Daily Lobo Column
I’m sure you’ve heard all the hullabaloo about “free trade” and globalization: North American Free Trade Agreement, World Trade Organization, World Bank/International Monetary Fund and the like. But what effect, one must wonder, has the increasing free movement of capital had toward facilitating freer movement of people?
According to activists from 25 countries throughout Europe, none. In fact, the advent of free trade under the European Union has coincided with increasing difficulties for people trying to move across borders. During July 5-12, six border camps were set up to protest this trend.
As usual, the activists’ peaceful intentions were met with violence. Actions by the police before and during the demonstrations included random searches and identification checks, launching water cannons, kidnapping and intimidating independent media journalists and damaging their film.
And what dreadful things, you ask, did the activists do to warrant such attacks? Guerilla theater, street parties, drumming circles, peaceful marches. Oh, the horror! Both the underlying issues of the demonstrations and the violent response to them beg the question: Where do the people fit into this whole globalization thing?
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But before we get to that, perhaps we should take a glance at our own backyard. The United States is no stranger to closed borders, in spite of our free trade aspirations. Newspapers are littered with stories of harassment and brutality by the border patrol.
The supposedly left of center Bill Clinton signed legislation restricting access to basic services for legal immigrants. As if the government can’t do enough damage on its own, we even hire private mercenaries — the Corrections Corporation of America. At its Immigration and Naturalization Service Detention Center in New Jersey, guards beat a man seeking asylum so brutally that the imprints of their boots were indented on his face. North America’s problems at least rival those that spawned the border camps in Europe.
So, back to that earlier question: If globalization is so important, why is free movement of people still denied? The answer, my dear Watson, is elementary. Free trade is not for the people. Proponents of free trade are only concerned with borders as long as they are a barrier to free movement of capital.
And what is capital? Capital has no inherent connection to the products and services it used to purchase. Capital is, in fact, nothing but a figment of the imagination, a symbol with no intrinsic value. Its sole function is to stratify people into classes by tying ownership to this symbol, rather than to concrete reality. Without capital, how could one person claim to own what another produced, unless given freely by the latter?
Free trade, then, is not just about free movement of capital. It’s about free movement of capital from the poor producers (of any geographic area) to the wealthy owners (of any geographic area). But we shouldn’t be surprised. The degradation of labor and environmental standards, loss of jobs and privatization of and subsequent profiteering from basic social services that have taken place as a result of free trade should be more than enough to show us that globalization was never for the people.
Actions like the border camps and anti-corporate globalization protests call attention to issues deeper than those apparent on the surface. People’s ability to cross borders, to secure basic necessities and to maintain a healthy planet are all tied ultimately to the more fundamental question of liberty. Capital denies liberty, not only because of class stratification, but because it incurs still another, greater wrong.
Capital ties work almost exclusively to economics, thereby stripping it of its creative value. For most people, work is merely a requisite for survival. For a few, work is a means to sate the all-consuming god of materialism. In the pursuit of capital, the idea that work might actually be fulfilling, in and of itself, seems little more than the fantasy of children.
True freedom must mean more than just the freedom to accumulate wealth. Liberty can only be realized when our “economy” finds its basis not in capital, but in enabling all people to pursue their full human potential.
