Chapter 19
Global Trade

It is time to challenge the myth of competitive advantage, and therefore of massive free trade, by observing that in practice, it simply amounts to favoring social and ecological dumping.
To do this, let us once again give the floor to Alain Supiot at the end of the 8th lecture in the series Legal Figures of Economic Democracy, given at the Collège de France in 2017. He cites Maurice Allais and his book Globalization and the Destruction of Jobs and Growth: The Empirical Evidence: “The fact is that around the world, only a few small groups, and especially the leaders of multinational corporations, benefit from economic globalization. These groups have vast financial resources, and through intermediaries, they dominate all media: press, radio and television. It is in this way that opinion is largely indoctrinated. It is in this way that one is led to believe that globalization is inevitable, necessary, and beneficial for everyone.”

Now, as we saw at the beginning of this third part, more specifically in the paragraph “Why limit the concentration of wealth?” in chapter 13, the need for deregulated globalization is caused by the proliferation of non-productive staff, i.e., jobs that are not directly productive, which we described in chapter 2 regarding Parkinson’s law.
However, not only does deregulated globalization not limit the generalized nepotism associated with these jobs, and therefore the added stress on all individuals, but it is also a paradoxical remedy that aggravates the disease while hiding its short-term effects. Indeed, globalization comes with a shift of the working class to Asia and Africa, which creates there not only misery close to what Marx described, which we ignore with the greatest cynicism, but also, and of which we are not aware, it simultaneously causes a true explosion of non-productive jobs. Thus, as emerging countries gradually reintegrate design, management, and marketing to respond to their population's social aspirations, we will find ourselves importing finished products, thus losing the significant added value we had previously acquired at low cost, and, in addition, we will find ourselves with the result of years during which we did not effectively combat the proliferation of unnecessary yet well-paid jobs that we will no longer be able to afford to fund.

Put simply, with the current system, our biggest upcoming problem is not the funding of social protection for the most vulnerable, but the impossibility of funding the middle classes who have gotten used to working in mythical and non-productive sectors described in Meyer and Rowan’s article.
During the 2008 Greek crisis, the world discovered that far from producing the expected economic catch-up, the subsidies provided to Greece following its accession to the European Union actually fostered corruption. A similar phenomenon is occurring with the relocation of jobs from Europe and the United States to Asia and Africa: at first glance everything seems to work better since there is growth and improved margins, but in reality, a gradual subversion of the production system is taking place, which is not effectively combated because too many people benefit from it in the short term. In the context of relocation, the main issue is the multiplication of unnecessary and well-paid jobs, while the only perceived issue is the loss of industrial jobs.
An essential point to understand is that currently, in the case of restrictions in a company or administration, one might naively assume that it is the non-productive jobs that are eliminated, and that the core business is preserved. The reality is different, because the less a job is genuinely useful, the more energy is spent by those performing it to maintain their social position, that is, to intrigue to make the marginal seem essential, or to justify an inappropriate general organization of activities. Parkinson shows clearly how underemployed individuals create activities to justify the maintenance of their positions. The method is generalized nepotism (chapter 2), which ultimately produces an intensification of the struggles for social status, as well as increasing pressure on operational staff. Cognitive dissonance also plays a heavy role at this level, in the form of self-deception. Indeed, because they forget to exclude from their justifying work both what is actually useless and what relates to intrigue, these people consider that they are working hard, and thus that their pay is justified.
However, even if we have seen in chapter 13 that we are proposing a society where work will become increasingly marginal, it is still necessary that goods and services be produced, certainly with the maximum assistance from computing and robotics, but produced all the same. Moreover, it is important that each community can produce locally what can be produced locally, and also some other more specialized products or services, in order to balance exchanges with other communities and thus gain access to the full range of products and services that require particularly large concentrations of resources, hence specialization and trade over greater distances. Consequently, it will be very difficult to shift the cohorts of largely useless jobs to the new system, due both to their reluctance and to their difficulty in finding a satisfactory place within it.
In the end, whether we switch to the new system or remain in the current capitalist system, the multiplication of useless jobs, once known as bureaucracy and today generalized under the term 'bullshit jobs,' observed by Parkinson, analyzed by Meyer and Rowan, and accelerated by offshoring since the 1980s, is the biggest threat to our economies. We do not have too many public services, but too many useless or not really useful jobs, both in the public and private sectors. Even if in the end you reject all the proposals in this book, if you have understood this, then you will not have wasted your time!

Next comes the issue of the exploitation of raw materials. For now, three systems exist. The first concerns mainly former colonies where corruption has prevented the establishment of a political system that can effectively benefit from the resource, which is then pillaged. The second concerns countries that have converted their raw material into a rent. The third corresponds to China, which uses its raw materials to impose a de facto monopoly over processed products.
The subject of global trade should be to set a stable price and pace of exploitation of raw materials that provides a real benefit to the concerned populations, while limiting the temptation for other countries to secure access to the resource through geopolitical influence games.
However, note that the majority of current international agreements are set up contrary to this objective. Indeed, they primarily aim to ensure access to external markets, both for goods and capital. However, as we saw in the second part of this book, hyper-specialization is a bad idea: we must produce locally everything that can be reasonably produced locally, and only carry out large-scale exchanges for what requires a significant concentration of resources. This is both more ecological and more socially stable. Healthy international agreements will therefore be based on the respect of common rules for access to raw materials, in exchange for access to international trade in products requiring significant concentrations of resources. In other words, our vision is not one of an international market covering more and more products, and its corollary of ever-greater regional specialization and large-scale instability, but one of an international market where the exchange of a few poorly distributed raw materials on the planet balances the exchange of a few products that require significant concentrations of resources.

The one who read only this chapter could conclude that what we recommend is a return to protectionism. What is important to understand is that restricting trade can only be positive if it follows the implementation of the new production organization introduced in previous chapters, and this in order to limit the pursuit of power by limiting the size of organizations, thus generalized nepotism and the permanent stress on individuals. Conversely, a return to protectionism within the current capitalist system would result in an increase in generalized nepotism, in the form of an increase in collusion between actors in the same sector, and ultimately a greater stress on individuals.