Free TradeTM

Published in “The Ecologist”
May/June 2003

To understand what is happening at Cancun, and why so many people care so much about it, we need first to understand the realities behind so called ‘free trade’.  By Derrick Jensen.

Free trade. So benign sounding a phrase. A concept whose principles no reasonable person would challenge. Trouble is — free trade as we know it, free trade as is pushed by those massing at Cancun in September, is far from free. Think about it. If it was truly free, would they put sanctions on those who don’t want to participate, and use police to violently put down protests by those who oppose it? Free trade is really just a euphemism, like ‘peacekeeping’, or ‘forest management’, that hides a far uglier, more brutal reality. Free trade is a brand — Free Trade TM that sells a repackaged product no one in their right minds would buy if they knew what it really was.

 

So what is it? Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz once wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Free Trade is the continuation of colonialism by other means. Good old-fashioned colonialism, which my dictionary defines as “(a) control by one power over a dependent area or people; (b) a policy advocating or based on such control.”

Whether we like it or not, the fact remains that the rich of the world still control the former colonies — although few are so impolite as to call them that anymore — because many of the colonial structures they built up were simply left in place after “independence.” Corporate access to land, resources, and markets; debt peonage; tax structures favorable to those in power; commodity pricing aimed at driving small producers off their land; and the massive export of resources are often similar to conditions hundreds of years ago. Only the names describing these mechanisms have changed. And in some countries, poverty is much worse than it was under direct colonial rule.

Same old story

It’s a story as old as civilization. About which, the anthropologist Stanley Diamond noted that “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” This will not be news to the citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama, Palestine, (and so on, ad nauseum) nor to those “at home” who’ve felt the pepper spray, batons, and rubber bullets of cops whose job it is to protect those in power.

They understand that those at the centre of empire have always needed to import resources to maintain and expand their empire. That’s why the trade our leaders will talk about and promote at Cancun isn’t and can never be “free”: if resources are needed by those in power, trade that is purely voluntary by all concerned will never be sufficiently reliable.  That’s why anytime some community sits on a resource needed by those in power, and chooses not to sell this resource (at a price convenient for the powerful), the people are killed, the community destroyed, the resource stolen.

Far fetched? Those at the centre of empire have been killing people, destroying communities, and stealing resources, that is, expanding their region of control and exploitation, for some 6,000 years. At every step of the way, these conquistadors have not encountered vacant land but instead functioning human communities living in dynamic equilibrium with their landbases. Time and again these communities and landbases have been destroyed to serve those at the centre.

As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, probably the world’s foremost authority on the psychology of genocide, made clear in his extraordinary book The Nazi Doctors, before you can commit any mass atrocity you have to convince yourself that what you’re doing is not an atrocity but instead beneficial. Thus the Nazis weren’t committing genocide and murdering Jews (Gypsies, Slavs, Russians, and so on) they were “purifying the Aryan Race” and gaining lebensraum they needed to fulfill their destiny. Thus the Americans weren’t committing genocide and murdering Indians, they were fulfilling their own Manifest Destiny (gaining lebensraum, as it were). Similarly today, those in power aren’t destroying communities and committing ecocide, they are ‘growing the economy’, and ‘developing natural resources’, and ‘helping those in the Third World to develop their infrastructure’, ‘bringing to all the benefits of free trade capitalism’, (admittedly often at the point of a gun). No longer is the choice offered to those to be exploited Christianity or death, it has become Free Trade or death.

But wait a minute. How can I compare Free Trade™ to lebensraum? Isn’t trade a good thing? Isn’t free trade just the untrammeled exchange of items to the benefit of all? Isn’t that what happens when two kids trade baseball cards? I’ll give you a Pedro Martinez for a Barry Bonds, straight up.

Sure, free trade can be good, if all parties hold equal power. Negotiations aren’t possible when one side holds a gun and the other does not (the technical term for this sort of exchange is robbery). That is how the civilised were able to get Indians to sign treaties giving up their land for pennies or less per acre: the Indians knew if they didn’t sign they’d receive nothing but bullets, and bayonets to the throat.

Balance of power

From the beginning, those in power have recognised the impossibility of negotiations between parties of unequal power, and have done everything they can to magnify this disparity. Without access to land there can be no self-sufficiency: land provides food, shelter, clothing. If you can force people to pay just so they can be alive on this earth — nowadays these payments are usually called rent or mortgage – you’ve forced them into the wage economy.

 

The same holds true for forcing them to pay for materials the earth gives freely: the salmon, bison, huckleberries, willows, and so on that are central to the lives, cultures, and communities not only of indigenous peoples but to all of us, even if we make believe this isn’t the case. To force people to pay for things they need to survive is an atrocity: a community- and nature-destroying atrocity. To convince them to pay willingly is a scam. It is also, as we see around us — or would see had we not been so thoroughly convinced — to cause them to forget that communities are even possible.

 

Just as those in power must control access to land, the same logic dictates they must destroy all stocks of wild foodstuffs. Why would I go to Safeway if I could catch wild salmon in the stream outside my door? The same is true, obviously, for everything that is wild and free, for everything else that can meet our needs without us having to pay those in power. The push to privatize the world’s water helps make sense of official apathy surrounding the pollution of (free) water sources. You just watch: air will soon be privatized: I don’t know how they’ll do it, but they’ll certainly find a way.

But the destruction of wild foodstuffs doesn’t require some fiendishly clever plot on the part of those in power. Far worse, it merely requires the reward and logic systems of civilization to remain in place. And so long as the rest of us continue to buy into theses systems that value the centralisation of control over life, that value the production of things over life, that value empire over life, that value Free TradeTM over life, so long will the world that is our real and only home continue to be destroyed, and so long will the noose that is empire continue to tighten around our throats.

PULL QUOTES

anytime some community sits on a resource needed by those in power, and chooses not to sell this resource (at a price convenient for the powerful), the people are killed, the community destroyed, the resource stolen

Just as  the Nazis weren’t committing genocide they were “purifying the Aryan Race” and gaining lebensraum they needed to fulfill their destiny, similarly today those in power aren’t destroying communities and committing ecocide, they are ‘developing natural resources’ and ‘helping those in the Third World to develop their infrastructure’