Walden Bello

Free trade is in real trouble today. But the promoters of free trade brought this on themselves. However, it is not because they have been tepid in their defense of free trade, as the description of this debate has it. They have been guilty of far greater sins.

The way forward, it is increasingly clear, will be largely determined by the outcome of a political struggle between two post-globalization camps: fascists and democratic socialists.

Free trade and the freedom of capital to move across borders have been the cutting edge of globalization. They’ve also led to the succession of crises that have led to the widespread questioning of capitalism as a way of organizing economic life — and of its paramount ideological expression, neoliberalism.

I think it is urgent that we overcome our fears of articulating grand narratives and lay out a vision that spells out the overcoming of the present world blighted by Capital through common struggle, with the end being the construction of societies that harness men and women’s deepest instinct— cooperation.

The problem with the Eurozone is that it is a monetary union that does not have the necessary requisites of a fiscal union and political union that would set up the rules and mechanisms to allow the central authorities to move capital from surplus to deficit regions.

…Rates of global inequality are simply unprecedented. And neoliberalism is to blame.