“… exploitation, long familiar in the foreign and domestic colonialism of modern nations, has now become “the global economy,’ which is the property of a few supranational corporations. The economic theory used to justify the global economy in its ‘free market’ version is, again, perfectly groundless and sentimental. The idea is that what is good for corporations will sooner or later – though not of course immediately – be good for everybody.
That sentimentality is based, in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition that the great corporations, in ‘freely’ competing with one another for raw materials, labor, and market share, will drive each other indefinitely, not only toward greater ‘efficiencies’ of manufacture, but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result, all the world’s people will be economically secure – in the future. It would be had to object to such a proposition if only it were true.
But one knows, in the first place, that ‘efficiency’ in manufature always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with machines.
In the second place, the ‘law of competition’ does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the ‘free market’ without restraint, will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.
In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap long distance transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale. And cheap long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities, for the single commodity, that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the ‘efficiency’ of such a system, its result (and, I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence. It destroys the economic security that it promises to make.”
