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 (2022) 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.


Introduction
After decades of social justice groups pushing for an end to free trade agreements, this pressure has instead given rise to an unprecedented expansion of new labour, gender, human, Indigenous, and environmental rights components within them.Variously called 'inclusive, 'progressive,' 'sustainable' or 'socially responsible,' these new trade initiatives offer a diverse assortment, from token to more substantive initiatives (ILO 2016, Canada 2020, World Bank and World Trade Organization 2020).While their full impact remains to be assessed, their expansion marks an important shift in the political economy of trade policy around what is considered to be a legitimate focus of trade, trade negotiations, and trade agreements.How radical this transition is depends on the organisations involved.Liberal institutions, including powerful ones like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank, have always drawn on support for 'trade' to push pro-corporate investment policies which, as critics have observed, were often 'not about trade' (Wallach 2004;McNally 2006, 27;Bhagwati 2008, 71;Kellogg 2019, 67).In this sense, they have conceded todayofficially, at leastto a degree of support for 'inclusive trade' while using this discourse in much the same way as 'free trade': to advance a pro-corporate agenda around investment protections, capital mobility, and deregulation (Zini 2016, Parisi 2020, Hannah et al. 2022).A more radical leap, I would argue, has come from trade justice groups (including union, feminist, and environmental organisations), who have shifted their strategy from calling for an end to trade agreements, to demanding new social and environmental rights within them.These groups have increasingly demanded accountability from dominant institutions, like the WTO, which is viewed by some activists as having 'the power to enforce its agreements' making it 'the envy of a lot of international organizations.' 1 This reorientation contains complex contradictions, conceding to the persistent popularity of global trade while simultaneously insisting on a new vision of what trade is 'about,' opening the door to radical possibilities (through an incipient trade justice ratchet), while simultaneously conceding to the limitations of the existing trading order.Growing recognition that trade remains popular as an ideaor what I will argue below, a fetishised fantasyis mixed with an understanding that what people believe trade to be about is more open and flexible than the narrow understanding advanced by trade economists.Thus, while it can be very difficult to confront trade directly, given often passionate devotion to it, it can be challenged 'awry' or indirectly, in manner that can have significant implications for trade and trade policy (Žižek 1989, Watt 2021, Pohl 2022).
In this article, I offer a conceptual framework for exploring the shifting nature of trade politics and sustainable/inclusive/progressive/socially responsible initiatives, by drawing on a psychoanalytic engagement with political economywhat has been recently termed a Global Libidinal Economy (GLE) approach (Kapoor et al. 2023).Such an approach does not seek to place ideological or symbolic issues above material or political economy concerns, but rather to reveal the ways in which they are inseparable and equally determining in driving trade outcomes.Drawing in particular on the work of Ilan Kapoor, I will argue that trade is increasingly 'fetishized'imbued with a 'sublime quality' beyond reasonable determinations, enchanting people with its 'spellbinding powers,' making it very difficult to directly confront (Kapoor 2020, 125).This points to the persistent popularity of free trade, or more accurately trade in general, and the relevance of a trade politics that aspires not to overcome trade fetishism, but as Lucas Pohl (2022, 164) suggests, to 'get with' it.In the first half of the paper, I unpack the idea of trade fetishism, based on an alternative, psychoanalytic reading of Marx's famous notion of 'commodity fetishism,' and how it can be applied to trade policy and socially responsible trade initiatives.Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), I argue, can be understood as driven not solely by material goals (lowering tariffs, protecting investor rights) but libidinal desires that fetishise trade itself.In the second half of the paper, I explore the applicability of trade fetishism to the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) which, in 2020, replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).The renegotiation of the USMCA is frequently viewed as marking a new era in 'modernizing' trade, given its labour and environmental components, and is particularly well-suited to examine the interplay between conventional trade policy and the possibilities of an incipient trade justice ratchet.In the end, I argue that understanding these new dynamics requires attention not only to the material motivations behind trade policy, but the ways in which trade policy is interwoven with a perpetual contest to determine the symbolic content of what trade is and is not about.

Trade fetishism and trade policy
In the political economy literature on trade, defenders and, to a large extent, critics of the dominant regime often depict trade policy as, ultimately, driven by rational economic, political, and strategic logics, even if they disagree on whether these policies are motivated by societal interests or those of the rich and powerful.A GLE approach, in contrast, argues that non-rational beliefs and unconscious desires are equally motivating factors in driving economicand tradepolicy through promises of enjoyment through development, efficiency, fulfillment and harmony (Dean 2009, Wilson 2014, Sioh 2014a, Kapoor 2020, Kapoor et al. 2023).At the same time, such an approach is not as at odds with mainstream commentary as it might first appear.Free trade advocates frequently despair over governments' pledging adherence to trade liberalisation while simultaneously constructing trade barriers, driven by 'emotional,' 'foolish,' 'silly,' and 'irrational' ideas, resulting in 'policy madness' (Bhagwati 2008, 67;Broude 2018, 24-8;Krugman et al. 2018, 29,37;Hirsh 2019).Despite this, the irrational beliefs themselves are not the subject of analysis, depicted as distortions or by-products, with their significance to trade policy recognised but disavowed (Sioh 2014a).
One area of mainstream trade research that does explore beliefs is the work of pollsters who have long noted that 'values and ideology offer a better explanation of attitudes toward trade liberalisation than do economic interests' (Acquaviva et al. 2018) (See also EKOS Research Associates 2020).They offer numerous insights into attitudes about trade.Globally, trade remains very popular, much more so than in the 1990s; according to one 25-country survey, on average 75% agreed that expanding trade is a good thing (Ipsos 2021).While trade has become less popular among right wing groups opposed to 'globalization'particularly in the United Statesit has gained in popularity among liberals, democrats, progressives, and those in favour of diversity, despite efforts by trade justice groups to mobilise opposition to FTAs (Acquaviva et al. 2018, Wolfe and Acquaviva 2018, Friedhoff 2021, Ipsos 2021, Jones 2022).At the same time, support for trade tends to be contradictory.For instance, people often support both free trade and preferential treatment for domestic industry (Friedhoff 2021).Or, in the case of Trump supporters, they tend to be more anti-trade than the rest of the population, despite having larger incomes on average and not being more trade exposed, leading Jonathan T. Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell (2016, 2) to conclude they are driven primarily by 'racial identity and cultural attitudes.' The work of pollsters demonstrates how popular attitudes are of central concern to trade policy, dovetailing with economic considerations as politicians, lobby groups, and policy makers determine trade agendas.At the same time, they often fail to explore how these attitudes emerge politically.This has long been explored by critical scholars who emphasise how power and ideology play a determining role constructing trade knowledge (Gill 2003).Constructivists have emphasised the cultural biases in trade knowledge based on epistemic communities and institutional systems of meaning (Hannah et al. 2016, Singh 2017).Gramscian researchers have explored how capitalist classes translate economic power into ideological hegemony over subordinate classes so that elite visions of trade are advanced as the natural beliefs of society (Selwyn 2016, Peet 2018, 269).Foucauldians have emphasised how 'communities of experts' regulate legitimate discourse, disciplining themselves and others (Goldman 2006, Orbie et al. 2022).Despite foundational differences, these approaches are increasingly combined into an overarching critique of power/knowledge in global trade (Hopewell 2016, Peet 2018, Hannah et al. 2022).
While critical approaches expose the ideological influence of discursive and institutional sources of power, they often fail to account for the deeply held desires that are expressed through trade, making it appealing despite ideological critique.Existing approaches tend to portray trade discourse as anonymous and detached, generally imposed on people.This downplays trade's symbolic appeal that draws people to it despite of its contradictions and inconsistencies (Dean 2009, Konings 2015, Kapoor 2020).A trade fantasy approach, in contrast, points to how beliefs around trade offer temporary (and ultimately failing) objects of desire while smoothing over anxieties, not just about trade and economy, but the constitutive lack at the heart of desiring subjects.Trade fantasies are ubiquitous to the global order, trade's popularity extends beyond immediate material gains or losses, and free trade is eagerly marshalled by politicians and populists of all stripes to defend their own agendasincluding ones that defenders and critics of free trade argue are 'not about trade' (Wallach 2004;McNally 2006, 27;Bhagwati 2008, 71;Kellogg 2019, 67).The relevance of this can be teased out through a more focused examination of how trade fantasies become fetishised.

Instrumentalism or fetishism in socially responsible trade?
Whereas earlier socially responsible trade mechanisms have been roundly criticised for lacking genuine enforcement (Knox 2004, Karpilow et al. 2014, ILO 2016), the newest wave of initiatives has opened the door to greater possibilities for enforceable action around social and ecological rights.At the same time, critics have noted that the new mechanisms simultaneously instrumentalise or abstract subversive discourses (such as 'inclusivity') into something manageable, apolitical, and less-threatening to political and economic elites (Macdonald and Ibrahim 2019, Tiessen 2019, Parisi 2020, Santín Peña 2021, Hannah et al. 2022, Orbie et al. 2022).While I agree with this reasoning, its important to add that the compulsion to instrumentalise or oversimplify is not strictly a political strategyeven if elites recognise and take advantage of itbut is also desired by people, often ardently, as a goal in its own right (Kapoor 2020).People seek out simplified, fetishised objects to meet their desires based on fantasies that are collectively, if also 'vertically' shared (Vucetic 2022).
To explore this further, Kapoor provides a foundation for examining the constitutive role of the desiring subject in political economy.Drawing on Lacan and Žižek, Kapoor emphasises how humans, after birth, move through language from nature to culture, into the symbolic order, experiencing 'a fundamental absence (of a mythical sense of plentitude) that forever haunts us' (Kapoor 2020, 77).Desire emerges to fill this sense of lack, targeting a lost object which, in Lacanian terms, is referred to as 'object a'an imagined object which 'never positively existed in reality' (Žižek 2020, 39).The result is that lack can never truly be filled, desire can only be temporarily satisfied.This leads to the pursuit of 'jouissance,' or excessive enjoyment, often to the point of pain, as people aspire to fill the gap by transcending an inadequate 'normal' through excess (Dean 2009, Wilson 2014, Kapoor 2020, Žižek 2020).The perpetually frustrated attempt to find an adequate object for desire, Kapoor argues, can lead to obsession with the 'drive' itself, aimed not at the final 'goal,' but rather the 'aim,' which never needs to be reached; we become obsessed with encircling the object, trying, failing, and trying again.Under capitalism, human drives becomes linked to the accumulation drive, unleashing a cycle of limitless expansion, with people hooked on a quasi-impersonal drive to accumulate for accumulation's sake (Harvey 2003, Kapoor 2020, Kapoor et al. 2023).
Desire and drive are often directed toward fetishism, where individuals transfer desires and anxieties to fetishistic objects that promise elusive fantasies of pleasure or fullness.Marx famously made the connection between fetishism and capital through his concept of 'commodity fetishism' (Marx 1978, 319-29).Capital accumulation drives unprecedented production, leading people to become hooked on endless consumption, regardless of its longer-term impacts on society and the planet.In this context, commodity fetishism is often depicted as obscuring the relationship between substance and appearance in commodities (Hudson and Hudson 2021).Alienated consumers purchase goods on the market as though they are abstract commodities (in appearance), obscuring the exploitative relations of production embedded in them (the substance).Through fetishism, commodities become imbued with mysterious or magical qualities (i.e. to improve our image) far removed from authentic knowledge around how they are produced (McNally 1981, Elson 1988, McNally 1993, Hudson and Hudson 2021).
Whereas contemporary Marxist thinking emphasises how fetishism obscures the conditions of production, a GLE approach emphasises fetishism itself, depicted not as a distraction or distortion of consumption, but one of its primary goals (Böhm andBatta 2010, Pohl 2022).The boundaries between the substance (material) and the appearance (libidinal) of a commodity are dissolved.Alienation, moreover, does not exist only under capitalism, but in all societies in different ways, with the subject alienated (from both itself and the Other) due to a constitutive lack (the 'Real').Desire emerges as people seek to fill this lack with a (mythical) lost object.Consequently, Marx's notion of commodity fetishism can be understood as recognising the unavoidable nature of fetishism in all societies, reflecting the ways in which individuals seek to fill a 'primordial gap,' that lies at the heart of identity, a limitation that 'is the basic condition of our lives' (Žižek 2020, 13).Under capitalism, fetishism focuses on the commodity (object a) as a resolution to lack, unleashing a cycle of shopping, disappointment, and further shopping (Pietz 1987, Böhm and Batta 2010, Kapoor 2020).
Adding to this, Kapoor argues that fetishism can be applied not only to commodities but to a range of practices, ideas, and institutions that are central to the reproduction of capitalism (Kapoor 2020, 123-46).This includes economic growth and technology, which become fetishised objects in themselves, desired beyond objective or rational determinations.The fetish, states Kapoor: … is not just a pleasurable and magical object, it is also one that enables the subject to (unconsciously) deny the harshness of reality.As a substitute for fundamental trauma, the fetish is a site of disavowal, allowing the subject to better master her world by ridding it of lack and difference.Additionally, by behaving single-mindedly toward the fetish object as if it possesses a sublime quality, the fetishist forecloses other possible worthy objects or sociopolitical goals.Mastery, disavowal, and foreclosure thus become the hallmarks of fetishism.(Kapoor 2020, 123-4) Kapoor's insights can be extended to 'trade' as a popular object in the symbolic order, desired not solely for its material effects, but its fetishistic qualities (Fridell 2022).Kapoor emphasises three unconscious processes that are particularly instructive.
First, fetishism involves disavowal through simultaneous recognition and denial of traumas and contradictions (Sioh 2014a).This is common among conventional trade economists who disavow the significance of history, politics, and social power in forging uneven trade relations (Chang 2008, Wilson 2014).At times, they are acknowledged, but only as failed policies or distant pasts that have little relevance for today (Sachs 2005, Krugman et al. 2018).Disavowal is aimed not only at dominant trade narratives, but their emotional content (Konings 2015).The result is what Žižek (1989) has termed 'fetishistic disavowal'; when the 'the kernel of enjoyment' offered by trade, as a fetishised object, is so libidinally captivating that we 'choose the fetish despite knowing better' (Kapoor 2020, 142).The pleasures that people derive from devotion to trade is disavowed, including not only rational goals but, as Kapoor observes, the 'deep comfort and satisfaction we get from bureaucratic processes, religious rituals, or social customs' (Kapoor 2013, 9).
Second, trade fetishism entails the fantasy of mastery, displaced onto the fetishised object which is then overinvested with magical power 'to give the banal a sense of the extraordinary' (Kapoor 2020, 125).Within the context of the uneven global political economy, Kapoor asserts, mastery often involves 'an attempt to preserve privilege by dominating the Other (the Third World, the subaltern) through the fantasy of sameness' (Kapoor 2020, 128).This involves a mythologised Western, capitalist societyof wealth, democracy, rationality, and freedomcontrasted through a stereotyped non-Western Other, as traditional, irrational, underdeveloped, static, and unpredictable (Wilson 2014, Kapoor 2020, Orbie et al. 2022).The fetishised object (trade) is used to sustain a Western sense of self-worth, projecting lack and anxiety on to the Other, denigrating and negating difference, and portraying the non-Western Other as 'inferior,' but ultimately on the same trajectory as the West, only father behind.Trade fetishism allows Westerners to 'revel in pride' (Kapoor 2020, 128), drawing on success at global trade as evidence of superiority over the Other, all the while projecting anxieties over failure, contradictions, and limitations on to the Other (Sioh 2014a).The Other is then criticised for its shortcomings, which actually masks 'the fetishist's own lack' (Kapoor 2020, 130).
Third, fetishism depends on foreclosure, entailing a narrow fixation on the object, rejecting difference 'by reducing and simplifying the world in order to better master it' (Kapoor 2020, 125).It is through this simplification, states Kapoor, that the fetish gets its 'sublime quality,' removed from the contradictions and traumas that underpin it (Kapoor 2020, 123).The widespread fixation on global trade provides a source of pleasure through foreclosure which, as noted by Marxist scholars, disconnects exchange relations from the exploitative and imperialist conditions of production under global capitalism (Harvey 2003, McNally 2006).A focus on foreclosure also offers instructive possibilities for recasting core issues in the political economy of trade.For instance, FTAs are widely depicted as 'locking-in' a process of economic globalisation (Gill 2003, Villarreal and Fergusson 2014, Rodrik, 2018).Locking-in, however, involves more than technical commitments, but pushes us to come to terms with a wider economic integration that is often 'already taking place' (Villarreal and Fergusson 2014).As a result, it can be difficult to discern the precise impacts of any single FTA, even though they do affirm dedication to an ongoing process of global capital accumulation, not just materially, but symbolically and ideologically.They involve not only 'lock-in' at the policy level, but at the intrapsychic level, foreclosing political possibilities and eradicating lack, trauma, and difference by fixating on a reduced and simplified object (Kapoor 2020, 123).
As a final note, it important to emphasise that the seductive content of trade occurs not merely at the level of illusion, but rather 'is built into the fabric of social reality itself' and is 'a constitutive element of capitalist political economy ' (2020, 133).Kapoor argues that 'the unconscious mechanisms of the fetish are not an 'inside' condition of the mind but are radically external, inscribed into our social practices' (133).This means that, from a Lacanian perspective, the unconscious is not purely individual, but rather emerges intersubjectively, as an essential component of language and shared meaning; exploring unconscious desires does not mean probing the depths of 'hidden,' individual minds, but rather re-examining what is there for us all to seeas well as to deny, disavow, and fetishise (Kapoor 2014(Kapoor , 1128)).

Trade Fetishism and FTAs
Drawing on a GLE approach, trade fetishism can be explored through FTAs, examining the discourse of politicians, think tanks, trade negotiators, media, and advocates around their negotiation and meaning.More than just policy or legal advisors, trade experts are 'figure [s] of social authority' who validate and reproduce popular, shared fantasies (Watt 2021).Despite framing their work as being motivated strictly by rational and apolitical goals, trade experts are no less ideologically interpolated or libidinally motivated than the rest of us (Sioh 2014b).On this premise, in what follows, I provide a preliminary illustration of how ideology critique informed by the concept of trade fetishism can be applied, drawing on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis around the USMCA, whose renegotiation in 2020 (out of the old NAFTA) is often viewed as signalling a new era in 'modernizing' trade. 2  To begin with, disavowal, as is often the case, was central to the framing of the negotiations around the USCMA from 2017 to 2019.Despite recognising that the renegotiation itself was driven by the populist politics of US President Donald Trump, looking for an opportunity to dominate and belittle Mexican and Canadian trade partners, liberal commentators simultaneously insisted that the true goal was to improve and 'modernize' trade rules for the twenty-first century (ICTSD 2018a, Macdonald and Ibrahim 2019).Critical commentators, like political economist Paul Kellogg (2019, 67), more unequivocally recognised how the negotiations were about 'a racially charged move to cement America First policies in a new racist political coalition,' but often concluded, as a result, that it was not 'about trade' (See also Ahmed and Bick 2017).The effect, however, is to inadvertently adopt a fetishised version of trade not dissimilar to neoclassical economics, narrowed to its material objectives, while libidinal goals (Othering aggression, anger, racism, superiority) are depicted as diversions from what trade is really about.Success in global trade, however, as Sioh argues, is frequently taken to reflect not just material success, but 'full human status' (Sioh 2014b, 284).Northern states evoke success to uphold their sense of moral superiority, insisting on an economic logic that leads to intensified exploitation while simultaneously chastising Southern countries for the repressive politics required to carry this logic out (Sioh 2014a).Southern countries, for their part, seek not only material success but to stave off their own sense of anxiety by demonstrating the dynamism of their economies.Their success, in turn, sparks trauma in the North, perceived as a loss of racial, national, and class status (Nast 2014, Sioh 2018).When negotiators meet to hash out FTAs, this libidinal baggage is always with them.
Alongside instances of disavowal, fantasies of mastery were also pervasive to the political discourse around the USMCA.One example centers on the discussions about the impact of the old NAFTA.The US decision to trigger negotiations put trade advocates on the defensive, compelled to defend a track record for the old NAFTA that, in economic terms, was recognised by free traders as 'relatively small' (Globerman and Sands 2017, 17) (Hufbauer et al. 2014, Villarreal andFergusson 2014).Despite this, experts insisted that NAFTA had 'served to create a single North American economy,' (emphasis added Hufbauer and Globerman 2018, 5) and was 'vitally important' (Owens 2019, 4) compared to 'a complete cessation of trade' (Leblond and Fabian 2017, 6).Others drew on a language of excess, pointing to the 'size of the trade flows,' (Leblond and Fabian 2017) and how trade 'has grown exponentially since NAFTA entered into force ' (Bergsten andde Bolle 2017, Miller 2017, 2).These arguments are dubious as they disavow the fact that, as trade experts themselves recognise, the three nations are 'natural trading partners,' (Owens 2019, 4) and expanded trade between them 'may have taken place with or without an agreement' (Villarreal and Fergusson 2014, i).They can be seen as attempts to push beyond the limits of the agreement, overcoming its banal normal with something exciting, temporarily providing trade jouissance (Wilson 2014, Kapoor 2020, Žižek 2020).
The desire for mastery was also expressed through 'the fantasy of sameness' (Kapoor 2020, 128), with the US and Canada upholding their sense of superiority (mythologised as democratic, free, rational), using their knowledge of trade to lift Mexico up.This discourse persisted despite the fact that Mexico has lagged behind the US and Canada in productivity and labour share of income (which declined in all three countries), and has experienced persistently high poverty rates (Villarreal andFergusson 2014, Brennan 2015).It was particularly evident in discussions about reforming the controversial Chapter 11 Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms.The US wanted to eliminate the provision, arguing it gave other countries too much influence over American policy.Canada wanted to maintain it, while limiting the ability of investors to sue Canada (McGregor 2018, ICTSD 2018b).Canada claimed to be particularly concerned about Mexico, asserting that foreign investors 'wouldn't put one penny in' the country without ISDS. 3This position has often been repeated by negotiators despite a lack of evidence linking ISDS to expanded foreign investment (Mertins-Kirkwood and Smith 2019, Sornarajah 2021).In the end, a compromise was reached: ISDS was eliminated between the US and Canada, but persisted between the US and Mexico.It was reduced to five core industries (oil and gas, power generation, telecommunications, transportation, and infrastructure), all of which are predominantly of concern for US investors.This means that Mexico will likely be the main target of investment disputes in the years to comean important precedent limiting ISDS but one that reproduces hierarchy and colonial fantasies of superiority of the US and Canada over Mexico (Perez-Rocha 2020).
It is worth reflecting further on ISDS and the awareness that corporate lobby groups have had on the popularity of 'trade' as a selling point for expanded corporate rights, including rules around IP rights, capital mobility, banning performance requirements, restricting public procurement or promotion the liberalisation of digital services (Gill 2003, Rodrik 2018).Support for FTAs has often polled higher than support for 'globalization,' the latter of which impliesin terms of valuesissues beyond economic prosperity, including immigration, corporate power, or declining national sovereignty (Acquaviva et al. 2018, Wolfe and Acquaviva 2018, EKOS Research Associates 2020).Recognising this, TNCs have worked tirelessly to connect pro-corporate policies to 'free trade' (McNally 2006, Bhagwati 2008, Kellogg 2019).Trump was able to temporarily break the link between ISDS and 'trade,' connecting it instead to 'globalization,' something particularly appealing to a white nationalist base rooted in xenophobia and paranoia, and opposed, in highly conspiratorial terms, to a 'globalist' world order (Sioh 2018, Kellogg 2019, Santín Peña 2021).Not to be deterred, the corporate sector has continued to append new policy mechanisms to FTAs, including 'good' regulatory practices as they seek to address 'behind the borders' barriers to trade.Thus the USMCA contains a new chapter on 'Good Regulatory Practices' (Chapter 28) that will enhance corporate influence over domestic policies, offering new avenues, as Senior Trade Researcher Stuart Trew, argues, for 'pre-empting, forestalling or weakening pro-consumer or pro-environment policies and regulations before they are ever implemented' (Trew 2019, 10-1).
Despite limitations, however, the changes to ISDS also reveal how the sudden renegotiation of the USMCA opened doors that had seemed closed, temporarily softening the foreclosure of trade fetishism and allowing politicians, unions, and social movements to pressure for new changes.As Angelo DiCaro, Director of Research at Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union, told me: 'It was the first time we had an established longstanding free trade agreement that now was being opened up.So all of the critiques that had built over time, all of the failures that we identified, there was a platform now to actually infuse some new ideas into how to do things differently.' 4  The push for new changes were met by ongoing efforts to reassert mastery and foreclose around trade fetishism.The idea of a stand-alone gender chapter was rejected by the US, although some components made it into the agreement, and the idea has had impacts on global trade policy, contributing to ongoing discussions around gender and trade initiatives (Macdonald andIbrahim 2019, Brodsky et al. 2021).Advanced by the Trudeau government, the idea of a gender chapter was a nonstarter for Trump, whose electoral success was in part based on appeals to white masculinist identity and perceptions of lost status internationally and domestically (Sioh 2018).The Trump approach to the negotiations was heavily masculine, including an aggressive approach and insistence on dominating other partnerstrade itself was not the problem, but rather the US needed to assert mastery over its partners, portrayed in feminised terms as irrational, demanding, passive, emotional, and weak.The Trump administration resisted meaningful discussion around gender, upholding a conventionaland foreclosedunderstanding of trade, where issues of social reproduction (around unpaid reproductive work, care obligations, gender discrimination) were dismissed and 'devalued as emotional behaviour … associated with the non-market sector' (Hannah et al. 2022(Hannah et al. , 1371)).
The introduction of a new, stand-alone environment chapter marked a more notable change.Chapter 24 affirms commitments to existing multilateral treaties, recognises the importance of conservation and protecting biodiversity (including constraining subsidies for illegal, unreported, and unregulated fisheries) and is technically open to enforcement through binding dispute resolution.At the same time, hurdles to genuine enforceability remain; while any organisation can make a submission to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) if they think a country has failed to enforce its own environmental laws, the CEC 'may' consider the submission if it meets various criteria, including that it 'appears to be aimed at promoting enforcement rather than at harassing industry.' 5 The chapter also makes no recognition of climate change.Thus, while on the one hand opening the door to a discussion around trade and the environment, it simultaneously forecloses it, directing trade/environment issues toward biodiversity loss as opposed to other major issues, such as fossil fuel exports (Malkawi and Kazmi 2020, Perez-Rocha 2020).While Mexico is an important producer of fossil fuels, the US and Canada are the 3rd and 4th largest oil exporters in the world, have greater historic responsibility to address carbon emissions, and are deeply invested in avoiding discussion around climate change and fossil fuels (Lee 2018).Mexico is also likely to have greater challenges enforcing its laws around biodiversity protection (due to state capacity, lack of resources, challenges with criminal networks and corruption).As a result, as with ISDS reforms, the environmental chapter could end up producing outcomes biased against Mexico.As of November 2022, Mexico was the target of five out of six active submissions under consideration by the CEC. 6 More significant than the environment chapter is the new labour chapter and the Rapid Response Labour Mechanism (RRLM).Unlike the old NAFTA side agreement, which covered a narrow range of issues and was never used for dispute settlement, the new agreement has a labour chapter included in it with tougher enforcement mechanisms.Chapter 23 contains stronger commitments to basic labour rights, including affirmation of the 1998 ILO Declaration on Rights at Work, commitments to eliminate discrimination based on sex or gender, and an appendix where Mexico commits to overhaul is labour laws to insure effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining. 7After initial negotiations over the labour chapter, recognising a potential window of opportunity, unions and US Democrats lobbied the administration to include stronger enforcement.This lead to the adoption of the RRLM, the first of its kind (DiCaro and Macdonald 2021, Macdonald andDiCaro 2022).The RRLM exists as two bilateral appendix (A and B) in Chapter 31, on Dispute Settlement, between the United States and Mexico, and between Canada and Mexico. 8 What is unique about the RRLM is that it allows states to trigger a review of alleged labour violations, with the prospect of tariffs aimed specifically at a company if deemend in violation.Once a party requests a review, the respondent has 45 days to reply and remediate the situation before the door is open to dispute settlement.As of January 2023, the RRLM had been used six times by the US to challenge corrupt, 'protection' unions in Mexican factories, leading to free elections and new independent unions in all cases, with more cases in the works.These results emerged out of actions taken by Mexico prior to any dispute settlement being necessary, either by conducting new elections or striking an agreement with the company to renounce the illegitimate union (DiCaro and Macdonald 2021, Macdonald andDiCaro 2022).Laura Macdonald and Angelo DiCaro also observe that the USMCA has 'led to new forms of support from trade unions and non-governmental organisations in Canada and the United States for promoting labour freedom and democracy in Mexico,' including tens of millions of dollars in funding for joint labour activities between the three countries (Macdonald and DiCaro 2022).
Despite unprecedented changes, there are still shortcomings in the reforms.Mexico has committed to reassess the legitimacy of over 80,000 collective agreements, but missed the deadline of May 2023.The decision to use the RRLM is based on the government in power and future administrations may be less amenable to its use than President Joe Biden in the US and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico (Macdonald and DiCaro 2022).The RRLM, moreover, is also designed in ways that reasserts US and Canadian fantasies of mastery over Mexico.Bilateral RRLM agreements exist only between the US-Mexico and Canada-Mexico, and both are limited to 'priority sectors,' in manufacturing, services, or mining (Curi 2020). 9This excludes those sectors where the most vulnerable Mexican migrant workers are employed in the US and Canada, in particular agriculture and construction (Passel and Cohn 2016).Consequently, Mexico will will almost certainly be the main target of labour cases under RRLM (Curi 2020, Perez-Rocha 2020).New advances in trade justice are met by ongoing efforts by powerful states to reassert mastery and foreclosure around a simplified vision of trade that better suits their interests in the long term.
Through this uneven process, possibilities have emerged for trade justice groups to expand their 'ratchet' mechanism, pushing for progressive changes to trade agreements in a manner similar to how TNCs have long pressed their own agenda into the symbolic imaginary of 'trade.'As Peter Drahos (2003) has observed with the case of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), despite the fact that such monopoly protections run contra to 'free trade,' pharmaceutical companies has successfully entrenched them in the global trading regime (Rodrik 2018).Deploying a 'global regulatory ratchet for intellectual property,' they have strengthened initial IPRs, shifting strategically from multilateral, to regional, to bilateral bodies to push their agenda onto numerous treaties (Drahos 2003, 7).While trade justice groups will never possess similar resources, the gains of the RRLM reveals the ways in which such mechanisms can serve as a potential trade justice ratchet, advancing what is considered legitimate to 'trade' negotiations (social and ecological rights), and then expanding and strengthening the expectations around what this involves (around enforceability, coverage, speed, and transparency).The RRLM can be seen as representing an important twist in an nevercompleted ratcheting process.

Conclusion
This article is premised on the view that the seemingly undeterred desire for trade must be examined with attention not only to its material motivations, but to its libidinal drives, with 'trade' valued not solely for its immediate impacts but, for its connection with symbolic and ideological desires beyond strictly rational determinations.Rather than viewing these values as detached or imposed by elite hegemony, trade often works as an object of desirethe elusive object a, which ultimately fails to fully satisfy.This leads to a recasting of trade as a fetishised object of global capital, offered as a mysterious source of pleasure and substitute for lack, desired for its emotional fantasies (Böhm and Batta 2010, Wilson 2014, Konings 2015, Kapoor 2020).In this sense, the negotiations for the USMCA were cut through with libidinal goals (Othering, aggression, anger, racism, superiority), which were not side games or distractions, but rather central to trade policy and its seductive content.
Such an approach offers directions for exploring how trade is linked to our desires for oversimplification, with trade policy heavily influenced by disavowed trauma, fantasies of mastery, and the desire to eliminate messy politics and difference through foreclosure.It is the deeply held, unconscious desires that are expressed through trade fetishism that make trade so appealing despite ideological critique of its limits (Kapoor 2020, Kapoor et al. 2023).As Pohl (2022, 164) has observed, there is no easy way to overcome or see beyond fetishism.One cannot merely expose the illusion behind a fetish, as the illusion is part of social reality.Rather than 'getting over' the fetish, Pohl argues we need to 'get with' it, understanding not what lies beneath it, but what it gives to people that makes it so attractive (even to a critical observer).Attempts to directly expose the fetishised object, or attain 'cynical distance' from it, can lose sight of its symbolic qualities, leading instead for psychoanalytic thinkers to call for examining fetishised objects 'awry' or 'obliquely,' in an indirect manner that recognises the power of fantasy (Žižek 1989, Watt 2021, Pohl 2022).
From this vantage, it is worth noting how some of the most substantive challenges to the USMCA have come from a messy and at times contradictory politics that have confronted hegemonic trade visions awry, sidestepping direct confrontation with the prized 'trade' object.After decades of trade justice groups pushing for an end to FTAs with limited success, they have instead realised gains by demanding new components within trade agreementsincluded not only in the USMCA, but other FTAs as well.The gains are mixed, partial, and gradual, but also unprecedented.This includes previously unimagined reductions in transnational investment rights and, through the RRLM, possibly the first genuinely enforceable labour chapter.These will form major advocacy points for trade justice groups in the years to come (DiCaro and Macdonald 2021) 10 as part of a global trade justice ratchet whose full impact has yet to be determined.As Unifor's DiCaro stated, advancing social responsibility components in FTAs does not entail unions abandoning their critique of free trade, but rather finding ways 'to extend that critique to other free trade negotiations to articulate why those are also failed models,' ultimately 'creating the conditions to really advocate for stronger labour standards.' 11The significance of these achievements should not be underestimated.As recent as November 2019, a high-ranking Canadian trade official was pressed by civil society representatives about why the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) had no genuinely enforceable labour and environment rules, compared to strong mechanisms for investor rights.The official brushed the issue off, warning about 'going nuclear' on enforceable labour and environmental rights in a way that would 'paralyze the discussion' at negotiations. 12 A great deal has changed since then in only a short amount of time.
At the same time, trade fetishism reasserts itself throughout the process of confrontation and change, revealing the limits of an indirect approach, which, as Pohl observes, leads to a cycle of 'defetishisation and refetishisation' (Pohl 2022, 154-155).Defetishising always brings with it the threat of strengthening the (now slightly modified) fetish (Žižek 1989, Žižek 2015).The implications of this for mobilisation and advocacy around trade justice are many.First, while making the case that trade is about social and environmental rights can deployed by trade justice groups to demand genuine action, it can simultaneously be used in myriad ways, including by defenders of the system to insist that the global capitalism is 'inclusive.'This tension is ongoing and unavoidable, requiring continuous effort by justice groups to avoid settling on initial gains and instead push for their expansion and replicationalong these lines, pressure from unions and trade justice groups, particularly in the US, led to official declaration in 2023 that the new, 14 country Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) Supply Chain Agreement would include facility-specific mechanism for addressing labour rights allegations.Second, efforts to adopt more overtly oppositional positions against specific components of FTAs would seem to be most effective when trade itself is approach awry, arguing that such components (like ISDS) are not truly about actual trade.Third, while the above discussion might seem to indicate that explicitly anti-trade activism is futile, given the popularity of trade discourse, this is not necessarily the case.Instead, the psychoanalytic approach offered here points to the necessity of recognising how people are not so much duped by the idea of trade than seduced by its fetishistic qualities (Kapoor et al. 2023).Alternatives to global trade must offer something equally pleasurable, a vision the attracts people not strictly at the level of the intellect but, as Kapoor observes, seduces them 'at the level of the passions' (Kapoor 2014(Kapoor , 1624)).Given how admittedly difficult this task is, progressive forces have not been particularly effective at achieving it.But, this does not meanwith greater attention paid to the seductive content of tradethis must inevitably be the case in the future.
In the current context, with trade justice groups opting progressively for a strategy of demanding more social/environmental rights within trade agreements, significant changes to the goals and vision of 'trade' have occurred simultaneously with a reassertion of disavowal, mastery, and foreclosure around trade as a reduced object (expunged of messiness, trauma, and difference) offering a simplified solution to the inequalities embedded in global trade.Important gains in labour and investment regulations in the USMCA have simultaneously been designed in ways that reasserts US and Canadian mastery over Mexico (Perez-Rocha 2020).Efforts to fundamentally alter the trajectory of trade politics invariably find themselves fenced in, not only by the power of elites, formidable in its own right, but by popular and deeply-held trade fantasies (Kapoor 2020, 125).The concept of trade fetishism cannot demonstrate how to easily overcome this tension, as much as it can point to the often unanticipated or unexpected possibilities that emerge through critical recognition of it, and of appreciating the centrality of both the material and seductive power of trade in determining trade policies and outcomes.While some trade policies remain rigidly confined to dominant fantasies, others offer ways to provisionally 'traverse' the fantasies (Žižek 2015), while others point to contradictory mixtures of both.The outcome for trade politics is the pursuit of a complex interplay between gains and losses, through a perpetual process of contesting and reimaging the symbolic content of what is and is not central to the pursuit of 'trade.'Notes