What we need is a rule-based international economy
By John McMurtry
All freedoms have limits. Freedom of speech does not include the right to slander one's neighbour or to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. In the same way, the free market needs to have limits imposed on its operations. Otherwise, as we now see, the unfettered free market tends to weaken or destroy the resources of life and freedom for the majority, to benefit mainly a small wealthy minority, and to leave most people with little but their own work to live by and increasing tens of millions without even that.
The more unequal the possession of wealth is in a free market, the more people there are without the money to buy what they need for a decent life, and the less freedom the free market assures for the society in which it operates.
In recent years, globe-girdling technologies and international free trade agreements have increasingly allowed corporations and investment capital to sever their connection with any given community or nation or culture.
Workers anywhere can now be displaced, not only by workers elsewhere willing to work more cheaply, but by new labour-replacing, computer-driven systems of production and communication.
With no democratic input or accountability required for any step of this process of mass worker displacement and disemployment, corporations and investment capital can dismantle or move their operations across the world with the speed of an electronic signal. The vast majority of the planet's people have in this way been radically disempowered as an economic and political force--transformed into an international pool of part-time employees who can be hired and dismissed at will, with ever more people in the labour market competing for ever more replaceable jobs.
Globalized free trade has brought us to the age of disposable humanity.
The solution is to institute a "rule-based international economy" where the rules do not, as now, merely protect business interests and trade, but include minimum standards to protect workers' wages, health and safety, to safeguard the environment against pollution and degradation, and to provide a "social safety net" for the unemployed, the old, the young, the infirm, and others left out of the current global economy.
Most of the serious problems of the anarchic free trade economy would be significantly reduced by such a global-rule system. Unfortunately, the world's dominant corporations are opposed to the protection of any rights but their own. They have fiercely attacked public health care, unemployment insurance, old age pensions and social security programs as "too costly," "unworkable," "anti-private initiative," even "communist."
In the past, such programs have nevertheless been provided because of their widespread popularity and support within the general population. The difference now is that corporations are no longer tied to the community as a whole, and are free to leave any society in which effective rules and programs to protect human rights and the environment have the effect of raising business costs.
Now that business has secured the right to invest or disinvest at will across national boundaries with no social obligations, rules protecting human life have to be international to be effective. If they are not, business will simply move to the lowest-cost, lowest-standard areas to maximize profits. Effective international rules protecting people and the environment must therefore be included in transnational trade agreements to bind corporations to wider interests than their own profits. Once such trade deals include life-protective standards--not as now by token "side-agreements" without legal force, but by specific and enforceable regulations--corporations would be obliged to comply in order to continue having access to the national markets covered by these agreements.
Two benefits would flow from such a regulatory balancing of the rights of corporations with the rights of people. First of all, the current corporate agenda of reducing or dismantling the social standards of civilization "to compete in the tough new international marketplace" would be diminished in its capacity to extort social sacrifices for lower business costs.
Secondly, the ability of dictatorships and oligarchies abroad to resist international pressure to improve human rights and environmental standards within their borders would be eliminated. Their access to other countries' markets would be conditional on their compliance with international social and environmental standards.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to be optimistic about the chances of educating free market adherents to the most elementary requirements of social existence. Private corporations and business-dominated governments have so far imposed against majority will a series of undebated, secretly-negotiated, business-only trade agreements which have disemployed and disempowered millions, ruined communities, and cut back social legislation across the developed world without a noticeable dissenting voice from a single political party in the process.
A world-wide coup d'état, one might say, has already occurred. The owners of international capital have been given clearly defined transnational rights to rule the world's production and distribution, uncontrolled by a single effective human right or environmental limit to their private profit-seeking activities.
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