Monday, August 10, 2009

International Trade Idea

As to my original idea in international trade, the idea is that if we use some of this wealth for others instead of ourself what this creates is a trading situation. It involves the diversion of a certain amount of wealth. The wealth that we divert out of the original trade system is an extraction taken out by the society itself, according to broad public policy, and not taken out as a matter of an individual firm’s (or even an individual industry’s) choice.
This suggests an interpretation of capitalism as one system, which is (ought to be) broken into two, with the extracted portion moved from one of the two delineated but pre-existing parts (the rich side) to the other (the poor side). Sharing and trading become co-emergently defined terms.
The idea that capitalist trades take place out of isolated self-interest is now discarded.
A bundle or basket of goods is extracted from the whole system. One way to speak of these taken-out goods is to say “free.” The take out or extraction is created to be set aside as wealth that is valued as a sort of “trade item,” yet, co-emergently, also as a sort of free give-away.
The gain is that of a more stable world order. A world where wealth continuously accumulates in the hands of just a few at some point ceases to make sense. Senselessness is not a defensible trait, obviously.

The money – or value, or wealth – that the wealthy West possesses exists in the form of a vast pool that simply circulates from one denizen of the “rich world” to another, based on what we may call various subterfuges that one calls “business.” Few of these are materially essential to our survival. Also, it generates waste. These practices contribute to pollution, global warming, etc. Then let us find new ways to distribute capitalistic output (not that an argument is being strongly made here that the present idea would impact the waste issue). To earmark some of the output resulting from all this historical “accumulation” or, differently put, from this humanly-generated productive activity to the benefit of the “poor” of the global system not only seems just and moral (since these are the same folks this system has created) but it creates a more well-balanced system overall. The benefits from increased rationality seem obvious, as has been noted.

The individual is anonymously well-treated as a “customer” in the “rich west” block – a transnational group tantamount to an ethnicity or master race, while others live on “two dollars a day.”
In its total anonymity the entire “rich west” block is like one social unit, like a particular ethnicity or nation.
Firms such as banks and so forth automatically defer to any “customer.” There is a quality that may be thought of as a kind of equality. This trade idea – if “trade” is indeed the word – offers the idea of a sort of connection, or relationship between the two halves (or, we could say, haves and have-nots). The fundamental referential concept or sort of relationship that this would be would be capitalist.

What we are saying then is that there is a different sort of trading situation that we can conceive of where the build-up or excess is transferred, in order to get a better system of social relationships going. It is still capitalism. Moving items of commerce from rich sector to poor sector is simply another kind of capitalism: no more, no less. This is the basic epiphany, and from there a lot of new ideas may begin to emerge. The idea of a new type of trad/give away leads to a conclusion that indicates that actually capitalism is public rather than private; and that globalization can be rendered most rational, sane, just, etc. when it is divided into two parts; and, that the additional step of marking off or formally designating that which exists anyway --- the divide between global rich and poor, more prosaically called the haves and have-nots --- is not a bad thing but a good one. We find that capitalism survives and changes --- but it survives only by modifying itself. And not, therefore, by sticking to the same old method.

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