The World Trade Organization Doha Development Agenda was suspended on July 24, 2006. The decision to halt the “Doha Round” of trade talks came after the major imperialist powers—the United States and countries in the European Union—failed to reach a compromise on world agricultural trade. For the workers and oppressed people of the world, the collapse of the WTO talks is a welcome development. It brings some breathing room, however brief and limited, to our common struggle against the imperialist institution and economic domination.
The breakdown in this round of WTO talks was due principally to inter-imperialist squabbling. The United States has
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The real purpose of the WTO
The WTO was supposedly founded to “promote free trade” in order to “stimulate economic growth.” But since its inception in 1995, the World Trade Organization has gained notoriety for its instrumental role in destroying the livelihoods of workers and peasants throughout the world. The WTO is one of many institutions, like the G8, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, that undermine the sovereignty of nations by forcing the implementation of disastrous neoliberal economic policies of privatization, liberalization and deregulation.
The World Trade Organization is one of the most powerful legislative and judicial bodies in the world. It oversees global trade in goods and services. Unlike the other institutions mentioned, the WTO has a thin veneer of “one country one vote” democracy. In reality, the WTO is dominated by the United States and used by all imperialist countries to bully less developed nations into opening their markets and undercutting the living conditions of the majority of their citizens.
Many people all over the globe understood from the WTO’s founding that it wasn’t created to stimulate economic prosperity for the working class. Over the years, this has been confirmed time and time again. The WTO has operated to concentrate capital and natural resources further into the hands of a small super-rich minority at the expense of workers everywhere.
Just like the World Bank, the IMF, and all neoliberal institutions, the WTO is designed to enrich the wealthiest capitalists in the most developed nations. In November 2005, the World Bank estimated in a report that $287 billion could be gained from global trade liberalization. But the vast majority of the money gained would flow directly to the top. According to Tim Wise, deputy director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, “70 percent of the gains will go to developed countries.” (Reuters, Nov. 25, 2005)
Resisting the WTO
The anti-globalization movement, begun in the 1990s by progressive and socialist forces, mobilized hundreds of thousands all over the world to denounce and stop the WTO’s policies of exploitation. The unbridled arrogance of the global capitalists has been met by militant protest both in their home countries and wherever their ministers and government representatives meet.
The Doha Round of the WTO started in November 2001. The previous round of trade talks—the so-called Uruguay
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During the previous round of talks, the imperialist countries eventually succeeded in extending their economic agenda from goods to “intellectual property” and services.
Under the Doha Round, the imperialists want to force oppressed countries to reverse any import taxes they’ve erected as a way to keep domestic markets stable and away from imperialist domination. They also want further “liberalization” of the trade in services. The imperialists also want to scale back any economic concessions they’ve granted to oppressed countries under previous trade deals.
For the oppressed nations participating in the talks, they mainly want the U.S. government and the E.U. to push back their massive agricultural subsidies that make it easy for cheap goods from imperialist countries to flood the markets of less developed national economies.
Opportunity and challenge
According to Prof. Jose Maria Sison, chairperson of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, the collapse of the Doha talks presents both an opportunity and a challenge to workers. In a July 26 statement, Sison said:
“It is an opportunity to carry forward the struggle to undermine the WTO as a sweeping mechanism for imperialist ‘globalization’ and the ever greater exploitation of the world’s people and natural resources. The underdeveloped world has already suffered much from the past decade of the WTO with worsening poverty and unemployment as well as the degradation of its already backward agricultural and industrial sectors.
“Yet, there is also a challenge as the big powers will now more likely use its other means for advancing their
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As long as the capitalist class and its government managers decide what will be done with the world’s resources and who will dictate global trade relations, working and oppressed people’s needs will never be met. The only way to bring an end to further explotation is by organizing a resistance movement with both national and international dimensions that is defined and guided by the desires and needs of the masses of working people.
