Bill Fletcher Jr. on Internationalism (Jim O'Connor)

Barbara Laurence cns at cats.ucsc.edu
Sat May 6 13:23:54 PDT 2000


It's interesting to see what Bill Fletcher Jr. left out of his account of globalization and neoliberalism - namely, the imperialist role of the US and its instruments, IMF, etc. He defines "globalization" as an "orchestrated process by governments and economic elites to address many of the problems which capitalism has been facing over the last 20-30 years, by reorganizing the world economy at the expense of working people." But it's the U.S. that "orchestrates" this process. Japan and EU are moving however slowly toward a multipolar world, often opposed to U.S. globalization schemes. The US government and US finance capital are or should be our targets, not "governments and economic elites" in general. I like much of what he has to say, especially about international labor solidarity, but this idea remains much too abstract unless we understand the (rough) equation between globalization=neoliberalism=US imperialism. Just how much and in what ways US workers or some fraction or fractions of US workers "benefit" from globalization=neoliberalism is something to discuss and debate. But even if US workers are all in the same boat as workers in the South, as Fletcher implies, that doesn't make US imperialism any less globalistic or neoliberal. Fletcher puts his finger on one big difference between US unions and, e.g., South African unions - that the latter think of themselves as representing all workers, not just union workers, while US unions rarely act as if they are representing the US working class as a whole. He doesn't try to explain this difference, perhaps because one of many explanations that makes sense is that class politics within the only imperialist power is or would be regarded as treason. Jim O'Connor



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