Trade fetishism and the trade justice ratchet: between token and substantive change in NAFTA 2.0

Abstract

Countless socially responsible trade initiatives have emerged in recent years offering an uncertain mixture of token and substantive changes. After decades of battles over free trade, this marks a significant shift, challenging established debates over free versus regulated markets by promoting labour, gender, human, and environmental rights through trade agreements. This reorientation contains complex contradictions, with trade justice groups conceding to the popularity of trade while simultaneously insisting on a new vision of what trade is ‘about.’ Drawing on the idea of trade fetishism, this article argues that the desire for trade involves not only its material motivations, but its seductive content as a fetishised object of global capital, offering the fantasy of ‘trade’ as a symbolic source of pleasure. Through the case of the new NAFTA 2.0, it points to the relevance of trade politics that aspires not to overcome trade fetishism, but, as Lucas Pohl (Citation2022) suggests, to ‘get with’ it. Through a trade justice ratchet mechanism, advocates have pushed for unanticipated changes, while also ceding to the limitations of the current order. The outcome is a process of contesting the symbolic content of what trade is and is not about, with significant material and policy implications.