Trade Deals and the Quest for Global Dominance
The Setup
“In the factory books, you see lots of turnover. But slaves couldn’t quit. While factories were worrying about filling positions and just keeping things going, plantation owners were focused on optimization. They could reallocate labor as they saw fit. I found real quantitative analysis in their records. They were literally looking at humans as capital.”
— Caitlin Rosenthal, Harvard Business Review
As this is being written U.S. President Barack Obama is pushing the House of Representatives to give him ‘fast-track’ authority for his trade agreement, the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), granting him the authority to cede political control to global capital at will. As has now been well commented on, the agreement isn’t about trade per se, but is a template for the consolidation of corporate power within an international framework. The current push for explicit ‘political’ control is only an anomaly to the historically illiterate— the growth of Western capitalism has come through use of state power in the service of predominant economic interests. Hopes that the defeat of ‘fast-track’ will represent a strategic victory against global capital have several centuries of history to overcome.
A machine that turns the toil of one group into the possession of another is invented. Presciently, the source of the labor and toil to be converted; be it through slavery, imperialism, armed robbery or capitalism, is irrelevant. Nature, as expressed through the ‘will’ of the machine, is served by the conversion. Or at least that is the explanation provided by those whose pockets its product ends up in. Original image source: flourmillmachines.com.
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