On Oct 5, 2007, at 9:35 AM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> This sort of poll comes out every few months or so, it seems. Of
> course
> people support international trade: only a complete isolationist
> doesn't,
> and poor countries need to export. It doesn't mean that people oppose
> measures to protect local economies. Nor does it mean people support
> something called "globalization" if that means the agenda of global
> elites.
> We shouldn't be encouraging these chimeras, because the whole
> intent is to
> befuddle and bewitch.
Quite a few people on the left are rather anti-trade, and talk fantastically about "de-linking." Walden Bello had a piece about that just the other day. American unions are constantly denouncing trade deals and foreign competition. Aside from being extremely hard to imagine in practical terms, this sort of thing has almost no constituency - except, it seems, among a certain subset of political intellectuals who travel widely to international conferences to preach the virtues of localism. In the U.S., political candidates with high-profile anti-trade agendas repeatedly get crushed.
I've been yammering against the word globalization for more years than I want to count. The word leads to lots of confusion. It's an area where we should be extremely specific and class-angle the thing. Workers and the environment need to be protected, not economies.
Doug