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leftpress · 7 years

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I Was A Teenage Anarchist And Now I’m A Mid-Thirties Anarchist

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 | MAGPIE

Fifteen years ago today, on February 2nd, 2002, I became an anarchist. I was nineteen, living in NYC, and I attended the World Economic Forum protests. I knew the anarchists by reputation only — they wore all black and they smashed things. They were going to wear masks in defiance of NYC’s anti-mask laws. I wanted to know why, so I approached a man with his face obscured by a black bandanna.

“What’s anarchism?” I asked.

“Well, we hate capitalism and the state.” He was very forthcoming, which I appreciated.

“What do you all do about it?”

“We build up alternative institutions without hierarchy while attacking and interfering with the existing, oppressive ones we despise.”

“Oh,” I said. I pondered this for a moment, but honestly only a moment. “Do you have an extra mask?”

He did, and he gave it to me. Simple as that, I became an anarchist.

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A few months later, I dropped out of college to ride freight trains and go to protests — it was the style at the time, you understand. We broke into abandoned houses to sleep in puppy piles and we faced overt surveillance from the feds while we met in public parks to plot zombies-against-war marches. We ate trash and shoplifted and loved one another fiercely and everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The anthem of that summer was the album Reinventing Axl Rose by Against Me. After we were mass-arrested in DC, all of us John Does who refused to identify ourselves to police sang “Baby I’m An Anarchist” at the top of our lungs to irritate our captors and keep our spirits high as we resisted being separated, named, and charged by the system.

Some years later, the woman who wrote that album wrote another song, “I Was A Teenage Anarchist.” Well, Laura Jane Grace, so was I. Fifteen years later, I still am.

* * *

My politics have changed dramatically in the intervening almost-half-my-life, to be sure. But the core of it remains the same: I desire a world without coercive hierarchy and I believe the way to reach for that world is by individually and collectively acting directly on our desires and enabling others to do the same.

There’s some cliche I heard as a kid: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you’ve got no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you’ve got no brain.” If that’s true, I’m the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow both because I ain’t either and never have been. But the core idea — that your politics settle away from radicalism as you age — is fascinating. It’s possible that it’s happening to me, but on a different scale than liberal/conservative.

Throughout most of my twenties, I identified more with green anarchism than red: that is to say, my focus was ecology and I’d have been more likely to call myself an individualist anarchist than an anarchist communist though I likely would have told you that was a false dichotomy. Now, I suppose, I’m on the other side of that still-false dichotomy. I swapped out the green-and-black enamel star on my black hoodie for a red-and-black enamel star on my black dress coat.

I have a love for chaos, still, that will never leave me. But I’m also a lot more excited about organization.

* * *

I don’t really know what teenage anarchist me would make of mid-thirties anarchist me. I do a lot of things I thought I’d never do: I work for money and shop at box stores and pay my taxes. I prefer owning nice things when I can. I avoid breaking the law unless the law needs breaking. This last November I had to hire people to help me make buttons — though I tied my own wage to theirs and donated any profits above labor costs to avoid exploiting anyone. I write about politics more often than I go into the streets. I hang out with liberals and I don’t, by default, distrust people who don’t circle their A’s. I understand the value of compromise, in personal relationships and political coalitions both.

But I don’t really care what teenage anarchist me would think, if I’m being honest. I’m not an anarchist for the sake of old-me. I’m not an anarchist simply out of habit, but out of deep and ever-deepening conviction.

While on the surface, there are things about me that have calmed down, anti-authoritarianism and a pro-collective spirit have sunk deeper into me over the years. The difference between teenage anarchist me and adult anarchist me is the difference between the goth garb I wore in high school and the one I wear now: as a teenager, I was trying on a persona and a costume. As an adult, it’s that I’ve found the clothes and ideas that suit me.

Rebellion has taken hold of my heart. It is no longer a costume, nor a poise. I’m not trying to impress anyone anymore by how radical I am. It’s just that, at this point, I simply cannot understand the idea that someone else would be in charge of me. I simply cannot understand that one would attempt to wield economic or political power over others.

* * *

I assume I’m in it for life at this point, but I’m no longer going to say I’m certain. That is to say, I no longer tell myself I’m certain in order to cement the idea in.

I think a lot of people get tattoos related to political identity in order to keep future-them from betraying that identity — veganism, straight edge, anarchism, what-have-you. It’s a precarious sort of “certainty,” and we all know drunks who laugh about their straight edge tattoos. Maybe one day I’ll laugh about the word “sedition” tattooed across my knuckles. I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

* * *

I can’t always understand or empathize with people for whom anarchism was a phase. I try, but it’s not easy.

It’s possible that I got lucky, in that I wasn’t exposed to anarchism socially but came upon it politically. I was never a punk in high school, just a weirdo, so I was never exposed to anarchism through music or through social pressure. I chose anarchism after flirting noncommittally first with libertarianism (but quickly grew aware that corporations would run everything) and then social democracy and the green party (but the spark just wasn’t there).

I’ve found, however, that fewer people “sell out” or abandon anarchy altogether than I assumed when I was younger. I’ve found that most people don’t embrace a different political framework (state communism or liberalism, let’s say) as much as they step back from political engagement. The only part that was a “phase” for most people was the active involvement in protests and their affiliated social circles. Which makes sense to me: we’ve all got our lives to lead.

When I was nineteen, I was an anarchist and that was all I was and it consumed my entire being. I’m thirty-four now, and I’m also a writer and a geek and a musician and a thousand other things. I’m capable of getting as much emotional fulfillment from learning to craft a short story as I am from organizing a demonstration. I have as many friends who write novels or make weird costumes as I do friends who live and breath political change.

That, more than anything, is to what I attribute my ability to stay in the game to the degree that I’ve been able to. Stepping outside the A-team social scene, outside the echo chamber, is what keeps me grounded. Of course, sci-fi nerd culture is its own echo chamber too, because echo chambers are what humans make when we hang out with other humans — we’re social creatures, and our ideas influence one another’s. It’s just good to get out of one chamber and into another for awhile.

* * *

That first summer was magic. I mean that literally. Never before had I experienced such emotion, nor such power. We could do anything. We were going to change the world.

We were wrong, of course, and though we had a hand in stopping the neoliberal consensus of free trade, the world went on largely as it did before we took our queer bodies to the wheel.

But we were right, too. We changed our own worlds, each of us. We were stubborn, pretentious little shits who thought we could do anything we wanted and that the world owed us to change… and we were right on both counts and it worked. For long moments at a time, we became free.

I’ve got no regrets about teenage anarchist me. I did things I wouldn’t do now and I also accumulated all the trauma I’m still reeling from, but I’m not sorry. The only regret I’ll cop to is that one time, in Oakland all those years ago, after our freight-trains-verus-hitchhiking race down the coast from Portland, when everyone was giving one another stick-and-poke tattoos that said “up the punx” in cursive on our necks behind our ears… my only regret is that I should have gotten that tattoo. I didn’t, because I thought I might regret it.

* * *

I don’t want to be a rebel anymore. I feel older than I should, already, and I’ve got all the conflict trauma I need. I don’t want to be outside of society and I try not to be when I can. I just want to write novels and make jewelry and love my friends.

But I can’t stand to live in a world of oppression and not do anything about it. I can’t stand to be ruled by capitalism, the state, or patriarchy. I can’t stand my complicity in a white supremacist, colonialist society. I can’t stand to have a boot on my neck or my boot on someone else’s.

Some of my friends of all ages are in it for the fight, and I respect that, and I used to be. Me, I just want to win already. I want to live in comparative peace in a world of horizontalism where it doesn’t make me a rebel to think that I’m the one who is in charge of me.

Until that day, though, I guess I’m a rebel still.

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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Eight lessons for the rest of the continent

Left: Doctor in a mask in South Africa. Top right: Someone drinking a cup of tea in South Africa. Bottom right: Two women walking in South Africa

South Africa leads this continent in many ways. Right now, it is poised to lead Africa into the next, most dangerous phase of the pandemic, as the country braces itself for a dramatic rise in infections that will almost certainly overwhelm its relatively well-resourced healthcare system.

Here are eight things it can teach the rest of Africa:

1) Keep the tea rooms clean

No, it is not a joke. Governments, and medical teams, still need to focus a lot more on hygiene.

The most dangerous place in a clinic is considered the tea room

Instead of wasting time and money – as many experts now see it – on acquiring expensive but relatively ineffective ventilators, the evidence from South African hospitals already grappling with the virus points to the need for vastly improved hygiene protocols.

Several major hospitals have already been forced to shut after becoming hot spots for the virus.

Doctors are warning that medical staff continue to congregate in tea rooms, removing their masks, passing mobile phones to each other, and undermining all the work they do on the wards.

“The most dangerous place in a clinic is undoubtedly the tea room. We’re trying to get that message out,” said Doctor Tom Boyles, an infectious disease specialist in Johannesburg.

2) Fast tests – or no tests

After a promising start, South Africa is now struggling, woefully, with its testing.

It has built up a huge backlog – “tens of thousands” according to several sources – at its laboratories, which is now undermining the validity of the entire testing process.

It is taking 14 days to get the results of Covid-19 tests

“How do we prioritise limited resources?” asked Prof Shabir Madhi, a prominent vaccine expert, who said South Africa’s likely testing limit – because of financial and logistical constraints – would stay at about 20,000 per day.

An impressive number, perhaps, but of no real use, doctors insist, unless the results of those tests can reliably be produced within, ideally, 24 hours.

Much longer than that and an infected person will either have spread the virus to too many others to trace properly, or they will already be in hospital, or they will have passed the point of serious risk for infecting others.

Story continues

“Currently the turnaround time for Covid tests is around 14 days in most places, so that basically means it’s a complete waste of time,” said Dr Boyles.

The same concerns apply to South Africa’s much-hailed community screening and testing programme which, experts say, has outlived its usefulness, since the virus has now spread far beyond the capacity of the country’s large team of community health workers to track with any effectiveness.

Banner image reading ‘more about coronavirus’

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“The timeline renders it meaningless and compromises the care that should be occurring in hospitals,” according to Prof Madhi, who said it was vital that the testing system be aimed, as efficiently as possible, at hospitals, medical staff and those at most risk.

But there are signs of a political battle delaying these changes, with officials reportedly resisting calls for older tests to be simply thrown away.

3) It is not old age, it is obesity

Much has been made of the fact that Africa has an unusually young population, and, indeed, that may yet help to mitigate the impact of the virus here.

But the evidence from several South African hospitals already suggests that alarmingly high levels of obesity – along with hypertension and diabetes – in younger Covid-19 patients are linked to many fatalities.

More than half of all South Africans are now considered medically overweight

It is believed that as many South Africans suffer from hypertension and diabetes as from HIV – some seven million people. That is one in eight of the population. Some of them are undiagnosed.

Two-thirds of coronavirus deaths in South Africa so far are among people aged under 65, according to Prof Madhi.

“Obesity is a big issue, along with hypertension and diabetes,” he said.

Although demographic differences make it hard to make direct comparisons between countries, over half of younger South Africans who are dying from Covid-19 have some other illness – roughly twice the rate seen in Europe.

4) Exposure isn’t always exposure

A busy antenatal clinic in Johannesburg recently closed down following reports that one member of staff had been exposed to a coronavirus patient. Twelve nurses were sent home and told to self-isolate.

Experts say the fear factor about coronavirus needs to be addressed

The move has been quietly condemned by many doctors who see it as evidence of a wider climate of unnecessary fear and over-caution among medical staff which is in danger of crippling the country’s health system and undermining its fight against the virus.

“There needs to be clear guidance on what sort exposure is significant. We have not adequately demystified this virus,” said Prof Madhi, who stressed that a person needed to spend 15 minutes or more in close proximity to a confirmed case to be considered at serious risk of infection.

Unions have been understandably robust in seeking to protect their members and to raise concerns where personal protection equipment (PPE) has been lacking.

“The investment in ventilators was a huge waste”https://ift.tt/2HfCbR7;, Source: Prof Shabir Madhi, Source description: Vaccine expert, Image: Shabir Madhi

But several medical workers told me that tougher discipline was needed to enforce hygiene protocols among staff – along with better education and training about managing risk.

“Fear is the predominant factor. Morale is definitely low,” said one hospital doctor, on condition of anonymity.

“But you also find people who are looking to get quarantined, who are very happy to take a two-week paid holiday” in self-isolation.

5) The devil is in the detail

This week South Africa announced that religious groups could resume worship in gatherings of no more than 50 people.

The move was clearly a political concession by a government under pressure to ease lockdown restrictions and that understands that to retain public trust over the longer-term it must show signs of give and take.

During the lockdown churches have been empty and services have gone online

But the decision carries significant risks. Religious gatherings – often attracting older people – are known globally to be hot spots for spreading the virus. By choosing to ignore that fact, the government may be undercutting its own messaging.

“It undermines any pretence that the regulations are rules are science-based,” said political scientist and commentator Richard Calland.

One option for the government might have been to bar anyone over 65 from attending a religious service. Instead it has told religious leaders to implement strict social-distancing and hygiene policies in their churches and mosques.

Will they comply?

All non-authoritarian governments eventually have to rely on the public’s willingness to obey, not just the broad spirit of any regulations, but – as the tea room troubles indicate – the granular detail of clean prayer mats, no-contact services and no more than one person for every 2.5 sq m (about 26 sq ft) of church hall.

6) Winning the peace

South Africa’s official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has been struggling to make itself heard during the lockdown.

A crisis of this magnitude inevitably pushes opposition parties to the sidelines and, one could argue, they would do well to stay there.

Coronavirus in Africa:

When the DA has sought to attract attention to itself, it has shown signs of flip-flopping on policy.

“They should be playing a much longer game, looking to win the peace, not the war,” said Mr Calland, citing the example of Clement Atlee, who swept to power in the UK, defeating Winston Churchill in the immediate aftermath of World War Two.

President Ramaphosa’s political rivals will seek to blame him for the inevitable rise in infections

The much smaller, populist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has already indicated how it plans to win political capital from the crisis, by opposing any easing of the lockdown (its racialised antipathy to foreign investment and to big business freeing it from serious concern about the economic impact).

It will presumably seek to blame President Cyril Ramaphosa for the inevitable rise in infections and deaths.

Mr Ramaphosa’s own enemies within the governing African National Congress (ANC) – currently silenced – may well make common cause with the EFF on that issue.

The blame game will be a brutal one across the continent. Will the power of incumbency – such an important factor in African politics and beyond – prove to be a strength or a weakness with Covid-19?

7) Bring the public with you

When South Africa banned the sale of alcohol during the lockdown, many people accepted it as a harsh, but perhaps necessary step to limit domestic abuse, prevent violence, and thus keep hospital beds free for coronavirus patients.

“The ban is playing into the hands of powerful criminal syndicates controlling contraband cigarettes, and is costing the government a fortune in lost tax revenues”https://ift.tt/2HfCbR7;, Source: Andrew Harding, Source description: BBC News Africa correspondent, Image: Someone breaking a cigarette in half

But over time, frustration – with the ban, and with the brutal and haphazard enforcement of it – has grown and the clampdown is now set to be partly lifted. So far so good.

But in tandem with the alcohol ban, South Africa put a stop to all cigarettes sales too. And that will remain in force indefinitely.

The government insists its decision is based on scientific evidence, but few people seem to believe that is what is really guiding ministers. Instead many suspect that officials are using the lockdown as cover to introduce their own pet projects.

The ban is playing into the hands of powerful criminal syndicates controlling contraband cigarettes, and is costing the government a fortune in lost tax revenues.

But perhaps more importantly, it is undermining the credibility of the lockdown regulations themselves – making compliance, as the country moves to ease some restrictions on movement, less likely.

8) Keeping it simple

For weeks, it seemed, everyone was talking about finding and building ventilators. But the experience of frontline doctors in Cape Town has already shown that simpler, cheaper and less-intrusive devices can play a far more important role.

Countries need to plan according to their limited resources.

With Covid-19 breathing can become difficult and the lungs get inflamed

“The investment in ventilators was a huge waste,” said Prof Madhi, who, like colleagues in Cape Town, stressed the importance of high-flow nasal oxygen machines that work more efficiently than more traditional oxygen masks.

He said he had been “raising the alarm” about the need to improve South Africa’s supply of oxygen “for about six weeks”.

Hospitals in Cape Town are also following the international example of “proning” – lying patients face down in order to improve oxygen supply to their lungs.

The principal of looking for simpler solutions applies to staffing too, with many doctors urging the health authorities to focus on bringing final-year medical students, and perhaps retired staff, into an overstretched system, rather than importing expensive foreign doctors from places like Cuba.

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alamante · 6 years

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Trump is not the destroyer of order and harmony, but the product of a corrupt and broken system.

President Donald Trump’s trade agenda is a corrupt, chaotic mess.

He made trade concessions to China after its government agreed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a Trump-branded resort. He announced a modest trade enforcement action on steel and aluminum and declared it a “trade war” ― something both “good” and “easy to win.” He then shifted his sights in this combat from China to Canada without any apparent rationale. The president has even threatened Ecuador’s economy with crippling sanctions if its government offered public support for breastfeeding.

As with so many Trump debacles, his bluster creates an appearance of radicalism — a dramatic break with a stable and happy consensus. Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell has lamented that he is discarding more than 300 years of settled economic knowledge. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has been more modest, accusing Trump of jeopardizing a free trade system that dates back to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It’s easy to forget that just before Trump’s election, elite Washington was rethinking the approach to free trade and globalization that the United States had taken since the 1990s. Centrist think tanks held major conferences calling to restructure the U.S. relationship with China. Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and even libertarian experts at the Cato Institute agreed there were serious problems with the way trade agreements were enforced.

Part of the trouble is that Trump is not pursuing a coherent and consistent trade strategy. On some matters, he’s hard to distinguish from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, while on others, he does break with the recent past. But even here Trump is not the destroyer of order and harmony, but the product of a corrupt and broken system.

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To understand what’s going on and where it went wrong we need to start at the beginning. What economists are accustomed to describing as “free trade” or “globalization” has another, less flattering name: colonialism.

Comparative Advantage And Exploitation

Human beings have been trading across political borders for as long as human beings have recorded their activity. But free trade in the modern sense was the conceptual innovation of David Ricardo, a brilliant 19th-century British economist. In his 1817 magnum opus ”On The Principles Of Political Economy And Taxation,” Ricardo laid out the theory of comparative advantage: If every country focused on producing what it made best, and then traded with other countries that did the same, everybody everywhere would get to enjoy the best of everything. In the process, Ricardo argued, every country would become richer this way than it would if it tried to produce everything at home by itself.

To illustrate the point, Ricardo presented a thought experiment in which two countries, Britain and Portugal, produced just two commodities ― wine and cloth. In the 19th century, Portugal was famous for its wine, while European nobility coveted fine British textiles. Imports of good Portuguese wine were tough on British winemakers, and if the British government wanted to protect its domestic wineries, it could put up tariffs against Portuguese wine, making the foreign stuff more expensive in British stores. And that could be just fine for winemakers.

But there are only so many workers. Someone who spends the day smashing grapes can’t devote that same time to running a loom. Tariffs couldn’t change the root problems with the British wine business ― the soil and climate on a rocky semi-arctic island just weren’t good for grapes. As a result, propping up the inefficient British wine industry would sap resources from its much more productive textile operations. This waste would register as lower overall production of both wine and cloth. And perhaps worst of all, it would mean British drinkers would have to settle for their own lousy wine.

The obvious solution was for politicians to keep out of the way and let people do what they would naturally do absent government meddling ― trade freely.

“Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each,” Ricardo wrote. “This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole.”

Ricardo was onto something. But he took an awful lot for granted to make his point. He didn’t have much to say, for instance, about how the British textile business actually operated. In the real world, England’s spinning and weaving factories relied on cotton from India and the United States. This cotton was cheap ― and the British factories, by extension, so wonderfully efficient ― because plantation owners relied on slave labor and violent exploitation to keep down costs.

By focusing on Ricardo’s abstract trade model, economists and policymakers could be lulled into understanding these acts of violent subjugation as components of an impartial, balanced system. Ricardo converted a vast array of political choices ― including the very existence of the British Empire and American slavery ― into what looked like a simple, mathematical truth: More trade equals greater prosperity. But the 19th-century mantra of “free trade!” was, among other things, a euphemism for enriching slaveowners.

Free trade rhetoric almost always serves a magical function: It erases ugly, violent political realities and replaces them with clean, natural progress.

Free trade rhetoric almost always serves a magical function: It erases ugly, violent political realities and replaces them with clean, natural progress. To its evangelists, free trade isn’t just a way to maximize profits and production. It offers a path to the elimination of human evil. New Deal luminary Cordell Hull believed free trade offered a cooperative foundation for the prevention of war, while libertarian high priest Milton Friedman believed it cleared the way for political rights like freedom of speech and religion.

Krugman describes “liberalized trade” as the key to an “international alliance” against “authoritarian politics,” while House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) champions it as a way to advance “rule of law,” “women’s rights” and “democracy.”

And yet history shows no clear pattern between tariff levels and freedom, war, democracy or autocracy. Ryan’s enthusiasm, for instance, was issued in support of a 2004 U.S. free trade agreement with the Kingdom of Bahrain. In 2017, according to the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch, the government of Bahrain shut down the country’s only independent newspaper and held its most prominent human rights activist in prison.

In the 19th century, “free trade” was a doctrine that called for limiting trade barriers between European imperial powers as they plundered the rest of the world. When this system collapsed in World War I, the ensuing destruction on the European continent created a profound sense of nostalgia for the prewar order and the Ricardian ideals it had fostered. Over the following decade, heads of state and diplomats made herculean efforts to re-establish the collapsed trading regime. But they were frustrated by outbursts of violence, like the French invasion of the Ruhr, Germany, in 1923; political instability, like the collapse of the Weimar Republic; and speculative financial implosion, like the stock market crash of 1929.

Tariffs were largely incidental to this story, entering late in the game as a decade of dysfunction descended into the Great Depression. The United States passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, raising tariffs on roughly 20,000 goods. In 1931, the British government raised a tariff of its own and devalued the pound. Tit-for-tat reprisals followed among other nations. These prevented the re-establishment of the lost Golden Age at the Twilight of European Empire, but they did not cause the Great Depression. The system had already come undone.

It was time for new thinking. And eventually, an economist entered the world stage with the intellectual firepower to overthrew Ricardo.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump, surrounded by business leaders and administration officials, prepares to sign a memorandum on intellectual property tariffs on high-tech goods from China, at the White House in Washington, U.S. March 22, 2018.

John Maynard Keynes grew up an ardent free trader, viewing the unimpeded movement of goods “almost as a part of the moral law.” But the war and the Depression changed his mind. Though he still cherished the free international exchange of “ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, [and] travel,” technological advances seemed to have left many of Ricardo’s observations obsolete. True, climate and culture played some role ― the British were never going to be great winemakers. But such products were tangential to an industrial order dominated by heavy manufacturing. You could make a car anywhere. The advantages of national specialization were fading.

“Most modern mass-production processes can be performed in most countries and climates with almost equal efficiency,” Keynes noted in a 1933 essay. There would be costs for any nation that wished to make the lion’s share of its economy a domestic concern. But innovation had dramatically reduced the cost of abandoning free trade. National self-sufficiency, he wrote, was fast “becoming a luxury which we can afford if we happen to want it.”

And Keynes believed there might very well be reasons to want it. “It does not now seem obvious,” he wrote in 1933, “that the penetration of a country’s economic structure by the resources and the influence of foreign capitalists, that a close dependence of our own economic life on the fluctuating economic policies of foreign countries, are safeguards and assurances of international peace.”

“At any rate,” he continued, “the age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.”

Keynes elaborated on these ideas in his most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which he believed offered national governments the tools they needed to take care of their domestic economies without preying on their neighbors. He urged readers to think of his work as a kind of handbook for alternatives to the economic strategies of imperialism. If countries effectively managed their internal demand, they would not need to pillage resources, exploit foreign workers or undercut overseas markets to improve domestic prosperity.

Many of Keynes’ economic tactics were becoming commonplace by the late 1930s, as governments resorted to deficit spending to bring countries out of the Depression and financial regulation to mitigate the cataclysmic boom-and-bust cycles of Wall Street and London. For domestic policymakers around the world, Keynes was king.

Efforts to integrate these domestic policy innovations into a global trading system, however, were quickly subsumed by the Cold War. In the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, tariffs, subsidies and currency maneuvers became tactical methods used to win allies and punish enemies.

But the language of “free trade” and its supposed liberationist potential persisted as the new great powers of the 20th century grappled with the rights and demands of newly formed nations emerging from colonial rule. By the late 1970s, the apartheid government in South Africa had become a focal point for an intellectual and political dispute with global implications.

Free Market Support For Apartheid

South Africa was both a U.S. ally against the Soviet Union and a tremendous profit center for more than 160 American corporations, including General Electric, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Profit margins were incredible ― more than double what U.S. firms could earn on a typical international investment.

The key to all this was cheap labor. The nation’s black population could not form labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, go on strike, move or vote. Apartheid officials had administered an estimated 850,000 whippings against the black population between 1954 and 1964 alone to keep demands for better treatment in check, according to Africa Today, an academic journal published by Indiana University. Colonialism had shed its 19th-century European military uniform for a modern American business suit.

The appalling conditions for the South African people led American anti-apartheid activists to call for corporations and investors to pull money and resources out of South Africa until the apartheid government had been replaced by a democratic order. As the divestment movement gained momentum on college campuses, a group of neoliberal lawyers and economists began advancing arguments explicitly attacking the prospect of democracy in South Africa on the grounds that democratic politics would be incompatible with free markets and free trade.

Wesleyan College historian Quinn Slobodian details this project in Globalists: The End Of Empire And The Birth Of Neoliberalism. The most prominent anti-democracy advocate of the era was Milton Friedman, who argued that universal suffrage in South Africa would be “a system of highly-weighted voting in which special interests have far greater roles to play than does the general interest.” It was critical not to let the “political market” interfere with the economic market. As with Ricardo, the abuses on the ground evaporated into airy economic theory.

By the 1980s these arguments were too gauche to win much favor in American politics. And so President Ronald Reagan and a crop of future Republican power brokers including Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff and Jeff Flake advanced a modified version: The best way to reform the apartheid government was not to cut off its money but through the magic of free trade.

Many U.S. companies had agreed to a set of corporate responsibility principles outlined by Philadelphia pastor and General Motors Director Leon Sullivan that called for equal treatment of black and white workers. Additional U.S. investment, these voices argued, would bring American values and freedoms to South African workers and lead to political reform.

“The American companies pulling out who have abided by the Sullivan Principles, did much good for the black population there,” Flake told the Utah State Senate in 1987, while working as a lobbyist for a Namibian mining company with substantial South African operations. “Since 1977 they have contributed more than $140 million to black education, to social programs, to housing, and when our corporations pull out and these sanctions are opposed, it leaves these South African subsidiaries to take up ownership who are not obliged to follow the Sullivan Principles, and who would just as soon make a profit.”

By the time Flake was testifying, however, the free traders had essentially lost the battle on apartheid. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, passed into law over Reagan’s veto, imposed economic sanctions against the country that weren’t lifted until the apartheid government had put in place a series of reforms, including Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

The experience of American corporations in South Africa wasn’t far from the minds of leading neoliberal intellectuals as the Cold War drew to a close, and international negotiators began developing the treaties that would create The World Trade Organization. As Slobodian notes, these agreements were intended to control emerging democracies and prevent them from Keynesian economic policies that would privilege the rights of their citizens over the interests of American and European capital.

By eliminating tariff barriers with nations that had poor labor standards and a record of human rights abuses, these trade pacts encouraged U.S. companies to shift domestic jobs to countries where labor was cheap. While most of the agreements paid lip service to labor rights, these provisions were only rarely enforced in practice. In countries like Guatemala and Colombia where the U.S. eventually brought North American Free Trade Agreement-style agreements, dozens of union leaders were murdered every year after free trade agreements were signed, most of them unpunished. If new factory jobs in the developing world were designed to lift people out of extreme poverty, there were limits to the new system’s generosity, as demonstrated by the deaths of 1,100 workers in a Bangladesh factory making garments for U.S. retailers in 2013.

But though WTO architects continued to use the language of “free trade,” they had era had left Ricardo’s idea of free trade behind. They weren’t just talking about tariffs anymore. They wanted to reach across national borders and into the domestic political life of post-colonial nations to block potential labor, environmental and consumer protection rules before they were written while guaranteeing broad rights to international investors. The same was true for a new slate of trade pacts former President Bill Clinton began signing into law beginning with NAFTA. These rules had little or nothing to do with Ricardo’s ideas about comparative advantage. They weren’t based on natural differences in climate, culture or expertise. They were an attempt to construct an international law that favored a particular brand of inegalitarian politics.

The spirit of this new era of globalization was most obvious in the realm of intellectual property ― an arcane, technical arena with life and death implications for millions of people. Once again, South Africa became the epicenter of a global economic conflict.

The WTO And The AIDS Crisis

When Nelson Mandela’s government was elected in 1994, the HIV rate in South Africa was spiraling out of control, with roughly 10 percent of the country’s 39 million citizens already infected. American pharmaceutical companies had developed powerful and effective new drugs to treat HIV, with the capacity to extend lives by years, even decades. But the treatments came at a price. AIDS and HIV medication cost roughly $12,000 per patient, per year in a country with an average annual income of about $2,600.

This was obviously unaffordable for both individual South Africans and the new democratic government. South Africa’s entire economy generated roughly $140 billion a year. Treating every AIDS and HIV patient would have required shipping one-third of the nation’s annual wealth to American pharmaceutical companies every year. In the United States today, it would be comparable to spending almost $6.6 trillion ― 65 percent more than the entire annual federal budget ― on AIDS and HIV alone. There was simply no way to establish a functional national economic program with such costs.

The Clinton administration argued that WTO treaties on intellectual property gave pharmaceutical firms clear rights to charge what they wanted. WTO agreements included 20-year patent rights that guaranteed monopolies on new drugs and prohibited generic competition or government price controls. These terms, of course, had nothing to do with Ricardo’s ideas about comparative advantage. But they were still defended with the language of “free trade.”

Mandela had a deadly pandemic on his hands. In 1997, he signed a law authorizing his administration to shop around the world for cheaper drug prices. The United States, citing a WTO treaty, threatened to retaliate with trade sanctions on the grounds that the new law would “abrogate patent rights.” Mandela put the implementation of the new law on hold, even as the AIDS crisis spread to terrifying new proportions. By 2000, more than 22 percent of the country would be infected.

A new Indian pharmaceutical firm began producing HIV medication for the “humanitarian” price of $1 a day, portending a revolution in public health strategy, but the Clinton administration took pride in holding the line against South Africa on its “international commitments.” Clinton only relented when protesters descended on Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign announcement rally in Tennessee, unveiling a banner for the cameras reading “Gore’s Greed Kills: AIDS Drugs For Africa.”

Obama would prove to be nearly as aggressive. Higher global drug prices were a primary goal of his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, and everyone from his deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Secretary of State John Kerry leaned on India to curb the production of generic drugs, which were lowering treatment costs around the world. In 2016, the Obama administration and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) even threatened to spike a peace deal between the Colombian government and Marxist rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, over pricing for a leukemia drug (they only backed down after the private threat leaked to the press, prompting an international outcry).

Clinton had set a grisly diplomatic precedent. In front of the cameras, however, he presented his trade agenda as a grandiose humanitarian project. When he finalized a new trade pact with China in 2000, Clinton boasted the deal was ”likely to have a profound impact on human rights and political liberty,” creating pressure for China to “choose political reform.” The argument was essentially a refurbished version Flake’s case for free trade with apartheid South Africa.

“The process of economic change will force China to confront that choice sooner, and it will make the imperative for the right choice stronger,” Clinton said.

Damir Sagolj / Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump takes part in a welcoming ceremony with China’s President Xi Jinping.

Breaking From Dependence

Today, Trump refers to Chinese President Xi Jinping as “the king of China” with admiration, while Chinese democracy advocates die in prison. But the global economy has indeed changed as a result of the choices made in the 1990s. Under the WTO, the American corporate colonialism of the apartheid era turned in on itself, cannibalizing the U.S. social order in the quest for higher returns on capital. “The China Shock,” as it became known, probably eliminated about 2.4 million American jobs ― many of them concentrated in communities that have never really recovered.

Part of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was based on his promise to overthrow this order. In the Republican primary, he won 89 of the 100 U.S. counties hurt most by trade with China. In the general election, he swept the Rust Belt, taking conventional Democratic Party strongholds in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Millions of people who voted for Obama voted for Trump based in part on his promise to save manufacturing jobs.

He has instead offered belligerent, xenophobic chaos. But there is plenty of important work a thoughtful reformer could do. What we call free trade today is not a stable system reflecting several decades of consistent economic thinking. “Free trade” is a label that political leaders have applied to a variety of different colonial systems. It has changed before, and it can change again.

Old trade deals can and should be reopened to establish stronger international rights for workers and communities. And it makes good national security sense to establish some degree of American economic independence from a rising authoritarian superpower. Nearly every supply chain for things Americans buy runs through China at some point. That’s a dangerous amount of political leverage for one country, and limiting it will require a few tariffs.

These changes would take time, and cost money. But it is a matter of managing the transition. We do not face a choice between reason and the abyss.

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