wingolog

Good evening. Let’s talk about free trade!

Last time, we discussed Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica, which looks at how the cause of free trade was taken up by a motley crew of anti-imperialists, internationalists, pacifists, marxists, and classical liberals in the nineteenth century. Protectionism was the prerogative of empire—only available to those with a navy—and it so it makes sense that idealists might support “peace through trade”. So how did free trade go from a cause of the “another world is possible” crowd to the halls of the WTO? Did we leftists catch a case of buyer’s remorse, or did the goods delivered simply not correspond to the order?

To make an attempt at an answer, we need more history. From the acknowledgements of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists:

This book is a long-simmering product of the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. I was part of a generation that came of age after the Cold War's end. We became adolescents in the midst of talk of globalization and the End of History. In the more hyperactive versions of this talk, we were made to think that nations were over and the one indisputable bond uniting humanity was the global economy. Seattle was a moment when we started to make collective sense of what was going on and take back the story line. I did not make the trip north from Portland but many of my friends and acquaintances did, painting giant papier-mâché fists red to strap to backpacks and coming back with takes of zip ties and pepper spray, nights in jail, and encounters with police—tales they spun into war stories and theses. This book is an apology for not being there and an attempt to rediscover in words what the concept was that they went there to fight.

Slobodian’s approach is to pull on the thread that centers around the WTO itself. He ends up identifying what he calls the “Geneva School” of neoliberalism: from Mise’s circle in Vienna, to the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, to the Hayek-inspired Mont Pèlerin Society, to Petersmann of the WTO precursor GATT organization, Röpke of the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, and their lesser successors of the 1970s and 1980s.

The thesis that Slobodian ends up drawing is that neoliberalism is not actually a laissez-faire fundamentalism, but rather an ideology that placed the value of free-flowing commerce above everything else: above democracy, above sovereignty, above peace, and that as such it actually requires active instutional design to protect commerce from the dangers of, say, hard-won gains by working people in one country (Austria, 1927), expropriation of foreign-owned plantations in favor of landless peasants (Guatemala, 1952), internal redistribution within countries transitioning out of minority rule (South Africa, 1996), decolonization (1945-1975 or so), or just the election of a moderate socialist at the ballot box (Chile, 1971).

Now, dear reader, I admit to the conceit that if you are reading this, probably you are a leftist also, and if not, at least you are interested in understanding how it is that we think, with what baubles do we populate our mental attics, that sort of thing. Well, friend, you know that by the time we get to Chile and Allende we are stomping and clapping our hands and shouting in an extasy of indignant sectarian righteousness. And that therefore should we invoke the spectre of neoliberalism, it is with the deepest of disgust and disdain: this project and all it stands for is against me and mine. I hate it like I hated Henry Kissinger, which is to say, a lot, viscerally, it hurts now to think of it, rest in piss you bastard.

two theologies

And yet, I’m still left wondering what became of the odd alliance of Marx with Manchester liberalism. Palen’s Pax Economica continues to sketch a thin line through the twentieth century, focusing on showing the continued presence of commercial-peace exponents despite it not turning out to be our century. But the rightward turn of the main contingent of free-trade supporters is not explained. I have an idea about how it is that this happened; it is anything but scholarly, but here we go.

Let us take out our coarsest brush to paint a crude story: the 19th century begins in the wake of the American and French revolutions, making the third estate and the bourgeoisie together the revolutionary actors of history. It was a time in which “we” could imagine organizing society in different ways, the age of the utopian imaginary, but overlaid with the structures of the old, old money, old land ownership, revanchist monarchs, old power, old empire. In this context, Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League was insurgent, heterodox, asking for a specific political change with the goal of making life on earth better for the masses. Free trade was a means to an end. Not all Cobdenites had the same ends, but Marx and Manchester both did have ends, and they happened to coincide in the means.

Come the close of the Great War in 1918, times have changed. The bourgeoisie have replaced the nobility as the incumbent power, and those erstwhile bourgeois campaigners now have to choose between idealism and their own interest. But how to choose?

Some bourgeois campaigners will choose a kind of humanist notion of progress; this is the thread traced by Palen, through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Haslemere Group, and others.

Some actors are not part of the hegemonic bourgeoisie at all, and so have other interests. The newly independent nations after decolonization have more motive to upend the system than to preserve it; their approach to free trade has both tactical and ideological components. Tactical, in the sense that they wanted access to first-world markets, but also sometimes some protections for their own industries; ideological, in the sense that they often acted in solidarity with other new nations against the dominant powers. In addition to the new nations, the Soviet bloc had its own semi-imperial project, and its own specific set of external threats; we cannot blame them for being tactical either.

And then you have Ludwig von Mises. Slobodian hints at Mises’ youth in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a vast domain of many languages and peoples but united by trade and the order imposed by monarchy. After the war and the breakup of the empire, I can only imagine—and here I am imagining, this is not a well-evidenced conclusion—I imagine he felt a sense of loss. In the inter-war, he holds court as the doyen of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, trying to put the puzzle pieces back together, to reconstruct the total integration of imperial commerce, but from within Red Vienna. When in 1927, a court decision acquitted a fascist milicia that fired into a crowd, killing a worker and a child, the city went on general strike, and workers burned down the ministry of justice. Police responded violently, killing 89 people and injuring over 1000. Mises was delighted: order was restored.

And now, a parenthesis. I grew up Catholic, in a ordinary kind of way. Then in my early teens, I concluded that if faith meant anything, it has to burn with a kind of fervor; I became an evangelical Catholic, if such is a thing. There were special camps you could go to with intense emotional experiences and people singing together and all of that is God, did you know? Did you know? The feelings attenuated over time but I am a finisher, and so I got confirmed towards the end of high school. I went off to university for physics and stuff and eventually, painfully, agonizingly concluded there was no space for God in the equations.

Losing God was incredibly traumatic for me. Not that I missed, like, the idea of some guy, but as someone who wants things to make sense, to have meaning, to be based on something, anything at all: losing a core value or morality invalidated so many ideas I had about the world and about myself. What is the good life, a life well led? What is true and right in a way that is not contingent on history? I am embarrassed to say that for a while I took the UN declaration of human rights to be axiomatic.

When I think about Mise’s reaction to the 1927 general strike in Vienna, I think about how I scrambled to find something, anything, to replace my faith in God. As the space for God shrank with every advance in science, some chose to identify God with his works, and then to progressively ascribe divine qualities to those works: perhaps commerce is axiomatically Good, and yet ineffable, in the sense that it is Good on its own, and that no mortal act can improve upon it. How else can we interpret Hayek’s relationship with the market except as awe in the presence of the divine?

This is how I have come to understand the neoliberal value system: a monotheism with mammon as godhead. There may be different schools within it, but all of the faithful worship the same when they have to choose between, say, commerce and democracy, commerce and worker’s rights, commerce and environmental regulation, commerce and taxation, commerce and opposition to apartheid. It’s a weird choice of deity. Now that God is dead, one could have chosen anything to take His place, and these guys chose the “global economy”. I would pity them if I still had a proper Christian heart.

means without end

I think that neoliberals made a miscalculation when they concluded that the peace of doux commerce is not predicated on justice. Sure, in the short run, you can do business with Pinochet’s Chile, privatize the national mining companies, and cut unemployment benefits, but not without incurring moral damage; people will see through it, in time, as they did in Seattle in 1999. Slobodian refers to the ratification of the WTO as a Pyrrhic victory; in their triumph, neoliberals painted a target on their backs.

Where does this leave us now? And what about Mercosur? I’m starting to feel the shape of an answer, but I’m not there yet. I think we’ll cover the gap between Seattle and the present day in a future dispatch. Until then, let’s take care of one other; as spoke the prophet Pratchett, there’s no justice, just us.