How Capitalism and Technology Created (a) NAFTA
By: Biodun
In the late-20th century and especially in this first decade of the 21st century, there have been impassioned and highly controversial debates about the merits and demerits of trade agreements like the World Trade Organization (WTO), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), and the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA)--which was simply called CAFTA before January 2004 and renamed after. Recent discussions about globalization and the asymmetries of these agreements can be found here, here, and here. And yet, as I'll show, these agreements simply formalized (or attempted to formalize) a sub-rosa globalization and a new international division of capital and labor that began to operate defacto since the mid-1970s. Capitalism and technology played a huge role in these developments, with both equally contributing to this enterprise.

Before the mid-1970s, there was a pact between capital and labor in general, and in particular, among labor, management, and the state: that is, with the cooperation of labor and management, the state regulated and arbitrated productivity, wages, and profits. The production of consumer products developed mass consumption--in other words, supply worked to create demand. Americans became consumers of their own products--pace Henry Ford: "Our workers shall also be our customers," a capitalist model commonly known as Fordism.

However, by the mid-1970s, the saturation of domestic markets for consumer products led to the expansion of capital into third-world countries for the production and increasing consumption of these products by a robust and cheap third-world urban labor force ready for work but disorganized. Capital then became extremely fluid, eroding to a certain extent the boundaries and functions of traditional nation-states: no restrictions on first-world investment and transfers of capital, as third-world governments lusted after first-world revenues, and as first-world global (transnational) corporations lusted after cheap and robust third-world labor. This was a truly symbiotic relationship indeed, which eventually led to two condominiums.

LINK to con.