We're Weaving, We're Weaving!

 There's a lot one could say about Trump's decision to unilaterally torpedo the global economy this week with across-the-board tariffs. But what's particularly sticking in my craw this morning is just the rank unfairness of this policy to countries who spent decades redesigning their domestic economies, under pressure from Washington—only now to see more bullying from the U.S. government in the opposite direction. 

After all, maybe the U.S. was wrong to pursue neoliberal globalization so aggressively in the first place. Maybe it was a mistake. But the now irrevocable fact is that it happened; we did it. We imposed this system of trade on the rest of the world. Countries throughout the developing world were pressured to give up the protective tariffs that shielded their domestic farmers from competition and to throw their markets open to cheap, heavily-subsidized U.S. crops. 

The implicit deal was that—if these countries effectively let their farmers be driven out of work by accepting cheap U.S. rice and soybeans—they would then be able to fill the gaps in their labor markets by expanding export-driven manufacturing to produce cheap goods for U.S. consumers. 

Countless countries around the world took us up on the offer. They build sweatshops and maquiladoras to churn out cheap goods as a way to absorb the surplus labor displaced from their devastated agricultural sectors. 

And now, the U.S. turns around and says: How dare you export cheap goods to us! And we slap incredibly punishing tariffs on their industries. So... what are they supposed to do now? Restore their protective tariffs against U.S. crops and rebuild their domestic agricultural sector? There's no way they'd be allowed to do so. Trump—whose political base includes the agriculture-rich U.S. heartland—will resist this with every bullying instinct at his disposal. 

Countries in the Global South probably can't just go back to allowing domestic subsistence agriculture to meet their food needs, then. The Trump administration will continue to pressure them into accepting cheap U.S. crops. But the administration will also impose ruinous tariffs on their manufactured goods, cutting off the export market for these as well. 

So—what are they supposed to do for work? Just starve? Trump, of course, would probably be fine with that. He doesn't care. 

He doesn't care about the impact his tariffs will have on American workers and consumers either, of course. But he especially doesn't care about people in poor countries. 

POLITICO the other day called attention to one particularly gratuitous cruelty in his trade policies. Remember the African country of Lesotho, which Trump mocked in his pseudo–State of the Union as a place "nobody had ever heard of"? Well, apparently, Trump remembered the country well enough this week to impose devastating 50% tariffs on all of their exports—the highest rate imposed on any country in the world. Adding injury to insult. 

Bangladesh was not far behind; Trump imposed eye-watering 34% tariffs on their goods, which include a large portion of the clothing and other textile goods that U.S. consumers wear. 

Here is a perfect example of the cruelty and injustice of these trade barriers. Here is a country that completely redesigned its local economy around an export-oriented garment sector, with our country's blessing. Maybe they shouldn't have done so. Maybe the U.S. shouldn't have incentivized them to do so in the first place. But the fact is they did; and we did. 

And so—pulling the plug on this critical component of their whole economy now can only mean throwing thousands if not millions of innocent people back into crippling poverty. Does Trump care? Does J.D. Vance care. No, of course they do not care. 

Maybe people will say: eventually the global economy will sort itself out. Bangladesh will find some new way to survive.

This is what people said too about all the farmers who were thrown out of work during the heyday of "free trade." As a Serbian diplomat once put it—as quoted by E.H. Carr—in responding to arguments in the early twentieth century that he ought to throw open his domestic agriculture to foreign competition and simply let the chips fall where they may (even if it meant putting his country's own domestic farmers out of work): 

The old 'things-will-right-themselves' school of economists argued that if nothing were done and events were allowed to follow their natural course from an economic point of view, economic equilibrium would come about of its own accord. That is probably true (I do not propose to discuss the point). But how would that equilibrium come about? At the expense of the weakest.  

The same point applies in reverse. That is—when a country has been forced over decades to adapt its whole domestic economy to a regime of "free trade," suddenly forcing it to once again reorient itself to a protectionist regime will be ruinous for the "weakest" members of society. Some new equilibrium may eventually result from it. But what is one to say in the meantime to the unemployed Bangladeshi garment employee thrown out of work? 

How many of them will need to starve before the new "equilibrium" is established? 

The prospect of seeing perhaps thousands if not more Bangladeshi textile workers thrown into the streets brings to mind an episode from the early years of the industrial revolution—when hand-loom operators were being displaced by ruinous foreign competition with new machine-made textiles in England. This led to revolt on the part of the Silesian weavers. Heinrich Heine, whose sympathies lay with the displaced weavers, had this to say about it (Bowring trans.): 

“The shuttle is flying, the loom creaks away,

“We're weaving busily night and day;

“Thy shroud, Old Germany, now weave we,

“A threefold curse we're weaving for thee,—

               “We're weaving, we're weaving!”

So too, when the New York Times tells us that Trump's tariffs will almost certainly devastate Bangladesh's garment and textile industry, and put untold thousands out of work in a country with very few other domestic industries to absorb them—one can only think that Heine's words still apply. The weavers of Bangladesh's textile factories can only be cursing the rank injustice of this action—and rightly so. 

And if they continue to weave, it will only be to produce the funeral shroud of our own global order that we arrogantly imposed on them in the first place...