Sleepless since Seattle: what is the WTO about?

Post-Seattle, the WTO is under investigation for alleged conspiracy to establish a system of undemocratic rule and rule making for managing the global economy. The fall-out from the so-called ‘millennial round’ is a debate about WTO procedure, about channels of representation and transparency, about content of rules, and even about the WTO’s viability and right to exist. It is too early to say how this debate will progress and how the WTO will evolve as an institution. But it is timely to comment on the world-historical signiecance of the WTO crisis. The question about the WTO’s representativeness ultimately concerns the hasty and little publicized launch of the Organization by governments around the world in 1995. In the negotiations over the transformation of GATT into the WTO only corporate access to government delegations was allowed. Rather than the WTO being viewed simply as an evolving bureaucracy in step with the expanding scale of economic integration, in order to understand the nature of the crisis it is important to situate the WTO in its world-historical context. This context involves the corporate attempt to secure global market rule, framed by a pervasive discourse of neoliberalism, and to impose it as the preferred model of the dominant capitalist state. When Marx declared in the Manifesto that: the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (Marx and Engels, 1970: 37)