Part Three. The Wisdom Of Protectionism. The Madness Of Free Trade

Part Three.  The Wisdom of Protectionism.  The Madness of Free Trade.

You won’t read what follows in the most frank of published articles or the most progressive websites – especially if they come from the USA.  Why not?  Because a real “flattening” of political thought has been achieved in the last fifty – especially the last twenty – years.  The word “Socialism”, for instance, has been debased and scorned. It has been almost ruled out of conversation and publication except as a word of denigration.

Hugo Chavez wants to build twenty-first century Socialism, it’s true. “Western” theorists and governors absolutely refuse to deal with what that really means.  They won’t talk about it except by frontal ridicule.

They refuse to deal, therefore, with the stimulus to political and philosophical thought brought about by the philosopher Hegel ((1770-1831). That sounds complicated.  It isn’t.

Hegel introduced an idea that, developing, says social life, thought, human cultures – whatever – move (not ‘progress’) through time by the involvement of lively antagonisms.  And, over long periods, there isn’t a ‘winner’.  Rather the opposites cause a sort of coming-together, a synthesis, out of which new antagonisms arise and move on….

It doesn’t matter if that idea is ‘true” or not true.  Nor does it matter that Marx and Engels took up the idea to found ‘dialectical materialism’ upon – simply an idea that says everything happens in the historical world with forces, like classes, in antagonism.  (The two men are considered ‘millenialists’ because they believed the dialectic would end with ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, and its aftermath.)

What matters about ‘the Hegelian principle’ is that it lets everybody (whether philosophers or not) work from the assumption that there are different choices one can make in order to build societies, establish cultures, criticize existing power structures – and propose different ones. It kept alive an open-mindedness which has closed over the last decades – perhaps measured especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Around that time, Charles, Prince of Wales, was quoted as saying – more wisely and prophetically than most would give him credit for – that the loss of the balance between East and West was probably not going to be a good thing.  If he had wanted to use philosophers’ language, Charles might have said that the loss of the ‘visible dialectic in political philosophy and social theory’ was not going to be a good thing.

He was right.  Western Capitalism seized on the event and ran with it.  The world was facing ‘the end of ideology’, ‘the end of history’ the beginning of a single world-view, the end of wars and  conflicts and differences because all the world accepts the Market Economy, the ‘Free Market’, and Capitalist Democracy.  The world will fall at the feet of the Western nations, it was said, and all will fall in love with Democracy – by which they meant Capitalist Democracy. 

What Western Capitalism (and those “end of…” theorists) failed to mention is that Capitalist Democracy is, in fact at present, a system which is dominated much more by Capitalist ideals than Democratic ones. And what almost no one says is that – in fact – two more opposite concepts don’t exist in the world than Capitalism and Democracy.

Capitalist ideas develop from the idea of (human) nature red in tooth and claw.  The propagandists of Capitalism deny that in after-dinner speeches.  But read any “financial” publication for a short time, and you’re told that “the market” is based upon “greed and fear”.  Nice, eh.

You’re told more.  Capitalism is based upon “competition”, by which is meant a process in which others in (whatever) field are overcome, if possible destroyed, the market monopolized, and wealth production for the few placed before all else – before all reasonable human needs and aspirations. That happens as a result of increasing concentrations of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. 

And when those concentrations in fewer and fewer hands unite the powerful in government and the powerful in the economy, the “democratic” restraints upon Capitalism disappear.  Then you get  the almost incredible criminality, social breakdown, and economic collapse visited upon the world (led largely) by the USA right now.

Democracy, plainly, believes in cooperation, in restraint of individual greed, in shared decision-making, and in power placed, through democratic election, in the hands of “representatives” of all the people whose task is to use that power for the good of the whole society. One of Democracy’s primary objectives is to diminish as much as possible fear and greed in the community.

Protectionism is a means by which countries attempt to assure their own economic viability so that the whole population can benefit.  (More about that farther on.)

A simple rule of history can’t be denied. The Capitalists who work to corner all possibility of wealth production into a few hands also work hard to get the cooperation of the men and women who have power in government. When they succeed and convince political power that the “interests” of the country require major policy formulation for and support of the aims of resident Capitalists, the country begins to narrow its Democracy in order to support “the few”.  It begins to give public wealth to the few and to assist in the exploitation of the general population on behalf of the few.

When such a country has increasing success in bringing its own population to accept that condition and in bringing other countries into subservience – then it is becoming an “imperialist” country.  It is building an empire for itself – in which, by definition, the subservient populations are oppressed in order to increase the wealth of the imperial power. 

In most cases, the people of the imperial power are permitted to share some of the wealth – and are convinced by endless propaganda that they share a great deal of it, and so there are rarely any effective anti-imperialists in an imperial country.  When they criticize, what they say – in short - usually comes down to a soft imperialist position. “We should be dominant.  We should be an imperial power.  But we should be a good, kind, gentle imperial power.”  Critics of imperialism within an imperialist country rarely say that the whole structure of dominance has to go.

The people in the imperial country are, simply, slightly more disguised victims than the people outside. But they are victims.  If you doubt that, look at the havoc being wreaked upon ordinary people in the USA right now (while the grossly immoral corporate few and the financial warlords battle to maintain their obscene luxury as something they “deserve”).

An imperial country and its second-string supporting dominant countries work to find the best way, peacefully, to get power over the economies of other countries. Inevitably, they come upon “Free Trade”.  As pointed out in a previous Part, “Free Trade” is a system of peaceful agreements and/or treaties whereby the dominance of dominant countries is legalized in the subservient countries. And, in many cases, the dominance is permitted to reach into the most serious policy-making areas of the subservient countries – to bring them to destitution, if that is the policy of the dominant. (It often is.)

It might be clear why “Protectionism” is a fundamentally necessary policy for countries that cannot be called ‘dominant’. Before looking at that case, however, one more Part must be written to show how so-called “international” institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund became extensions of U.S. (and other big power) policy and – in effect – extensions of U.S. Free Trade and “open market” policy, rather than international bodies seeking good, equally, for all people on the planet.