At first there was NAFTA, then there was FTAA – or rather, there wasn’t, because talks to establish the Free Trade Area of the Americas have got bogged down in disagreements. The North American Free Trade Agreement, between the US, Canada and Mexico, came into force in 1994. Its declared aims were to eliminate trade barriers between the three countries involved and increase investment opportunities. In fact, it is far more about investment than trade, allowing US and Canadian factories to be moved to cheap-labour areas in Mexico and opening up further chances for privatisation. But it was always seen as a first step only, and the FTAA, which would extend to most of Central and South America and cover 34 countries, is the logical conclusion, originally intended to come into effect at the start of 2005.
The FTAA has many opponents. The nasty right-wing super-nationalists in the John Birch Society (see www.stoptheftaa.org) view it as part of the ongoing abolition of the United States, opening up borders to all sorts of criminals, terrorists and other undesirables, doing away with US sovereignty and creating a European Union-style integrated political unit. This isolationist conception does not fit in with that of the rulers of the US, however. There have also been opponents from the ‘left’, largely from the anti- globalisation or global justice movements (www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/ftaa/, for instance). They point to the effects of NAFTA in cutting wages in Mexico and increasing threats to the environment and public health. FTAA, they claim, will just be the same thing, writ larger.
In early November the Summit of the Americas was held in Argentina, partly to see how FTAA could be put back on track after the rulers of some countries objected to it. In the meantime, smaller groupings have been pushed forward, such as the Central America Free Trade Agreement (due to start in January 2006) and the Andean Free Trade Agreement (which is still under negotiation). The US is also particularly interested in expansion of the Panama Canal, which carries 14% of US foreign trade, so that it can handle more and bigger ships. But the Summit did not give the green light to FTAA, despite Bush’s threats and arm-twisting. A handful of countries stood out against it, including Venezuela, where oil resources give the rulers a bit of bargaining freedom (see the November Socialist Standard). So now things are being left to the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Hong Kong in the middle of this month.
The Argentinian Summit was marked by protests and police crackdowns, together with the usual populist anti-American pronouncements from Presidents Chavez of Venezuela and Lula of Brazil. Clearly, many workers are unconvinced that a policy is in their interests just because it suits Bush, his fat-cat backers and the American capitalist class in general. But nobody raised the real issues about the way society is run.
The truth is that arguments about ‘free trade’ or ‘fair trade’ or any other kind of trade completely miss the point. All variants on trade accept the idea that food, clothing, housing etc. should be bought and sold rather than freely available. They also accept that the earth should belong to a small class of owners rather than being the common property of all its people. They all accept the existence of capitalism rather than rejecting it entirely as Socialists do.
No comments:
Post a Comment