Social Protectionism

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Tue Mar 7 22:12:08 PST 2000



> From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
> Doug, gimme a f...g break, BEDFELLOWS!

Yeah Doug, you and other comrades have to understand that Rakesh is putting forward a perfectly sound point of view, one that has the support of the majority of radical development critics and better trade union intellectuals in my Jo'burg/CapeTown circuits.

I did a rap vaguely along the same lines for the Z-Net Commentary which perhaps they won't mind me circulating as it's a month old already... (Critical comments welcomed, but no lumping with Pat Buchanan PLEASE!)

***

Workers of the world, transcend the wedge!

INTRO: Southern Africa is also grappling with divisions between and among union and eco-social movement activists, writes Patrick Bond from Johannesburg. The only way forward is to make shutting the WTO, World Bank and IMF the first strategic priority.

Divide-and-conquer is an all too familiar gambit of a ruling elite under stress. Thus Seattle demonstrators, together with a growing international movement struggling in the same spirit in many other sites, have found themselves subject to both real and invented splits since stepping up to the world stage last November 30.

Every frightened establishment commentator now harps on about the partially-material, partially-mythical breach between allegedly protectionist French farmers or molly-coddled US trade unionists, on the one hand, and on the other, dirt-poor peasants blocked from export crop production or low-paid Third World workers suffering prohibitions on unionizing, a paucity of safety and health laws, competition from child laborers, toxic environmental conditions.

With pernicious intent, this caricatured division has been sewn and woven into public debates about post- Seattle world order reconstruction, in a terribly confusing way. The most disturbing manifestation may be the manner in which China-bashing has distracted some of the Washington, DC consumer, environment and labor leaders who otherwise last November began making important steps towards internationalism.

If we take as a first principle that internationalist solidarity is violated by promoting the power of an oppressor nation against an oppressed nation, especially without the consent and indeed request of the people most affected, then it is easy to support boycotts against apartheid-era South Africa and Burma--for whom sanctions called for by popular, democratic movements translate into a strategic attack on local oppressors--but impossible to stomach a moralizing Bill Clinton and those allied labor aristocrats whose trade interests are imperialist or at best narrowly protectionist.

But to notice, to grapple with and to transcend the establishment's "wedge issue" strategy, is also to recognise and squarely confront the grain of truth here. For radicals will have to adopt an equally potent strategy to contend with the many free-trade ideologues and bureaucrats from multinational corporations, media, academia, the WTO and likeminded states and agencies who seek to seduce pliable movement bureaucrats from NGOs, unions and environmental groups with the offer of "a seat at the table."

Precisely this conflict of interests emerged in Southern Africa late last year. In an eerie parallel to the Sweeney-Hoffa rerouting of the Seattle labor march away from the Convention Center and their repeated denials of intent to "shut down" the WTO, some leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) are also going "corporatist," espousing utopian notions of social contracts between big global government, transnational corporations and the leading fractions of unions.

This is surprising, not only because of SA's recent history of vibrant shopfloor protest, but also because, at first glance, it would appear that the interests of the world's workers lie in a concerted programme to raise the standard of living (including gender equity and environmental protections) of those at the bottom. SA is somewhere in the middle, and Cosatu regularly expresses concern about the flight of jobs to Bangladesh, Indonesia, China and other sites of ultra- cheap labor. The goal for Cosatu, just as much for the AFL-CIO, is to slow relocation and outsourcing by supporting struggles to raise wages and working conditions in maquiladores, export-processing zones and similar settings.

But to this end, the campaign to include social, labor, governance and environmental clauses (known simply as the "Social Clause") in trade agreements became extremely thorny during the 1990s.

For after a second glance, many progressive African social movements, NGOs, churches and women's groups, development agencies, technical think-tanks and intellectuals--some of them gathered in the Ghana-based Africa Trade Network--began condemning the way in which international institutions like the WTO, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as powerful Northern governments, impose conditions on what they argue is already a terribly unequal trade, investment and financing relationship with the South.

These differences emerged more clearly following a November 1999 Johannesburg workshop--hosted by progressive staff of Oxfam/Britain--attended by key officials of the Southern African Trade Union Coordinating Council (especially from Zimbabwe and Zambia) and regional social movement activists. That workshop's "Statement on the Seattle Ministerial" rejected "the widening of the ambit of issues under the WTO through the inclusion of the Social Clause" because the potential value of clauses was outweighed, in the activists' view, by the damage done to power relations through amplifying the legitimacy and power of the WTO.

But Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi--who did not attend--immediately disassociated the broader regional Council (which he presides over) from the workshop statement. Instead, in Seattle a few days later, Vavi joined forces with the South African government and local big business, in demanding from the North a less-protectionist set of international trade rules, but nevertheless including the Social Clause. The joint delegation gained prized access to Green Room deliberations, though came back to Johannesburg as emptyhanded as Charlene Barshefsky.

The Social Clause strategy thus appears discredited, both because of its wedge issue character, and its practical failure as the central trade strategy of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, led by the AFL-CIO. (Emblematic was the oft-violated textile sector pact between trade unionists and executives, mediated by Clinton--indeed the only way that the Nikes and Kathy Lee Giffords adapted their production practices even slightly, was through international solidarity, militant direct action and other forms of public consciousness-raising.)

Is there a way around and above the Social Clause dilemma? To advance more universal, unifying campaigning strategies requires an analysis based not on worker- versus-worker sentiments, but on the broader corporate power relations underlying international trade liberalization. Here it may well be that only particular corporate and global-state targets--including South African-based transnational corporations--work as unifying symbols of the system.

Indeed, the only logical way forward, if this strategy holds, is a united workers' front against any new WTO round, and indeed against the existence of a WTO that serves primarily corporate interests. (Many of the more advanced Southern African social/citizen movements have taken this "abolitionist" position.)

My point here is that in the run-up to the April 16 protests in Washington, the last two decades' worth of arcane attempts at reforming the IMF and World Bank (through varied kinds of Social Clauses) can be dispensed with--as I'll argue more specifically in my next column--not only because they haven't worked, but because the interests of workers and eco-social movements across the world are now, unequivocally, to stop and reverse the process of the construction of a global state that serves only capital's interests.

Patrick Bond teaches at Wits University, Johannesburg, and is active in many local and global social, labor and environmental movements. He is affiliated to the Alternative Information and Development Centre (http://aidc.org.za).



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