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36 | Tue PhıLosorny or Eco-Porrrics
which primarily represent companies and investors. ‘These do not bear
responsibility even on paper, unlike governments, to local societies —
perhaps only to their stockholders.
‘The principle of the free movement of capital, since it has been
prevailing consistently in international relations, goes together with the
grave limitation of the principle of public freedom and deprives local
societies of the opportunity for self-defence. The restructuring of the
power dynamic is evidenced by the fact that even treaties among states
are mostly about the removal of obstacles from the path of free trade.
Governments stand shoulder to shoulder in seeking the favour of
multinational corporations and financial investors through depriving
themselves of what little influence they have left over the regulation of
economic activity. They resign their basic duties towards their citizens:
they give up their right to make demands regarding healthcare, security
and work protection of the international companies arriving in their
country. If by chance they do, they authorise the latter to demand
compensation for their lost profit at the taxpayers’ expense. ‘They go so
far as to remove such conflicts from the jurisdiction of the ordinary
courts and to entrust special international commercial tribunals with
the protection of the rights of investors.
The left-wing anti-globalisation movements have also become
enthusiastic though involuntary advocates of multinational capital in
our times when they engage in antinationalist propaganda with vast
media support. Perhaps they do not notice that while they work on
discrediting and depriving of rights the nation states they accuse of
xenophobia and chauvinism, they are in actual fact smoothing the way
of the international investors and business empires.
‘The theory of the comparative advantages arising from the system
of free trade was developed in the early nineteenth century and perhaps
this is the greatest problem with it. For David Ricardo still had right to
assume that every country would benefit from concentrating on the
product it could produce most efficiently. For the sources of efficiency
— those comparative advantages — were, in his time, the resources of
nature, deemed to be constant, and local knowledge (technology and
work culture). His theory cannot be applied if efficiency depends
predominantly on conditions no longer tied to place, such as
technological know-how and the investment of capital. He did not
reckon with the depletion of raw materials in the wake of the economy
of the ruthless exploitation of nature either. Yet the current global
economic processes are no longer determined by the competition of