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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
