>Yes, China is a bigger market and a bigger player, but both NAFTA and the
>China WTO deal are both about the US corporate elite leveraging trade deals
>to exact market-oriented concessions from both Mexico and China. There are
>analytic differences but in terms of the fair trade labor-environment
>coalitions of the 1990s, the differences are not so qualitatively different.
>And definately not so different that an article can fail to even analyze the
>anti-China deal movement without reference to its evolution out of the NAFTA
>fight.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
I now reply:
The "left/progressive" critique of NAFTA (unlike the Perot/Buchanan critique) was directed against a creature drawn up by U.S. big capital in cahoots with the Mexican ruling class -- it essentially directed attention to the "neo-imperialist" character of NAFTA, which was, after all, a bilateral (well, trilateral) deal.
Chinese entry into the WTO is much less about a devil's pact between U.S. capital and the Chinese ruling class. First, the WTO is a multilateral organization -- no favorable terms/conditions for U.S. capital (although, of course, the U.S. has significant but not hegemonic influence in the WTO). Second, since the WTO already exists w/hundreds of member nation-states, contending that China shouldn't be in the WTO when dozens of other cheap labor/repressive gov't states are in the WTO degenerates into jingoism-as- anti-communism and plays into the hands of the anti-globalist right.
IMHO to the extent that U.S. leftists/progressives focus on the bad behavior of states other than their own they should focus on those states which are under the thumb of U.S. imperialism (like Latin America, the Philippines, and so on) and not cast stones -- which is not to say that I don't recognize the authoritarian and property-and-perks-accumulating nature of the PRC regime (at the same time low wages in China are not simply the artifact of PRC repression but are partially traceable to Western imperialism from the mid-19th to the mid-20th Century).
I think a much better approach for U.S. progressives/leftists would be to build bridges w/Chinese activists/movements seeking alternatives to full-blown Chinese incorporation into the neo-liberal global system (although as you have pointed out, this is tough to do given the absence of "civil society" in China). Better yet, for U.S. progressives/leftists to continue to develop ties and undertake joint actions w/workers and peasants of the world to abolish the WTO.
But I guess I'm repeating myself, and, you're right, the contrasts are slippery. Still, it seems ass-backwards to argue that China can't be in the WTO, when most other countries on the face of the globe are in the WTO -- as opposed to focusing on dismantling the WTO itself.
(I won't be that bummed if China doesn't gain admittance to the WTO -- I can't honestly say I've been following events on Capitol Hill at all, or explored the question of whether Congressional opposition to the end of the yearly reviews even matters -- but I sure wish this would come about as a consequence of U.S. labor/enviros acting out of concern for Chinese workers/peasants, and having a clue about what the consequences of Chinese exclusion from the WTO will have on the long-term prospects for some form of democratic socialism there -- obviously not any strong possibilities on the horizon and certainly a question I can't begin to answer).
Cheers,
John Gulick