> Why can't you say it? NAFTA allows US agricultural goods, which require very
> little labor, to displace Mexican agriculture, which is very labor intensive.
> So, let's say that 1 farm worker displaces 20 in Mexico and that 10 of these
> displaced farm workers are employed, displacing 3 U.S. workers.
>
> Brad DeLong wrote:
>
> > You can't say that NAFTA was bad
> > for the U.S. because demand for labor would have boomed even more
> > without it and also say that NAFTA was bad for Mexico because demand
> > for labor didn't keep up with the rapidly-growing labor force.
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I see an unwitting acceptance of the axioms of the Realist approach to international relations in this thread which should definitely be problematized so that the issue of capital and labor is "brought forward" in the future of the global political ecology debate. Let's disaggregate/decompose the nation-state thematic. People have been trying against enormous odds to shift this focus since at least Mueller and Barnet's book Global Reach. These new treaties have problematized the nation-sate to the advantage of the capitalist class big time; supranational institutions to regulate the ability of government's abilities to regulate commerce. This raises enormous issues for representation and accountability and externalities that are far richer than are explained by neoclassical/Realist discourse.
Why should we accept a Westphalian economic geography anymore when the capitalists and their lawyers are challenging the very terms of the issues in front of our very eyes [the public interest issue has already been commented on as of no value by the WTO dispute resolution panel, according to Ellen Gould--shades of Joseph Schumpeter]. Sure the state is their proxy in all this but we should problematize that too, draw the anarchists into the debate as they have a lot to contribute on this. After all, the capitalists are becoming increasingly anacratic and oligarchical. They're not US jobs or Mexican or Canadian; they're capital's jobs until we reappropriate them for different, more humane prerogatives. This is gonna be hard as hell, but we have to start with the way we think through the various ecological scales of production and distribution of abilities, competences, technologies, "resources", institutions and powers.
Ian