Lingua Franca - March 2001
COVER STORY Clothes Encounters Activists and economists clash over sweatshops by Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood
"ARE YOU A ZAPATISTA?" ASKED JAGDISH BHAGWATI, ONE OF THE WORLD'S preeminent trade economists, of a young protester wearing a mask. The sixty-six-year-old Columbia professor and free-trade advocate laughs as he recounts his adventures amid the steelworkers, topless lesbians, and papier-mâché puppets at the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. Recalling the demonstrator's response, he is still a bit puzzled. "She said, 'No, I'm just an anarchist.'" He giggles. "I didn't know if she'd read Bakunin!"
"I wanted to see where they were coming from," Bhagwati says of his foray into the November 1999 street protest. "I talked to a lot of kids, and some of the turtles as well, and asked, 'What's agitating you?'" (Some protesters were dressed as turtles to dramatize a WTO ruling that failed to protect turtles from commercial fishnets.) To his dismay, "They just assumed that the WTO was anti-turtle."
Whether or not the WTO is anti-turtle, the argument between Bhagwati and the protesters is really about a larger question: Does global trade policy place corporate profit before human and environmental welfare? Most of the demonstrators in Seattle would claim that it does, whereas most economists would claim with equal fervor that it doesn't.
"I came back from Seattle thinking that the voice of economists was not very audible in the public space," Bhagwati says. "Economists had opted out, partly out of indifference and partly out of contempt for [anticorporate] voices." Despite his enthusiasm for free trade, Bhagwati does not share this contempt. "Some of them rant and rave," he laughs, "but I have a slightly indulgent attitude, because they tend to raise questions from a very different perspective. So then I called up a lot of [economists] and said, 'Why don't we engage?'"
[...]