Richard D. Wolff

I admit to not knowing exactly what "folderol" means. In any case, Navarro's kind of thinking is actually not so rare. It is the flip side of the neoclassical economics profession's glib confidence in "free trade" as some sublimely perfect framework in which everyone wins. Critics have long argued that free trade is like protected trade in that it yields winners and losers but they are different winners and losers. Once that premise is admitted, then the question becomes merely showing that one set of winners and losers is to be preferred to the other set. The US, in views like Navarro's and Bannon's too, is thus a net loser from free trade relative to its better "winner" position in the correctly protected trade or, if its plays better, in the better constructed bi-lateral "free" trade agreements. My problem with the debate between free and protected trade (however labeled) is that it is a debate above all about winners and losers among capitalist enterprises/industries. It has little to do with the much more important (in my view) struggle between capital and labor over the capitalist system per se. Both free trade and protected trade provide contexts and supports for capital's domination over labor, its exploitative basis for profits, its socially costly business cycles, etc. Capitalism's victims and critics should not get caught up taking sides in a battle among capitalists unless it ca be shown that doing so advances the quite different goals and objectives of a social movement critical of capitalism itself.