return to top page TRADING IN SILENCE
by
Anton Pinschoff
December 1994
Tim Lang and Colin Hines have caused ripples in the establishment press of late by publishing a book critical of free trade in general and general global agreements on trade and tariffs in particular. Their mistake was to choose a particularly sensitive time in the everyday lives of our new world order givers for the release of their book.
Their book is in four parts and its title is provocative: 'The New Protectionism'.
In Part One they confront the ideas in the free trade package and introduce sustainable trade as a rather better idea.
In Part Two they examine the existing superpower structure, the transnational corporations and the GATTastrophe itself, and then in Part Three they do a good demolition job on Their New World Order of TNCs plus GATT. So far so good. Scholarship sound. Homework well done. No real concerns with the analysis.
But then comes Part Four where Lang & Hines seek to stake out a path through the thicket to a bright new world. Instead they escape far beyond the bounds of their competence. In the final chapter, the authors look back from the year 2000 over the successful transition to a sane humane ecological world of 'Sustainable Trade' from the crazy Hyper-expansionist TNC world of 'Free Trade' they dissected earlier on. The tone is naively optimistic with little concern for the sheer collosal momentum towards power giantism grinding us all into the dust, simply to satisfy the need for so much uninteresting surplus value.
As a literary device, looking back in contentment is an old trick. The German economist, Silvio Gesell, used it with devastating effect in 1906, for instance, in 'The New Economic Order'. Here we read the fictional views of fifteen honest citizens...from the local shopkeeper to the global speculator and the theorists on wages and economic crises...after the introduction of his Free Land and Free Money. And I mention this because it is here, where Gesell shines his searchlight, that our authors have their blind spot...something that would not have come as any surprise to Gesell who later commented on the difficulty of collecting 'among the millions of the German population a dozen persons for a serious discussion on money, capital formation and growth'.
'There will be a fading of the '1980's style demands for lower interest rates', intone Lang and Hines in their 'Fantastic Epilogue'. What? Shall we get even higher rates, when the only thing we ever needed was getting interest rates down to minus six or maybe minus twelve?
But be that as it may, Lang & Hines have at least dared to stand up and be counted, insisting that the system is wrong and needs to be turned around to serving our real needs, even while turning a blind eye to the power problem standing in the way.
At the end of the book, the authors present a ten point New Protectionist Agenda. This can be boiled down to the first two:
(1) getting away from global towards regional and local economies;
(2) building and supporting human communities as local power bases for all decisions.What more could we wish? Paradise on earth would be the result, if only we could wish away the existing elitist dominant myth which regards humanity as just another factor of production of surplus value, not for our own use, but for the great pie in the sky where the jet set nibbles.
The trouble is that the book ignores the important questions. What are the dynamics of change; how many divisions will be mobilised to stop it; how much chaos will be created to stimulate the demand for insurance against chaos; how many micro-fascists will be encouraged to discredit micro-nations in embryo providing moral anchor points within the dominant mega-states? Anonymous monopolists are daily checkmating both the citizen and the state using our disembodied monetary system, ie. our own alienated human energy, as their private Golden Calf.
Unfortunately humble peasants in the wilds of Brittany cannot afford to disregard reality this way. So they shrug and ask who will read this book and how will it lead to a change when the bulldozers are all around us and farmers are being pushed willy nilly into suicidal expansionism just to survive and because the bank flatters them with such huge debts.Whom do the authors think they are protecting by their silence on The Money Power as the real root of power? They seem, for the sake of an admirable academic exercise, to be ignoring the sheer colossal momentum towards monetarising and monopolising of almost everything on the planet behind a defensive shield of armed force, raised in the name of unitary states, freedom, democracy and security...and delivering only the first.
The reality is that nobody can stop this roller-coaster destruction just yet. The megastate which itself organises the protection racket clearly cannot deliver us from this evil, so its powers would best be reclaimed by the local people from whence they came, including all fiscal and monetary powers needed to realise the changes envisaged by Lang & Hines.
Useful as a book on New Trade might be, much more potent would be a book on Negative Interest Monetary Systems (NIMs), needing no central control and conceived to permit people and peoples to undercut the anonymous dictators of the command economy. The system was tried and tested and the winds of progress blew for 18 months from 1932 to 1934 when most of the local authorities of Tirol and Bavaria were on the point of adopting the system and held their congress in Vienna instead of deep in the forest. The experiment was forgotten in the ensuing turmoil but almost resulted in nobody needing a dictatorship to solve their problems ever again. All that is another story, more of which later, when the world discovers local currencies as means of struggle.
Meanwhile there are two things we can do. We can dream of better days, and we can try to unravel the mystery of how they got all that power together in the first place, penny by penny, centime by centime, one goose step at a time.
Once we understand the problem, perhaps, like Moses, we can move towards a solution.
And if you don't know how Moses did it, then look it up. Exodus 32.
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