Faux on Cockburn

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Tue Jan 11 06:33:30 PST 2000



>This is a real reach.

Please, Scott, why force me to repeat myself. The EPI, AFL-CIO, Teamsters all seem to have agreed that the campaign for non application of China was the real mandate it had received from the Seattle riots. This may be a reach on their part of the meaning of the Seattle protest, but an anti China, nationalist reach it certainly is.


>
>For example at the steelworkers conference in Seattle that week on
>"Building Global Trade Union Solidarity" the message was consistent and
>from all participants from all continents: "We have a common enemy and it
>is the transnational corporations. And they do harm everywhere they operate
>including in the industrial countries. They try and play workers against
>each other everywhere."

Sure, people think corporations are greedy. The main problem though is thought to be foreign ruling political classes forcing "our" greedy corporations to relocate abroad in order to circuvment trade barriers and exploit child and slave labor. So the *main* struggle post Seattle became one to impose penalties and barriers on foreign political ruling classes. This is a conception quite functional for the continuation of the bourgeois order.

And in fact the line on child labor was and is: "If
>the greedy corporations can get away with it overseas, then they will find
>away to reintroduce it here." According to UNITE they already have in some
>of the bigger US cities.

Do you know--or care--what the consequence of the Harkin Bill was on, say, Bangladeshi children?


>
>And the anger sure wasn't aimed at foreign governments it was aimed
>straight at Washington DC. More than one labor speaker at more than one
>event said the next stop is Washington to get us the hell out of the WTO.

Wow! What a radical demand. Maybe Farrakhan will show up in Washington to have black men protest themselves as well.

I will respond to Nathan as soon as I figure out what the real red herring in this debate is (quite possibly the concern with downward pressure on US wages from Chinese import competition).

By the way, I did think the UPS strike was an example of a real class struggle--that fell quite short of revolution, alas.

Yours, Rakesh



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