Trade Fetishism

Gavin Fridell is University Research Professor of Political Science and Global Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, and the co-author of Rethinking Development Politics and Global Libidinal Economy. He is a member of the Trade and Investment Research Project (TIRP) of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).Patrick Clark is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Global Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University and Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University in Toronto. He has previously been Visiting Researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO—Ecuador) in Quito, Ecuador, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) in Lima, Peru.

“This stunning book couldn’t be more timely—for examining today’s trade regime at a global moment of economic and tariff instability and warfare—or more perspicacious—for offering shrewd psychoanalytic insights on global trade that political economy by itself is unable to provide. A not-to-be-missed smart, original, and case study-based investigation.”Ilan Kapoor, author of Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development“At a time when global trade relations are in turmoil, Gavin Fridell and Patrick Clark offer an avant-garde political economy perspective that shows us how the human psyche models and remodels the perpetual dream of global commerce, and what this means for the politics of trade. Trade Fetishism provides a most welcome and highly timely theoretical alternative in a domain of economic theorising that remains mired in an – increasingly anachronistic - orthodoxy. The book will prove helpful to activists, scholars, students and policy-makers who are keen to pluralise trade theory and to build alternative trade futures.”Silke Trommer, co-author of A Feminist Political Economy of Trade: Beyond Free Trade Feminism“There are very few works that truly deserve the label ‘revolutionary.’ Trade Fetishism is one of them. It is one of the pioneering works in the promising field of libidinal economics.Trade negotiations have traditionally been analyzed through the lens of neoclassical political economy, where the bedrock assumption is that free trade brings about the best possible outcome, by bringing down costs and increasing benefits for all parties concerned. Fridell and Clark challenge this reigning paradigm. Bringing key concepts from psychoanalysis to political economy, the authors argue that while the dominant players may imagine themselves to be guided by rational calculus, more consequential are the subliminal predispositions they bring to negotiations. Borrowing from Lacan and Freud, they provide a provocative alternative framework that posits that the conditions imposed on weaker partners in trade negotiations derive not so much from the likelihood of their bringing about the promised growth and development than from the psychic rewards, or jouissance, produced by the repeated affirmation of the hierarchical domination of the stronger partner.”Walden Bello, author of Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy and Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash

• 1. Trade Fetishism; 2. The Seductive Gap in Trade Thinking; 3. Development and Trade: Disavowal and Reciprocity in the Caribbean-EU EPA; 4. Modernizing Trade: Mastery and Foreclosure from NAFTA to the USMCA; 5. Greening Trade: Magical Thinking at the WTO; 6. Trade Futures