Beyond the World Trade Organization.

• Author: Kovel, Joel

The protest in Seattle against the latest round of global trade negotiations draws attention yet again to the prime importance of trade in the current world situation, and more generally, to the whole phenomenon of "globalization" of which trade is an emblem. Certainly, the main body of ruling elites are rigidly united around the goal of the endless expansion of trade, with only a small faction in the US under the leadership of Buchanan dissenting in the name of isolationism. There is no higher priority for those who superintend the global capitalist system than to constantly bring down the barriers to the circulation of goods and finance under conditions that secure the orderly accumulation of capital, and to those of such persuasion--the growth of "free trade" has taken on a religious aura. Thus the pseudo-quarrels between the official political parties melt away to reveal the fundamental unity beneath. Witness how smoothly Clinton picked up from his "opponent" Bush the task of forcing passage of NAFTA, lik e a relay runner taking the baton without missing a stride. We can be certain that the next President will share the same axiomatic impreative.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) stands at the apex of this system. Its capacity to override the laws of nation-states, as well as key treaties between states such as agreements on human rights and biodiversity, or the Kyoto protocols on global warming, testifies dramatically to the status of globalization today and to the dangers it poses to humanity and nature alike. The outpouring of resistance to the regime of "free trade" bears witness to the scale of these dangers. We can suggest the outlines of a radical alternative to the WTO--an organization of world trade that would do justice to humanity and nature.

It is sometimes held that globalization is a new phenomenon, and that its key feature is the triumph of transnational corporations over the nation-state, which is supposed to now be unable to protect its people against corporate excess. Neither of these propositions is quite accurate, first, because there has been a global economic system for at least a millennium, with trade a dominant feature; and second, because the state and the corporations have never been in any significant degree opposed.

Under the conventional logic of globalization, the remedy would be to strengthen governmental controls to rein in corporate excess--the classically liberal answer to economic difficulties, which...