On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I have mixed feelings about anti-free-trade struggles. I wanted to see
> NAFTA defeated just to stick it in the bourgeoisie's eye, but I was
> really bothered by lots of the rhetoric around NAFTA, which was deeply
> nationalist and often anti-Mexican. A lot of it seriously alienated
> Mexicans, with whom we should be allying with, not offending...
Some of the difficulty comes from accepting the propaganda that NAFTA had anything to do with free trade. Opposition to NAFTA did not commit one to protectionism, jingoistic or any other king, because NAFTA wasn't a free-trade agreement. It was a charter for investors' rights that among other things omitted elements that any 19th-century commentator (such as Marx) would take as essential to free trade -- such as the free movement of labor.
--C. G. Estabrook