An Introductory Glance at the WTO, Plutocracy's Controlling Political Economic Mechanism

[Joanne98]

This is the first of six installments, which will clarify and amplify citizen understanding about World Trade Organization(WTO), which those who favor call a paragon of efficiency and sustainability and those who deplore it call a nefarious enterprise of insidious corruption and inherent oppression. This humble correspondent has a clear proclivity to lean toward the second characterization, but as ever a fair-minded fellow, he suggests that we look at the institutional, political economic, and social economic origins in order to establish the defensibility, or not, of such a case.

Inevitably, doing this entails, again, grappling with matters of political economics generally. Although this narrator is quite capable of thinking about such matters too elliptically, more theoretically, today he intends to inject some historical, grounded expression of such matters, specifically in relation to the early growth of capitalism.

Henry Magdoff is a grand vizier of Marxist historical analysis. We can listen to him, as he propounds--dispositively so, perhaps--about how the growth of what so many dearly adore and so many others horrifically hate came to produce what we now know as the standard operation procedure of things. This interview, from the definitely pinkish Monthly Review, is worth reading in its entirety.


"(C)apitalism was born in a world economy. However, we need to distinguish between merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism. With the development by the fifteenth century of three-masted, heavily armed sailing ships, capable of carrying substantial crews and cargoes over transoceanic distances, both international commerce and naval warfare were propelled forward. The new European ships spread out to the seven seas in search of profits and plunder. In this way the age of discovery, which was also an age of conquest, began in the fifteenth century and marked the rise of merchant capitalism on a world-economic basis. The wealth of western Europe grew by leaps and bounds: gold and silver were taken from South America to feed the banks, and slaves were acquired to produce the consumer goods and raw materials for the workshops of western Europe. World trade was spurred by acquiring new colonies, expanding old ones, the spread of slavery, and outright robbery. These were the outstanding features of the world markets that evolved in the more than two centuries preceding industrial capitalism. A key feature of this merchant stage of capitalism is that it provided not only the markets but also the wealth that fed the industrial revolution that began in the mid-1700s."

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-origins-of-the-WTO-Epi-by-Jack-Hickey-110129-381.html