Globalization has been kicked around lately as it should be what with China trade dominance and NAFTA in shambles. In itself it is a positive because opening up trade routes since ancient times generated civilization. Yet globalization has always been controlled by thugs, such as in the slave trade and the exploitation of much poorer or less advanced countries. This has not really changed. Since China can exploit its own labor by offering western capital an attractive bottom line to produce or to purchase goods there, an extreme imbalance of trade prevails.
In Marco Polo’s time, China was more advanced than Europe and had significant material to trade whereas the West had little to offer in return other than few of the finer Venetian crafts. As the seas began to open up more routes and Europe broke from feudal society, the trend toward exploitation became a mercantile adventure at the expense of other societies. Merchants, of course already knew that labor meant lining their pockets. It didn’t take long for the merchants to realize that goods in other nations were actually produced by near slave labor and consequently meant greater profits and huge capital surplus for them.
Thus capitalism rode into a new civilization on the backs of cheap labor. Since then little has changed. The theory behind trade is that both parties engaged benefit. In practice, one has to lose. To soften this view, the more wealthy and powerful nations explain that the child who makes a dollar a week in Mexico is a dollar more than if the child is left to beg. These ostensibly civilized nations even go so far as to justify slavery of the past by presuming that the black race in particular scattered about the world is in a far better condition than those in Africa.
What is beyond them, of course, is the reasoning that had they actually and fairly traded for goods rather than for free labor those primitive tribes may have become a thriving, modern society as some of the northern nations in Africa have already proven. However, the lust for capital precludes humane reasoning.WTO in theory is to lift the third world into modern times. The practice is to keep them there in squalor. The reason WTO can perpetrate this amoral strategy is that it deals with a few of the powerful thugs — who know only too well how to intimidate and exploit — running these countries.
Unfortunately, the United States is number one in this category; for, by corporate participation it not only exploits other countries but our own as well by denying access to countless jobs that once offered a decent wage. In the failing case of Mexico, illegal immigration has proliferated since because the jobs NAFTA was supposed to generate do not exist or are lower paying than low-life jobs in the states.What it is needed, then, is EWTO [enlightened world trade organization] that lets theory direct practice. Only in this way will globalization be a positive step in unifying peoples of the world.
Copyright © 2003 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: November 21, 2003 .