>The stance of labor and other insurgents in LDC's is
>well-taken as a concern, at least in principle.
Mazur said African unions were on UNITE!'s side in this dispute. Dunno about this; maybe he's right, maybe he's fantasizing, maybe he's lying, maybe said unions are running dog lackeys of the Sweeneyite social imperialists. But I'd like to seem some evidence one way or the other before I make up my mind.
I found this passage from Patrick Bond's piece mystifying:
> 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.
The only conditions I know of are pretty standard structural adjustment conditions - not labor or environmental clauses. What are you talking about here Patrick?
> 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 the WTO has done nothing to include social clauses - nor is it likely to. Incorporating anything but symbolic social clauses goes against the very logic of the WTO, which is to treat the commodity as pure fetish object, abstracted from the conditions of its production. When I interviewed Bob Naiman on the radio the other week, we agreed that the WTO principles are straight out of the first chapter of Capital.
> 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.
So the corporatist union sellouts demanded a "less protectionist" set of rules - i.e., very Friedman-pleasing ones. This doesn't advance the Bond-Bhandari line, does it? I'm confused.
Doug
>