The Doubter's Companion (38 page)

The leader who vaunts her toughness is actually saying that she has contempt for the citizen and—since she is speaking directly to us—that we have contempt for ourselves. See:
LEADERSHIP.

TRADE
   A miracle drug which used to be a practical commercial activity.

It is now believed by (almost) all respectable economists, politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats that more trade is the best way to get out of our depression because it creates jobs and wealth.

Curiously enough we have traded more in the last twenty years than ever before in history. Each year there have been remarkable net increases, yet we have continued to sink deeper and deeper into depression. Could this possibly mean that not all trade creates jobs and wealth? Or that trade does not always create jobs and wealth, but can also destroy them?

Would it be more accurate to say that some trade creates and other trade destroys? Which it does appears to depend on where we are in history, on economic circumstances and on geographical positioning. If so, then trade is a potentially valuable mechanism with no inherent value.

This isn't what Adam Smith and David Hume thought. But then their idea of commerce revolved around much smaller companies run by merchants and manufacturers who had the direct involvement of ownership. Without entering into the endless debate over whether commerce produces rationality and temperance, it can be argued that—with the rise of a governing technocracy which does not own, of shapeless transnational corporations and of corporatist values—the role of trade has been radically changed.

Jobs and wealth are created by imagination converted into creativity, as well as a willingness to take risks on creativity and to think in the long term. There must also be enough economic stability to make a long-term risk and creativity profitable. To the extent that trade encourages these factors, it is a positive mechanism. To the extent that it discourages them, it is negative.

Why then are we blindly obsessed by the idea that ever more trade must produce prosperity? Our experts keep telling us that just a little bit more will do the trick. Yet in separate conversations the same experts tell us that industrial production in developed countries is a doubtful prospect and that chronic unemployment may be here to stay. Increased trade seems to accentuate not discourage these problems.

The explanation may be that ours is a society which punishes creativity and rewards conventional thinking. And the most conventional idea of the last quarter-century has been that only through trade can we prosper. As this linear conviction presses on through continuing failure, the fear grows that a mistake is being made and so we press on ever more desperately, trading the way some people believe they are dieting when they have anorexia.

A more sensible approach might be to treat trade not as a religion but as a commercial activity. This might free us to think about the practical implications of today's trade mechanisms. What are we trading and to what purpose? If the effect of something is not positive, then only ideological blindness or masochism can make us insist that salvation lies in doing more of it. See:
HARD WORK.

TRADING WITH THE ENEMY ACT
   The ultimate American military weapon.

After the defeat of conventional forces in Vietnam and Cuba, this act, which prevents all commerce between the United States and its enemies, was meticulously enforced. Given the intricacies of international investment and trade, not a great deal can be done by anyone else with a country which the United States has blacklisted.

Thus the government in Hanoi survived for a dozen years on straight cash inputs from Moscow. Once the Soviet Union began to collapse and their aid with it, Vietnam had little choice but to surrender and convert to the market system. The same act remains in force against Cuba and will eventually prevail.

Two small details are perhaps worth mentioning. This act seems to win very precise victories for the free market. It has no effect on political or social systems. For example, the political prisoners remain in Vietnam's jails, including harmless Buddhist monks.

Second, the act is not enforced against all of America's enemies. Take the case of the
WAR ON DRUGS
which presidents regularly declare. More than half of the heroin sold in the United States comes from Burma, with the connivance of the Burmese government, one of the two or three most unpleasant dictatorships in the world. The death, violence and disorder in American cities brought on by the drug culture certainly justifies the use of the word “war.” Yet Washington doesn't even discourage U.S. companies from investing in Burma, let alone forbid them by applying the act.

What exactly must an enemy do to be treated as one? It might be useful if the State Department were to issue an instruction booklet for confused revolutionaries, dictators and other foreign types.

TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS
   The seat of contemporary feudalism.

Received wisdom has it that the new feudalism is nationalist and was brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The transnationals, given their support of the global economy, are seen as internationalist. This is a comic misrepresentation of feudalism, which had only an incidental relationship to geography and race. In no way does the nationalist phenomenon resemble the feudal system.

Feudalism was a highly abstract international order. It was the opposite of the Roman Empire, which remained in Western memory as the model of a concrete international system. The death of Charlemagne in 814 ended the dream that Rome's administrative, military and economic order could be re-created under a Christian barbarian king, crowned for that purpose as Holy Roman Emperor.

Power quickly slipped into the hands of thousands of barons, princes and minor kings, each with power over their various estates, duchies, provinces and kingdoms. But these bits of land and the people attached to them were merely pawns in the ongoing struggle between noble families for power in the great feudal order. The principal interest of the aristocracy reflected their central loyalty, which was not to their land but to their class, with its religious structure, rules of conduct, honours and privileges.

Lands and populations endlessly changed hands. They were traded in negotiations, joined arbitrarily by marriage, bequeathed by death, transferred or confiscated with each loss of a noble's title. Feudalism consisted of endless manoeuvres to change the balances of power within the social order.

Wars were surprisingly inconclusive. Protocol determined who could fight whom, given their respective social standings, and under what conditions. The purpose of this incessant but apparently aimless fighting was to force minor adjustments not to a concrete system but to an abstract social order.

There is nothing new or feudal about the recent explosion in nationalism. This slow and continual drive went into its modern phase in 1919. We are now witnesses to the playing out of various local or racial obsessions in the West, but these bear no relationship to real, that is useful, power.

Where the nationalist forces win, the local élites can hope for a few privileges to pump themselves up, along with a decorative façade which asserts that they have control over events within their geographical area. In reality they are limited to secondary and passive activities—principally the definition of who is to be included in their “race” or group, along with formal responsibility for their welfare. However, the economic factors which will decide that welfare are defined and adjusted on a different plane—that of abstract feudalism—which escapes their control.

The more the local élites apply political control over their concrete area, the more real economic power slips away from their group out onto the abstract international plane of the transnationals, for whom these local bits of land called countries, and the populations attached to them, are mere pawns in the ongoing struggle of individual corporations for more power in the great global economy. And so the rise to “power” of nationalist groups actually decreases national power. The smaller the group, the more extreme and disastrous this paradox. Nationalism is the consolation prize for the losers in the battle for power at the end of the twentieth century.

Theoretically the counterweight to the abstract power of the transnationals should be a large national group. This may help, but not if used in isolation. International economic feudalism is based on the constant ability to shift investments or production from one national area to another in an ongoing auction for more favourable conditions. The ultimate weapon is the threat to decamp each time there is discussion of wage levels, job security, health standards, environmental standards or any standards at all relating to place and people.

The feudal economy's power lies, therefore, in the patterns of production. The power of the concrete national groups lies in the patterns of consumption.

In other words, the only realistic counterweight to economic feudalism is an agreement on common standards among a group of national areas sufficiently large to control the patterns of consumption. Consumption, after all, is the transnational's source of income. The key to a corporation's success in the feudal order is not its ability to produce (however low the cost) but its ability to sell.

The European community is an attempt to create international standards through control over consumption patterns. But so long as the United States and Japan follow different rules, their group is not large enough. The Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States and
NAFTA
(Canada, Mexico and the United States) were both sold to the public with emphasis on the advantages to consumption. These treaties were really about patterns of production. They restructure large geographical areas to suit the methods of abstract economic feudalism.

Transnational systems revolve around goods, not individuals. In a citizen-based civilization the purpose of goods is to satisfy the needs of the citizenry. In an abstract market-based civilization of the transnational sort, the purpose of the citizen is to serve the logic of a supply-and-demand system.

This inversion couldn't help but have an effect on the rational élites. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the technocracy attached itself to the nation state. Gradually, in the second half of the twentieth, the leading edge of the technocracy has attached itself to the transnationals.

The technocrats' devotion to structures and pure power led them quite naturally away from the logic of geography and onto the more abstract plane. That this international system cannot satisfy the economic and therefore the social needs of the particular area from which a technocrat comes is beside the point. As in the Middle Ages, local personal distress is an unfortunate inevitability in the search for larger, more important truths, such as the ideal structure of production.

The citizen remains confused by this switch in loyalties. For example, the taxpayer funds the training of technocratic business élites in the hope that they will attack economic problems. In reality their very training leads them to aggravate the situation by serving on another plane.

The rational, corporatist assumption of Western education makes it difficult for us to face up to the return of feudalism. The technocrats, with their mechanistic ways, see all structural movements as inevitable. Structural inevitability is their replacement for the concept of the public weal.

Most of those who reject this mechanistic determinism see the transnationals as villains in an international plot.

If only it were that simple.

These complex structures resemble centipedes, with sections spread around the world. They have an internal logic tied to lower costs and higher sales. Their sections die, prosper, move or divide according to that logic. Local populations are of no concern. Nor are the local chapters of the serving technocracy. As with the mediaeval social order, it is the order which matters, not any particular holders of specific titles.

The transnational has no direction or purpose. That's why it can benefit or destroy individual societies with equal disinterest. The whole system is a negation of the idea of civilization. Humanism and a citizen-based equilibrium are impossible in such circumstances.

In the late twentieth century we have reached the culminating moment in a movement first identified a half-century earlier by thinkers such as Harold Innis and Fernand Braudel. Technological change or a mercantilist movement can do more than change society. It can reduce everyone, even kings, to bit players.

As the transnationals have gained power, so the frustrated citizenry have been tempted to fall back on the nationalist myth for defence. But just as economic feudalism destroys a citizen-based society by operating on a separate abstract plane, so nationalism does the same by operating on yet another abstract plane—that of racial determinism. What's more, nationalism is powerless against the transnationals and simply accentuates economic problems.

The citizen's problem over the next few decades will be to control feudalism without denying the possibility of humanism. This means making use of the nation state—because that is the practical, concrete shape of our existence as citizens. But using it in a cooperative manner to establish international agreements on standards which spread far enough to make them enforceable. If we fail, we'll soon find ourselves trying to rebuild society from scratch, having dismantled it in the name of abstract determinism. See:
CORPORATISM, REASON
and
STANDARDS OF PRODUCTION.

TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS
   The silliest economic theory of the twentieth century.

A government invests $100 billion in fighter airplanes. With a bit of luck, some of the R and D will trickle down into civil aeronautics, for example, giving a billion-dollar boost to a passenger airplane project.

But if what the government wanted was to give civil aeronautics a billion-dollar boost, they have just overspent by $99 billion. What's more, they have done it in a slow, awkward and uncertain way. On the other hand, if what they needed were new fighter airplanes, they shouldn't have been distracted from their duty by some unessential passenger planes.