June 14, 2001, 1:23 p.m.
Have you heard about how The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy is suing
President George W. Bush for the Global Gag Rule? Thumbs up!
12:40 p.m.
This is the first draft of my most recent book review for
MaximumRocknRoll . I fear I'm
being too academic again for a "lay" audience, but I don't know how
else to discuss my critiques. (I'm also trying not to be too sarcastic
-- notably in the first paragraph, which would have provided ample opportunity for cutting remarks.)
The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, Wayne Ellwood
The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change, Dinyar Godrej
The No-Nonsense Guide to Fair Trade, David Ransom
New Internationalist Publications / Verso Press
These guides are riding the wave of recent publications about
globalization -- the issues, the policies, the advocates and the
opponents-- in the wake of the so-called Battle in Seattle. It's a bit
odd, if only because the anti-globalization movement has its decades-old
roots in Third World nations (those that have been impacted the most by
current IMF/WTO/WB policy) but has only garnered such international
attention in the aftermath of U.S./First World protests. As a result, I
worry that the public face of the anti-globalization movement will be
the black-clad white (and usually male) youth, rather than the less
media-spectacular working people of Third World nations; and that the
anarchist spectacle of the former will overshadow and even suppress the
years of hard advocacy work of the latter. These are not frivolous
observations -- they suggest very real inequities of power among
imagined allies that will need to be dealt with, sooner or later. Keep
that in mind, because it will come up again.
Each of the guides runs about 150 pages and is neatly divided into
chapters and sections and clear headings. For those who are looking for
specific information about a particular topic, there is a decent index.
Each guide also offers a contact list of advocacy groups and
organizations, as well as a concluding chapter with "what to do next"
bullet points for a progressive agenda.
The guide to globalization is packed with the full cast of characters:
The International Monetary Fund, The World Trade Organization, the
Bretton Woods pact, the World Bank, debt and structural
adjustment, deregulation, et cetera. Offering straightforward political economy,
the author avoids the academic language of Masao Miyoshi and David
Harvey but manages to reference (if obliquely) such concepts as
time-space compression and flexible accumulation in less catch-phraseworthy, if
more lucid, prose. Structural changes in the global economy in the 1970s
. the creation of NICS (Newly Industrialized Countries) and
"export processing zones" among them. have given rise to an ideological
fundamentalism of "free trade" which has been anything but
"free." Multinational corporations are given tax shelters and legal
exemptions, unfettered investment and deregulation, and even supplied with
military aid, in what has been dubbed "corporate welfare." This slim
volume somehow manages to tackle all the relevant angles on
neo-liberal globalization without seeming top-heavy or overwhelming -- a helpful
crash course on the history and impact of global economic policy, it
might be useful to carry this one with you to the upcoming (and growing)
protests, since these issues can get positively labyrinthine.
Similarly the guide to climate change is a solid piece of reporting,
presenting the impact of "record-breaking" instances of extreme weather
on health, farming, and wildlife. There is an extensive analysis of the
international Kyoto accords, which U.S. President Bush has famously
derided and infamously refused to follow.
The guide to fair trade, however, misses the mark: beginning
with the foreword by Anita Roddick, founder and co-chair of the
transnational corporation The Body Shop, which almost reads like an advertising
pitch. Roddick takes the opportunity to plug The Body Shop's "community
trade" program (also prominently featured in all in-store brochures and
the on-line website) -- a subcontracted network of cooperatives and
collectives producing crafts and other goods for The Body Shop. As of
1995, however, this "Trade Not Aid" program accounted for approximately
1% of The Body Shop's business. Meanwhile numerous feminist scholars
have deconstructed the whiff of missionary discourse in Roddick's
rhetoric, a kind of "white woman's burden" for the new millennium, which
includes saving the Third World with "work and not handouts," buying
organic hand cream or tea tree oil for the betterment of all
involved.
But of course, that's simply the foreword. The
crucial question is: Does fair trade provide options? Certainly, for the workers
in the most immediate sense, commensurate wages (between 15-30% of the retail
price of the product) and union organizing is a material
improvement. Some of the other common principles of fair trade are: no
child labor, environmental sustainability, social premiums, democratic organization, et cetera, which
are all wonderful things, to be
sure. Thus, fair trade is by far preferable to free trade. The
chapters address different parts of the Third World as well as different
free trade products: Peru and coffee, Ghana and cocoa, Guatamala and
bananas, and Mexico provides the "cautionary tale" with a trip to a
maquila/factory. However, fair trade as a solution to the global
economy presents more complications than this guide either addresses -- and perhaps
more than the fair trade movement would be willing to address.
For instance, the relationship between fair trade
producer and fair trade consumer needs much more scrutiny. The ruggedly
romantic portraits of indigenous farmers and artisans presented in this
volume --and overwhelmingly so in the body of fair trade discourse--
suggest that fair trade as uniquely capable of creating social relations
with the Other along fixed axes of time and space. That is,
the relationship between producer and consumer is recuperated as one marked
by equality and exchange -- which is hardly outside of the logic of
capitalism. And so, to allude to my initial concerns, just who is identified as the agent of social change in fair trade?
Fair trade depends upon a generalized
metropolitan or First World subject who not only participates in
a global community defined by consumer culture, but who (according to
the discourse) provides for the disadvantaged with her purchasing power.
This cultural politics of "building people to people ties" (the Global
Exchange slogan) of cultural preservation and social justice, locates
political activity within a public sphere of consumption but limits its
exercise to an elite market . Moreover fair trade participates in
the privatization of acts of good citizenship, reduced to the issue
of consumption practices. This is made inadvertently clear in the
chapter about blue jeans, in which the search for a "non-exploitative" pair
eventually costs $100 (and that was on the low-end) for a hemp version
of the popular fashion staple. The ability of fair trade to change the
face of the global economy thus depends on the continued accumulation of
wealth and discretionary income in the First World in order to provide a
market for Third World goods. This necessity describes a situation that
does not necessarily empower the Third World worker and yet locates the
First World consumer as the agent for social change.
Meanwhile The Body Shop and Levi's --companies with "community
trade" or education programs for their workers-- blur the line between the
corporation and the NGO. A non-profit called PEOPLink provides web
access and Internet skills to artisan cooperatives for their goods,
earning high praise from former U.S. President Clinton for their efforts
in aiding the "less fortunate" to pull themselves up by the so-called
bootstraps. And in spite of the critique of neoliberalism, fair trade
still a) qualifies as the privatization of social services and aid and
b) fosters a politics that locates empowerment and equality in producer
participation in the market system.
In the end, a solution that requires "good people with good money" is
not any kind of solution at all. Fair trade is the weak link in the
anti-globalization agenda, and exposes the asymmetrical relations of
representational and material power that still undergird the movement.
As a whole, the no-nonsense guides are useful maps of the contemporary economic and political order. Clear and concise, the first two are a great introduction to the issues at hand, while the last provokes (if not deliberately) the need for a more critical analysis of the imagined solutions we pose, and how we do so.