Trade and the left

[Jubal]

So, the recent round of conflict in Yemen has reminded me of something I think doesn't add up well (in that it's historically explicable, but wrong) on the left, which is a general scepticism of any form of commerce or exchange taking place for literally any reason. A lot of people on social media seem to be able to watch the global trade slowdown in the Black Sea and simply assume that all this will lead to is reduced profits for the super-rich and some people getting their Amazon parcels a bit slower, like the Houthis set off some fireworks that caused a traffic jam on the M1 rather than attempting deadly attacks on actual shipping lanes.

This often goes hand in hand with people accepting the narrative that the Houthis, a group whose motto literally includes "Curse upon the Jews" definitely have good and progressive motivations for their "blockade of Israel", which as has been noted plenty of times elsewhere isn't actually a blockade and isn't going to do anything meaningful to the Israeli war effort anyway.

Now, I'd be very willing to suggest that the west in general has done a very poor job of its policy in Yemen, don't get me wrong, and I'm not at all convinced that their response to the Houthis will be or has been effective, and I worry it'll move soon from ineffective to immoral if the Houthis decide to bunker down more in civilian areas and the US/UK decide to bomb them anyway. However what I wanted to think about here was the general unwillingness among left-wing critics of those policies to appreciate that economic exchange is actually important to anyone. Blocking the transport of core goods - most obviously including food, also fuel - and creating gaps in supply can very literally kill a huge number of people who are reliant on those goods, and in a world that operates on tight supply lines a relatively small slowdown per vessel as ships reroute around South Africa can multiply into an economic hit leaving a whole bunch of the world's poorest people in a very bad place indeed.

There are critiques of that wider framework that have merit. Of course we should have an economic system where most of those worst-off people have a lot more economic and supply cushion, and I think there is an argument that the world as a whole has been far too blase about issues like food and water security. I'd also be broadly in favour of trying to reduce aspects of long-distance trade which have arisen from the perverse incentives of highly polluting movements being cheap and labour in the west being expensive (e.g. getting fresh goods from Europe packaged in eastern Asia and then flown back again, which there have been some cases of). I think it's also a fair criticism that far too much of the profit from global trade broadly goes to the wrong people in the wrong places.

Nonetheless, as a whole it's very obvious that there are some countries that can produce a lot more of certain goods than others and are doing, and that we can't healthily sustain people around the world if those goods can't get to them regularly and reliably. Even if one were living in a very different economic system and all these companies were cooperatives, or were owned by some sort of benevolent world social-democratic state, we'd still need to be able to do those exchanges of goods. And one can't really both claim that economic inequalities are bad because they're keeping profits from going to the workers, and claim that we should reform to a system where those profits shouldn't exist at all - even if you think far less or none of them should go to investors, you can't use trade revenues to bring people out of poverty if you're cancelling the trade revenues.

All that said, I think the history of this is pretty interesting, and has a lot of aspects, among but not all of which are:

• I think part of this is really old, and still comes from a Christian radical background: the sense that trade is per se greedy and that of course greed is bad so commerce is bad, all the way back to imagery of Jesus overturning market stalls in the temple. (This also has some old-fashioned antisemitism subtly laced in at times, too.)
• This first point has also helped link an essentially left-radical opposition to trade to a deeply conservative one, as in the C19th where the Tory/Liberal split in the UK effectively was on the grounds that the Tories could be anti-commerce because they were the asset owning class.
• Social democracy and the state in the C20th - I think the left get some scepticism of trade from the understanding that they work via the nation-state and that trade between states can only ever be partly under the control of their particular state. So e.g. European social democrats who harbour deep scepticisms of the USA for its economic practices (ones which I share) will sometimes generalise that to global trade (a sentiment I don't share)
• Unions and globalisation: Linked to the social democratic sense of trade as being outside state control, there's a real scepticism around offshoring profits or jobs, tax avoidance, etc, which is generally painted onto international trade as a whole thing.
• Free trade being largely associated with the west, liberalism, etc, such that leftists from the west who see themselves as more generally wanting to upend "the system" translate that into every part of the system, trade included, being Bad Actually.
• People not understanding that free trade and free markets are different things, and people thinking a laissez-faire market and a free market are the same thing, so they think free trade is bad because it hurts labour rights or something.
• I think there's a sense of distance about trade: because it's a wide global scale system, people can't hold how it works in their heads, and so people don't really separate bits of it out or work out which bits might be good and which not.
• Trade is something where it's much easier to see the negatives - ultra-rich people getting to fly private jets, poor working conditions from jobs outsourced to places with poor employment laws, etc - than the positives, because the positives are slow to form and far too widely distributed. That doesn't make the positives less real: but a few pennies off the price of a bag of rice is something that adds up to be meaningful across a large population over time, not something with any real immediacy.

Anyway, I don't know quite where I'm going with this so I'll wrap the vent up there. I don't think it's an uncomplicated issue and there are reasons why we may want to slow down bits of world commerce in very specific ways, but it annoys me seeing people who are going to be among the least affected if there's a major supply chain issue just blithely declaring that maybe we didn't need the supply chains anyway and that nobody will really care about a few merchant vessels anyway. Just thought I'd write this in case anyone else has thoughts.

[dubsartur]

Are these ideas from real people, or just the kind who have too much time to post on social media or write a column?

As someone who lives in the premodern world, I had trouble listening to Perun's talk about the Houthi attacks on random ships without thinking "stop catastrophizing you pampered slobs, failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.  And if you register your ship in a country without a blue-water navy and an air force because its cheaper, there may be consequences to that choice."  Big businesses love privatizing proffits and socializing expenses.

I think another topic worth reading up on would be the 2015-2022 blockade of Yemen.  I think its easy to see the benefits of the freedom of the seas when you have access to it.  Apparently the US helped negotiate a ceasefire in April 2022.  The Yemeni civil war is a nasty as you would expect and most reporting I have seen until the latest outbreak has been superficial repetitions of Saudi propaganda ("internationally recognized government ... Houthis and other Iranian proxies")

A lot of people want "good guys" to cheer for and assume that if one side is bad and lies the other side must be good and truthful.  That is not how war works, but most major newspapers have not had anyone on staff who understood war since I was born.

Edit: Gwynne Dyer has a list of the sheer number of factions who are launching missiles or drones at targets somewhere between Gaza and Baluchistan in 2024

[dubsartur]

Its probably relevant that since the Roman republic, pirates have been classed as hostes humani generis "enemies of mankind." (The Roman definition of pirates often looked like 'anyone else's navy' but that is another story).  Because global trade is so multinational, anyone who fires indiscriminately on passing merchant ships, say a Marshall-islands flagged tanker of Russian naptha chartered by an international group headquartered in Singapore, is likely to get smacked by pretty much everyone with a blue-water navy.  But people have been bombing the Houthis with large amounts of NATO-style weapons since 2015, so what to do about them is a hard question.  Its not 1801, you can't just bombard some towns, burn some ships, and make them stop.