Time for another “Globollocks Watch piece, surveying Doug Henwood’s piece in The Nation, which appears to have been taken by some among the neoliberal axis as evidence of a climbdown by a once-proud supporter of the Seattle rioters
Full disclosure: Although DH and I have never met, we’ve corresponded for quite a while and I consider him a mate. For this reason, I’ve decided that integrity requires me to be extra harsh in applying the patent Crooked Timber “Globollocks Scale”. I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people. The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying. Since I’ve never knowingly lit a candle while cursing the darkness was an option, don’t expect me to subject any of my own work to this scale any time soon.
I award “Collapse in Cancun” 8 Globollocks points and 2 cliche points. The breakdown is as follows:
Globollocks points:
Mention of Korea “without qualification” — 3 points. This is probably harsh - as I say, I’m intentionally erring on the side of harshness - as there are a lot of nuances to the analysis. However, the central point this was meant to pick up is that Korea owes a lot of its success to ignoring the WTO agenda, and in the opinion of the judges, this point was not made. To be honest, 3 points seems a bit much for this, so I might rejig the scores a bit.
A single sentence in the final paragraph - “The most troubled part of the world is Africa, a continent that is substantially underrepresented in global trade and capital flows” - picked up two points; one for “reference to capital flows in abstract without reference to actual capital flows” and one for “general equivocation between trade and capital flows”. I tend to operate a harsh standard on this, because I do think it’s terribly important that trade and capital issues be kept distinct. By rights, at least one of these points should be won back for getting the reason for the collapse of the talks (the G22 refusal to accept discussion of the Singapore issues), but I didn’t make any provision for that.
I awarded 2 points for “argues back and forth between general statements about trade and specific statements about currently live negotiations” (out of a possible 4); I discuss this in more detail below, because it’s the crux of my disagreement with Doug on this one.
And a final 1 point for “mentions farm subsidies in an article without mentioning textile subsidies”. This could also be seen as a fundamentally misdesigned criterion, since the original point of it was to pick up closet Europhobia. However, I went ahead and awarded it anyway, partly to demonstrate scrupulous fairness, and partly because there seems to be a pretty straightforward equivocation in the paragraph on Korea between arable farming (which is probably a silly thing to do on high, cold inhospitable land) and livestock farming (which is not necessarily such a silly thing to do in such an area; consider Welsh lamb).
Cliche points:
Both of these enormously unfair in the context of DH’s entire work, but as I say above, these points are awarded on a piece-by-piece basis because you never know what kind of use will be made of something once it’s cast on the waters. One point for “the antiglobalisation movement is better at saying what it’s against than what it’s for”, and one for “is it OK to put a Brazilian steelworker out of work to preserve an American job?”, which looks too much like a species of “keeping poor countries poor” to avoid the points.
Judges’ comments: An exceptionally harsh score under the circumstances. If I were to reduce the tariff on Korea to equal “unqualified mention of India/China” at 1 point, and allow one of the capital/goods equivocation points to be won back for getting the point right elsewhere, that would take the score to 5 Globollocks points.
Assessment
Doug does have a valid point here; it’s just that I disagree with it, or more specifically, I disagree with the wisdom of expressing it in this way. The WTO is much less virulent than the IMF or World Bank. I personally don’t take the egalitarianism of its “one-country-one-vote” convention particularly seriously, but there is room for differing opinions here too. As I indicated above, the crux of the matter for me is whether it’s possible to be in favour of free-trade in the current environment without, to coin a phrase, objectively being on the side of the whole neoliberal bill of goods.
The thing is, nobody in their right mind who understood the issues could be against free trade in goods, in principle and in good faith. I simply can’t think of any legimitate reasons why one might be against “free trade”. The trouble is, as I mentioned earlier, nobody seems to be interested in free trade at the moment. Although I don’t doubt that there are a lot of sincere and well-meaning people who support the neoliberal cause, there are also a lot of the other kind; people who are only interested in things like the extrajudicial enforcement of patents and copyrights, and in gaining treaty protection for their overseas investment strategies. Neither of these have anything to do with the interests of developing countries, and it looks very much to me as if the Evil wing of the neoliberal movement is firmly in the driving seat. (If you doubt this, consider how quickly TRIPS was passed, compared to farm subsidy and textile tariff reforms).
This makes it a lot more difficult to know what to do. Are the neoliberal institutions (broadly, the IMF, World Bank and WTO) so far gone that the only thing to be done is to campaign for their destruction, or can something be salvaged from them? There’s surprisingly little disagreement on this question when it comes to the IMF and World Bank; pretty much everyone to the left of Joseph Stiglitz or to the right of George Bush agrees that they’ve never done any good that couldn’t be done without them at much lower cost. (I’ve always liked Jude Wanniski’s advice that you could dispense with the CIA and just follow the general rule of thumb that any country where the IMF has put a program in place will have a significant anti-American movement within five years of signing). But the WTO is a much more ambiguous call. Doug (I think, after talking to Jagdish Bhagwati) is apparently of the opinion that it’s potentially an arena in which something worthwhile could be achieved.
It’s a judgement call; I’m less sure after the Cancun/Singapore debacle that there’s anything worth keeping there myself, but I could be wrong. But the reason I’m worried about the uses to which this piece is already being put is that, whether or not we want to keep the WTO, we should always, always, make sure that the bastards can smell the grapeshot while they’re holding their meetings.
The history seems plain to me; the TRIPS draft on the table in Seattle would have made it illegal for South Africa and Brazil to provide generic AIDS drugs to their populations, this draft would most likely have passed if the Seattle talks hadn’t collapsed, and the fact that the Seattle talks collapsed allowed the developing countries to develop a negotiating strategy that resulted in a much better deal. Ergo, the Seattle rioters can be thanked by a grateful world for breaking up the Seattle round of talks. I don’t necessarily condone every brick that was thrown in Seattle, nor do I necessarily agree with the agenda of everyone at the protests. But I think it can be established beyond doubt that the presence of the protestors at every WTO round has an entirely salutary effect on the debate, because it emboldens the developing countries and makes the developed negotiators nervous. It’s true that a lot of anti-WTO rhetoric is the most fearful AntiGlobollocks, and also true that the WTO cops a lot of flak from ill-informed people which should more rightly be directed at the IMF and WB. But the importance of the protestors is not so much what they say as the fact that they’re there. What we need is a WTO that’s effective enough to stop the US and EU from abandoning it in favour of a divide-and-conquer strategy of bilateral deals, but not cocky enough to push the Singapore agenda. And I’m, for the moment, not convinced that the pendulum’s swung so far that the protestors aren’t still a progressive force.
The most serious claims that altermondialists should do as to the WTO is that while “one state-one vote” looks quite fine, Orwell already warned that all animals are equals, but some are more equals.
DSW
I love all the qualifiers that open this salvo, particularly this: “I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people.” In a piece only 1,391 words long, there are a lot of things one can’t say. I guess I’ll have to say them here, even though the pay scale is even lower than TheNation.com’s.
Specific points: * “Mention of Korea “without qualification” — 3 points. This is probably harsh.” Indeed it is. I started writing about South Korea in 1988, I think, saying some rather kind things about the planning system and financial repression, much to the displeasure of some of my colleagues on the left. I guess it’s necessary to repeat things you’ve been saying for 15 years every time you bring up a topic, but it does get mighty inconvenient. But South Korea is now a rather rich country, and protecting absurd modes of farming seems a waste of resources. * Two points for “reference to capital flows in abstract without reference to actual capital flows” and one for “general equivocation between trade and capital flows” in a brief passage on Africa. If I’d been equivocating on the difference between the two flows I wouldn’t have used two words connected by an “and,” a grammatical construction that suggests different things are being invoked. And the kind of capital flows is pretty irrelevant in this context, since Africa gets little of any kind (aside from direct investment in the Nigerian oil sector). * One point for “mentions farm subsidies in an article without mentioning textile subsidies.” This is pretty damned weird, since there was absolutely no reason to mention textile subsidies in a column-length polemic. * Cliche points, which DD concedes are “enormously unfair in the context of DH’s entire work.” Well, damn, why award them then? And the specifics themselves are pretty important: 1) “One point for ‘the antiglobalisation movement is better at saying what it’s against than what it’s for.” Sorry, but this is true, and in this context, quite important. (Any cliche points awarded to the scorekeeper for calling it an “antiglobalization” movement when that’s not really an accurate label?) It makes me wonder how much time DD has spent talking to demonstrators, organizers, and even movement intellectuals. There’s almost no coherent economic analysis behind a lot of the rhetoric – no sense of what role trade should play in the world. Though it’s not as bad as it was a few years ago, there’s still a lot of instinctive autarky in the movement; people like Walden Bello, Vandana Shiva, and Ralph Nader evoke a world of local self-reliaance and small-scale production that would require several billion steps backwards in material life. 2) “[O]ne for ‘is it OK to put a Brazilian steelworker out of work to preserve an American job?” That’s pretty much the position of organized labor in the United States, which supported Bush’s steel tariffs. American unions have no sense of cross-border solidarity; they’re as unilateralist as W’s foreign policy. DD says: “nobody in their right mind who understood the issues could be against free trade in goods, in principle and in good faith.” Again, I have to wonder how much time he’s spent studying this movement. There are plenty of people who advocate “delinking” from the world economy (e.g. Samir Amin and Patrick Bond). But my argument isn’t with them so much as with the undeveloped nature of the discourse around trade within the global justice movement (a name much preferable to “antiglobalization”). But if my piece is being used by neoliberals as an ad for their cause, let me make my displeasure very clear: fuck ‘em. I think it’s wonderful that the global elite has to convene in remote places under heavy guard; I want their sense of being under siege to deepen and to disturb their sleep (if it isn’t disturbed already). But if you ask a bunch of demosntrators what is to be done, I’m afraid a lot of the answers would be rather embarrassing. And as I said in the piece, I don’t exempt myself from this criticism. But it’s now four years since Seattle; we’ve got to do better than this.
Doug Henwood wrote:
“One point for ‘the antiglobalisation movement is better at saying what it’s against than what it’s for.” Sorry, but this is true, and in this context, quite important. (Any cliche points awarded to the scorekeeper for calling it an “antiglobalization” movement when that’s not really an accurate label?) It makes me wonder how much time DD has spent talking to demonstrators, organizers, and even movement intellectuals. There’s almost no coherent economic analysis behind a lot of the rhetoric – no sense of what role trade should play in the world. Though it’s not as bad as it was a few years ago, there’s still a lot of instinctive autarky in the movement; people like Walden Bello, Vandana Shiva, and Ralph Nader evoke a world of local self-reliaance and small-scale production that would require several billion steps backwards in material life.
I’ll second that. The global justice movement, here in the US, has less a problem with giving ammunition to the enemy*, by way of self-criticism, than mollycoddling the ridiculous. By ridiculous I do not mean setting the record straight on the development of Korea, China, or India, nor do I mean sharp distinctions between trade and capital flows. By ridiculous I mean the priorities of self-sustaining localism and moral consumption, which is a common priority. Within the populism/anticorporatism there does remain some “instinctive autarky”. I still consider myself part of it (I was in DC in 2000 for the IMF/WB protests), and in no small part because of Doug’s work, but we’ve got a problem that is seriously limiting the movement. Far too few are saying anything about it on this side of the Atlantic. Considering the forum the article was posted in and the audience to which it was targeted, it would be better to measure the piece against the standards of Antiglobollocks.
Um, correction. Please sub —
“By ridiculous I mean the priorities of self-sustaining localism and moral consumption, which is a common priority.”
with —
“By ridiculous I mean the priorities of self-sustaining localism and moral consumption, which are common.”
Oy.
Really looking forward to more globBollocks watch from you!
Doug’s article has some good points but seems muddled, he seems to have been confused by some Globbollocks talking points.
Pointing out the smallness of the WTO or the “not-uniformly-consistent” nature of Anti-glob protester is to underevaluate the obscenity of the rich Western’s world latest WTO demands. The urgent priority had to be to reject them, and that is what the G22 did. A next step would be to make rich countries keep their promises, not to get confused comparing different types of protectionism…
The big problem with the Globollocks watch here, I think, is pretty much stated in the preface to the critique:
“The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying.”
That’s true of just about any short piece anywhere — any time you try to cram a nuanced technical argument into an abbreviated format(let alone a blog post) you’re going to have to oversimplify to get your point across. It might be preferable to focus less on these minutiae and more on the central thesis being presented, which would say far more about the status of the “neo-liberal” argument than a point scale for necessary minimization.
In the spirit of acknowledging the inherent shortcomings of short pieces on this sort of topic, Daniel, I was wondering if you have written, or are aware of something written by someone else, that could serve as a primer on your views on international trade and international political economy more generally? I find your short-form views compelling and would like to see more.
Am looking forward to more posts in this series.
>nobody in their right mind who understood the issues could be against free trade in goods, in principle and in good faith
Well, maybe you covered this with your good faith tag-on, but good faith is not a realistic hook to hang your country’s security on. (“In god we trust, all others pay cash.”)
The problem is to economists everything is a widget. But if I sell you oil and you sell me military hardware, there is the distinct possibility that you may at one point decide that you want, how shall we put it…, “more say” in my pricing.
Remember in GWI that the first thing the US did was shut down all the Iraqi tracking systems. Now I have no idea where Iraq sourced its electronics (it probably wasn’t the US) but some non-Iraqi government knew how it worked and told us. (I know that the Iraqi technology lagged due to incompetence not abdication, but my point is that abdication of home production would have guarenteed the result.)
In a rough and cold world, you can extend this to basic foodstuffs and medicine. As a leader you have a responsibility to your people to make sure you don’t have a security hole in these areas.
None of this applies to the First World, where say Germany could get all its food from Austrialia and all its military equipment from the US and still sleep soundly at night.
But in, say, Africa, things are a little different.
Hey Daniel, Megan and Jim Glass are going on about Social Security privitization, and I think their positions are just bizarre accounting errors. Care to comment?
Daniel, I’m afraid what this exercise proves is that your globalarky scale is a failure.
It’s main goal is to distinguish sense from nonsense. It fails to do that. Doug’s article, whatever its failings and mistakes, is better — more intelligent, more clear, more serious and more novel — than 90% of what’s written on the subject. Your scale fails to register that.
But this scale is not just useless, it’s worse than the disease. When applied, it produces text that is even more boring and head up its ass than standard globalarky.
If instead you’d written a short paragraph or two about Doug’s article stating your objections and reasons in your distinctive witty prose, it would have be 100 times more useful than this baroque exercise. And more pleasurable and more sound and more fertile.
None of this should come as a surprise. The number of attempts to divine the truth of language through numbers can be counted on one hand (the recession index . . . hmmm, maybe one finger.)
The strange thing is that a man who has devoted so much of his talent to unveiling numerical fetishism should so quickly fall under the spell of his own invention simply because it is sugared with jocularity. Is it a lingering effect of your deformation professionelle? Perhaps you have unwittingly uncovered the answer to why brilliant economists can inexplicably embrace nonsense when it’s in the form of a formula: because when it’s their formula, it makes them feel (blush, chuckle) like Newton.
Now stop this right now young man and go back to writing. Short, sweet, and to the point.
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