The Mexican analogy is a good one for the China WTO fight. By the logic of this piece (and the general argument supporting the China WTO deal), progressives should never have fought the passage of NAFTA, since all the arguments over xenophobia and limited strategy could be made against that fight as well. Yet the NAFTA campaign is never mentioned, a truly bizarre omission.
But since unions and environmentalists did fight NAFTA with a broad progressive consensus, the campaign against the China deal is hardly some new "hijacking" of the movement, but a logical continuation of the fight against NAFTA, against GATT& the WTO, against fast-track authority and against the MAI. There are no doubt some forces using chauvinist arguments in arguing against the China deal, but that says little about the rightness of the argument for the strategy; it just encourages a critique of rhetoric used. (Much as good faith opponents of the Kosovo intervention criticized some of the pro-Milosevic rhetoric coming from some quarters.)
I reply:
Nathan, I think you are obscuring some important distinctions between Mexico-NAFTA and China-WTO.
NAFTA was (and is) principally about opening up Mexican markets, labor, and land to U.S. capital (exporters and direct investors, agri-biz/industrial/ finance capital). It was (and is) neo-imperialist in character -- involving U.S. capital out-maneuvering its EU/E. Asian rivals and committing its Mexican ruling class/political elite "junior partners" in this mission (which was on its heels after the flameout of ISI and the debt crisis). Various strands of the Mexican left (independent labor and peasant organizations, the PRD) actively opposed NAFTA and actively sought the assistance of the U.S. left. The U.S. left could in good conscience shake off charges of "protectionism" b/c it was clear that Mexican ejido dwellers and workers would be harmed by NAFTA as much as or more than certain segments of the U.S. industrial working class.
The bid by the market Stalinists of the PRC (or however one wants to characterize the leadership of the CP) to join the WTO is a bird of a different feather. China's "state capitalist" elite seeks to join the WTO to reap the benefits of more thorough participation in the global neo-liberal order (with negative ramifications for Chinese workers, and especially peasants, to be sure). China's ruling class is not repositioning itself to become a "junior partner" of U.S. capital (U.S. capital will have no better or worse access to Chinese markets/labor/land than EU capital, Japanese capital, or "offshore Chinese" capital). As much as you and I and everyone else on this list despise the WTO and everything it stands for, the PRC leadership simply seeks to belong to the principal _multilateral_ forum by which different geo-political blocs of capital cut deals w/one another.
One can draw different conclusions from the fact that there are significant distinctions between the Mexico-NAFTA case and the China-WTO case.
One possible set of conclusions is this:
If one is against U.S. neo-imperialism, one opposes NAFTA as an instrument of U.S. neo-imperialism.
If one is against global neo-liberalism, one should argue for and work on behalf of reforming/overthrowing the instruments of global neo-liberalism (the WTO, the Bretton Woods institutions, the financial markets, the TNC's, whatever) -- not against the bid by any one country's leadership to insert that state more decisively into the global neo-liberal order.
The set of conclusions I derive above is not the only set that one can derive (for example, because of China's size, human rights record, absence of bourgeois democracy, etc., one could argue that opposing China's entry into the WTO _is_ to oppose the furthering of global neo-liberalism) -- but to base one's political conclusions on a Mexico-NAFTA/China-WTO analogy is, I think, a false move.
John Gulick