international commerce. It's about erasing national and cultural boundaries and knocking down "trade barriers" that prevent corporations from exploiting cheap labor in order to produce as much as possible for as little cost as possible (ignoring huge "externalities"), and to sell as many "goods" as possible to as many affluent consumers as possible.

Speaking of jobs and labor standards, wasn't there full employment during slavery? More the point, those organizing to improve living standards and work conditions in most of these developing countries, run the risk of being repressed, tortured and murdered by state-sponsored military thugs, principally supplied by the U.S. "defense" industry and trained at places like the School of the Americas. Doesn't this play an indispensable role in keeping labor cheap - the cheap labor that giant corporations are drawn too, according to the "laws" of the market?

Finally, if corporate and political leaders have suddenly realized the importance of the WTO being an "open" institution, then why didn't they invite the media inside? Of course, the much-needed democratic critique and struggle going on should not be aimed at morally marginalizing the rich. As Bertrand Russell noted, there is no such thing as the "superior virtue of the oppressed." The debate is over which institutional values ought to take precedence - market or democratic., which has nothing to do with having the widest possible selection of Gap