NAFTA & Global Capitalist Crisis - 21 Years On

[Oscar]

Global Capitalist Crisis and the North American Free Trade Agreement: Reflections 21 Years On

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Thursday, 04 June 2015 00:00 By William I. Robinson, Truthout | News Analysis

Recent US Senate approval won by President Obama for "fast-track" negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal has thrust "free trade" and capitalist globalization again into the headlines. Often referred to as "NAFTA on steroids," the TPP is but the latest in more than two decades of "free trade" agreements that have helped open up the world to transnational corporate plunder.

If we want to understand such deals we would do well to reflect on the first of these, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which went into effect in January 1994. We cannot understand NAFTA without understanding the larger picture of which NAFTA and the TPP form part: the new system of global capitalism and the crisis of that system.

NAFTA, and by extension, capitalist globalization, were outcomes of the last great crisis of world capitalism, that of the 1970s. Emergent transnational capital responded to that crisis by "going global," which paved the way for NAFTA.

To understand NAFTA and the TPP, we must grasp four novel features of world capitalism in this epoch of globalization:

1. The rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into a new globalized production and financial system. NAFTA served as a midwife for Mexico's integration into this system;

2. The appearance of a new transnational capitalist class, a class group grounded in the new global control over national circuits of accumulation. NAFTA and Mexico's globalization involved the rise of a powerful group of Mexican capitalists, epitomized by Carlos Slim, currently the richest man in the world. These emergent transnationally oriented Mexican elites led the charge in Mexico's globalization and used NAFTA to join the ranks of the transnational capitalist class.

3. The rise of transnational state apparatuses, comprised of dense networks of nation-states and supranational and transnational institutions that promote transnational over national accumulation in each country and act as the collective authority of the transnational capitalist class - as the new global ruling class. NAFTA was drawn up and imposed on the peoples of North America by this transnational state;

4. The appearance of novel relations of inequality and domination in global society, including the spread of new transnational class inequalities, the farcical wars on drugs and terrorism, as well as the wars on immigrants, youth "gangs" and social movements, all part and parcel of capitalist globalization in North America and elsewhere.

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