To the Editor The Nation 33 Irving Place New York, New York 10003 Dear Editor:
Without a shred of evidence, Alexander Cockburn (The Nation, January 3, 2000) accuses the labor/environmental coalition opposed to Bill Clinton's scheme to bring China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) of racism. As a result, he ends up singing left-wing harmony to the braying chorus of neo-liberals desperate to discredit the movement that derailed fast track in Washington, stopped the Multinational Agreement on Investment in Paris, and put 40,000 people into the streets to upset the WTO meeting in Seattle.
I would have thought Cockburn more astute than to fall for Big Dollar's story line that pits developing and developed countries' workers against each other. The real losers from the WTO wreck in Seattle, chants the Economist, are the poor countries whose starving children are being denied sweatshop work by selfish American workers afraid of losing their jobs. Just so, echoes Cockburn, referencing African and Caribbean "nations" who regard labor and environmental standards as - horror of horrors - protectionist!
The editors of the Economist know what they are doing. What Cockburn misses is that in the post-Cold War age the issue of distribution is becoming less a matter of countries and more a matter of class. The WTO is not a multicultural Boys and Girls Club that should be open to all the children in the neighborhood. It is an enforcer of the the Washington Consensus, designed to protect the interests of the world's investors at the expense of the world's workers. The managers of China Inc. want in so they can accelerate their transition from the long march to socialism to the fast lane to state-subsidized capitalism. The deal with Clinton will lock in their access to foreign capital in return for bringing to Wall Street an immense labor pool kept cheap at the point of a bayonet.
Cockburn is uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric criticizing China's state-controlled economy. Fair enough. We should all be careful of what we say. In any case, the issue is not China's state enterprises, per se. Nor even its lack of independent trade unions or NGO's. These are characteristics of an internally developing socialist economy. But when the state is no longer committed to social solidarity and places its assets in the service of multinational capitalism the game changes. Absent democratic trade unions and political institutions, workers have no bargaining power. In a country the size of China, the effect on wages in the global market is profound - and is everyone's business.
Cockburn says globalization is nothing new - just an elaboration of the capitalist process. Exactly. In the last century, the creation of a continental economy in America required a continental struggle to restrain the brutality of the market by asserting the rights of labor. Now that capital has broken through the constraints of the nation-state, the struggle to create space for ordinary people to live in dignity must be expanded to include the places like the WTO where Big Dollar sets the rules for global commerce
Forget it, says Cockburn, the global economy is always a zero-sum game; a central American worker gets another dime an hour and a U.S. textile worker loses a job. But this is not the way it has to be. A sensibly managed trading system can bring benefits to all workers. But because "Capitalism dictates the choices," Cockburn shrugs, nothing effective can be done "in this era at least" - whatever "this era" means. Like Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, and the Third Way liberals of the Washington Consensus, he lectures progressives to stick to domestic issues, even as globalization increasingly places corporate power beyond national boundaries. Cockburn's left sentiments are irrelevant here. Big Dollar doesn't care if you arrive at your state of hopelessness through a neo-liberal analysis or a neo-Marxist one. The important thing is to reinforce the message that, as Margaret Thatcher's so famously put it, "There is No Alternative."
Cockburn tries to scramble out of this ideological cul-de-sac by suggesting we all support the charity of his choice - reducing the debt of poor nations. I'm for it (see "Debt: Just Forget It," The Nation, November 22, 1999). But pleading with the international bankers to do what they themselves admit is in their own best interest is hardly a challenge to their power. Unsurprisingly, debt relief is now being used to bludgeon the world poorest nations into accepting Goldman Sachs' definition of sound fiscal policy.
He also advises "solidarity." But it is hardly solidarity with Chinese workers to concede the codification of their oppression implicit in the Clinton deal with their overseers. Already millions of Chinese workers have been structurally readjusted into the gutter, income is being rapidly redistributed upward, and the meager safety net - which included free health care - is being shredded.
By and large, American workers and their unions understand the class issue in the global economy better than Cockburn does. His charge that their opposition to Clinton's China deal is fear of the yellow peril is slander, just as was the charge by corporate lobbyists that labor's opposition to NAFTA was anti-Mexican. I have talked about trade issues to hundreds of U.S. trade union audiences; the biggest ovation comes in response to the point that their enemy is not the Mexican, or Chinese, or Russian worker but the system that sets them against each other.
The building of solidarity both within and across borders is one of the major tasks facing the left in this new century. The solidarity exhibited between American labor and the various other tribes of the left in Seattle is an important step forward. It needs nurturing, confidence and the experience of working together. It doesn't need reckless charges of racism to sap its strength.
On the lighter side, Cockburn's ad hominem shots from the hip miss most of his targets. Equating the labor-environmentalist coalition with the imperialist powers that suppressed the Boxer Rebellion a century ago seems to have no purpose other than to remind the less well born of his illustrious pedigree. His comment on "Many liberal NGO types [unnamed]," i.e., that the "the debacle in Somalia and to some extent the Kosovo nightmare, were their shows", must be a joke. And given my own long-time opposition to U.S. policy toward Cuba, his canard linking "progressive intellectuals from the Economic Policy Institute" with those who administer the siege of Cuba is absurd.
At any rate, the reality is that Big Dollar is planning to do whatever it must to ram its Chinese deal through this Congress. It wants the deal. And it wants to take the wind out of the sails of solidarity hoisted in Seattle by proving that Cockburn is right: resistence is hopeless because capital is master.
So who exactly is the enemy here? asks Cockburn. Right question. Wrong answer.
Sincerely,
Jeff Faux
President
Economic Policy Institute JF/ksw