RECENT world trade talks collapsed over tariff protection issues.
Representatives of the international capitalist classes, gathered at the headquarters of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, failed to agree on a further liberalisation of world trade.
Apparently, representatives of India and China wanted a clause allowing them to keep out foreign imports if they ended up getting too much, as well as a reduction in the subsidies given to US cotton producers, but America wouldn't concede.
That m
eans the so-called Doha development round of talks, started in 2001 and aimed at helping the developing capitalist countries, is dead, and it's each capitalist state for itself, and the devil take the hindmost.
Some will be happy with this outcome – not just US cotton producers and fledgling Indian and Chinese capitalists, but the anti-globalisation movement too, as it is against free trade and, if you examine its supposed alternative, protectionism as well.
Free trade or protection? That was the irrelevant issue the working class was invited to take sides over when the Socialist Party was formed more than 100 years ago.
As socialists, we advised workers not to take sides and to ignore the issue.
Neither free trade nor protection would improve their position or solve their problems since these were not caused by trading arrangements, but by the capitalist nature of society and production.
Workers were just as badly off in free trade countries, such as Britain, as they were in protectionist countries, such as the US and France, and vice versa.
That is still our advice today. Let the capitalist classes of the world and their representatives argue over their trading arrangements. They don't concern us.
The failure to agree, though not inevitable, was predictable. The negotiations were always going to involve representatives jockeying for position.
It's going to be the same with future negotiations on global warming, so the prospects for any meaningful action being agreed there are not that bright either.
As EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson put it when the latest trade talks opened: "If, after seven years, you cannot complete a trade round, what does that say for your prospects of reaching a deal on climate change?"
What indeed.
John Bissett,
Scarborough Parade,
Hebburn.
The full article contains 376 words and appears in n/a newspaper.
