A new surge of trade and investment agreements looms over us. How do we deal with this? This text presents proposals based on the lessons learnt through feminist resistance in Abya Yala in the face of the previous surge1.
1- Read it using your own language lens
Avoid using their language. Do not think of yourself as labor (will they create jobs?), consumers (will prices fall?) or entrepreneurs (how do we benefit from these business opportunities?). We must not fall into the trap of refuting their arguments on their grounds. Our language is different: How do these agreements deepen the commodification of living entities? To what extent do they curtail the ability to make decisions on vital personal and collective processes? What role do they play in the possibility of living lives worth living, today and in the future, on a living planet?
2- Read it in several languages
Do not let them confront us. Do not read them in the imperialist language of the competing countries. Agreements lay the basis for a project that confronts corporate power with community life. The conflict between peoples and capital crosses borders, although it is not the same to live in areas of accumulation in the world as in deprived ones. Opposing the new surge requires an internationalist struggle accountable for historical colonialism and present neocolonialism.
3- Do not read it in parts
Are we interested in making an impact analysis? Part 1: “what would happen if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)2 was approved?” Part 2: “what would happen if a comma was changed? Yes and no. To take a stand, we need to foresee the impact of an agreement. But we cannot linger there, thinking that these agreements could be good or bad (so let’s improve the wording) or that if the agreement was not signed we would get rid of the problem. The important thing is to identify the underlying and preceding project that uses the agreements (together, in surges) as a means to consolidate itself.
4- Do not read all 1400 pages of annexes
The agreement between Canada and the European Union, CETA3 has 1400 pages of annexes. Is it imperative to read them to reject it? Yes and no. Expert work is essential, but we need to avoid the risks of overestimating it: feeling discouraged, getting lost in a labyrinth of information, dictating from above how to move below, the affected population. The technical side is a means for political action. Let’s use it to know what is at stake and how the game is played. You and me, who haven’t read the annexes, are also able to criticize CETA.
5- Do not read it alone
Read it together with others. Look for things in common from the area you better understand (peasants? sexual and reproductive health?…) and contribute to the collective effort instead of insisting that your issue is a priority. Let’s read together with others, from our common standpoint of confronting corporate power. Although we know that the sum of diverse voices results in a distorting rather than a harmonious voice, we are forced to face the inequalities that come across. Let’s address them to become political and inclusive actors.
6- Look for the violent end of the story
Agreements can be compared to a children’s story where children are devoured: violence is hidden behind seemingly innocent words. We should not let them lure us with flattery. The previous surge brought promises of economic empowerment and cultural rights that would be delivered by a “colorful” or promising neoliberalism. There is no need to reform, water down, include social, environmental or gender clauses. We must refuse flatly any kind of agreement, as an essential step to stand up for other different, better and possible worlds. For that purpose, we need a different narrative, in direct opposition.
7- Burn it at the stake and write another story
What is the alternative? It’s not clear, but we do have some clues: it must be a story that breaks through what we have been told until now.
7.1- If they say TTIP, we say territory4
Capital expands globally, our counterproposal is that territory should lie at the heart of socioeconomic and political organization. Territory is the soil (which is also below the pavement) with the ecosystems it contains; and the bodies that inhabit in it, together with the relationships they build. It is the body-soil territory, crossed by conflicts. Defending it does not mean sanctifying it but reconstructing it so that all of us can be included with all our diversity.
7.2- If they say TISA, we say common5
Agreements eliminate barriers so that anything could become a niche business. In the face of the advancement of this biocide logic, we should stand for the decommodification of life and the construction of collective accountability regarding the processes that uphold it, with the deprivatization and defeminization of such accountability. This requires the transformation of means of production (of capital) into means of reproduction (of community life); challenging masculinity linked to a self-sufficiency delusion and femininity harassed by the reactionary ethics of care; and eliminating the logic of servitude whereby employers take for granted that there is another class, racially distinguishable, whose only purpose is to serve them.
7.3- If they say TPP, we say sovereignty
The new surge implies taking away decision-making power by expanding the metapolitical spectrum. Our proposal is the opposite: politics must not start where markets end, instead, markets should start where we decide it politically, from a politics concept that goes beyond institutional aspects. Let’s achieve sovereignty over collective life. A sovereignty that could be defined as feminist because it is rooted in everyday life, in life itself.
8- A manual is dead, let’s write a living story
When we read the agreements, we would like to start building a language of confrontation, internationalist, which includes us with our commonalities and differences, reaching everyone and available to anyone, a useful tool to oppose corporate power while we address our inequalities. With this language we would like to write a different story, one that, using other referents (unlike those of trade language, these refer to life, to our pluralist language), will help us build a world that includes everyone: where we have sovereignty over good coexistence, addressed as a common responsibility, rooted in body-soil territory. We are working on it!
NOTES
1 Amaia Pérez Orozco (2017) Lessons learnt through Latin American feminist resistance against trade and investment agreements. From “Say No to ALCA” to
challenging patriarchal capitalism, OMAL. This text is a summary and an adaptation of an article from Pueblos magazine number 76.
2 Trans-Pacific Partnership covers countries on both sides of the Pacific Ocean and is waiting for Donald Trump’s United States of America to resume negotiations.
3 Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which provisionally came into force on September 2017 and is waiting for ratification by the parliaments
of EU member countries.
4 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, between USA and EU, under negotiation since 2013.
5 Trade in Service Agreement, negotiated by 23 member countries of the World Trade Organization.
This article is published in the DAWN Informs July 2018. It is an adaptation of the article published in Revista Pueblos no. 76: http://www.revistapueblos.org/blog/2018/02/18/pueblos-76-primer-cuatrimestre-de-2018/?lang=e