By Jack A. Smith, Highland, NY, May 25, 2000
Almost everything about the China trade bill approved by the House May 25 was misrepresented to one degree or another by both sides of the debate.
The winning side, backed by the Clinton Administration, most Republicans, and big business, argued that permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with Beijing would be a great economic boon to the people of the United States and would act to improve human rights in China.
The losing side, backed by the AFL-CIO, many Democrats and liberals, argued that the bill would reward the Beijing government for alleged human rights abuses and would take good jobs away from American workers as big corporations moved operations to China.
Underlying both arguments was evident antagonism toward the government of China for not fully embracing capitalism and for the remaining socialism in its political system. Some of the discussion was right out of the Cold War.
In terms of the human rights issue that both sides of the U.S. debate continually raised, neither passage nor failure of the trade bill would have changed anything. China is justly proud of its history, culture and accomplishments and is hardly unaware of its importance. It is simply not going to accept political dictates from American politicians about what it should and should not do.
Frankly, what most Americans think they know about China is influenced by 50 years of gross distortions coming from Washington and the corporate media. China has made extraordinary progress since the revolution and its 1.2 billion people have benefited considerably in terms of their standard of living, health and education. It’s still poor, and is a society with many shortcomings, but it has done far better for its people than the U.S. government and detractors, liberal as well as reactionary, will ever admit.
For its part in the trade clash, China’s government won a victory, but it was more of a political victory internationally and domestically than a great economic victory because there were plenty of big corporations and export-import businesses from other parts of the capitalist world which would have rushed in to fill any void caused by the trade bill’s failure.
China’s international victory is that the world’s dominant capitalist state has been forced to remove barriers to its becoming fully integrated into the global economy. It was past time to end Washington’s abridgment of China’s sovereign right to normal relations. The Beijing government’s internal victory was over the minority left wing of the Communist Party which believes China is going too far too fast down the capitalist road and is reported not pleased about either the trade bill or the prospect of joining the World Trade Organization.
What will normalized trade relations actually mean? In terms of the impact on the U.S. economy, there will be some gains and some loses--and most of it would have happened anyway.
The gains will be in corporate profits earned through investments in low-wage industries and greater exports to China. The Clinton administration and the U.S. capitalism in general supported normal trade relations to garner enormous profits from bringing China ever closer to outright capitalism and being better able to exploit China’s huge markets and workers.
The rich will get even richer in the U.S. as corporate profits pile up. This undoubtedly would have happened under the old “impermanent” trade rules as well. The big difference is that U.S. corporations will now enjoy a more stable investment and trading atmosphere, no longer fearing that foreign rivals will enjoy a competitive advantage should Congress withhold normal relations one year.
The U.S. losses could be in terms of jobs and thus the economic impact on American workers as more domestic investment relocates abroad. The pact might mean the working class will have fewer quality jobs and its standard of living will continue to stagnate. At the same time, prices on some imported goods may go down, but not enough to impact this decline.
The AFL-CIO and its liberal backers wanted to save union jobs by keeping Chinese goods out of the U.S. market through protectionist devices that cannot succeed in today's era of global capitalism. So-called "globalization" is not a choice but a consequence of capitalism’s drive for profits accelerated by higher levels of technology, more efficient transportation, expanding markets resulting from the collapse of the socialist camp, and sharpening intra-capitalist competition,
Capitalist globalization is a system driven by internal rules. The big bucks inevitably will go after cheap labor in order to make even bigger bucks, at home and abroad, resulting in some nations and individuals accumulating great riches while many nations and billions of individuals accumulate poverty and sorrow.
It is true that such a system can be reformed to a degree, but its main features cannot be altered without changing from one system to another. Thus, while the U.S. progressive movement focuses on greedy corporations and such institutions as the World Trade Organization, International Monitory Fund, and World Bank, all these entities are components of a particular economic system that can be tinkered with but not substantially changed until the entire economic system itself is replaced by a different system. The only alternative, it seems to me, is one or another form of socialism.
The AFL-CIO, the political liberals, and most people who opposed the trade bill not only subscribe to the economic system that created the problems they deplore but support the political parties of capitalism as well. The union federation is already spending some $40 million to elect Al Gore and Democratic Party congresspeople. With apologies to the late Deng Xiaoping, the original target of this epithet during China’s cultural revolution, why is the federation focusing its formidable resources on electing as president “the second leading person in power taking the capitalist road”? These union and liberal forces will quite rightly excoriate the uses to which “free trade globalization” has been put, argue against plant relocation abroad, downsizing, reductions in the quality of life, the exploitation of foreign workers and so forth, but then vote for the very political leaders which represent the interests of the existing economic system and its wealthiest beneficiaries--those identified by impolite society as the Ruling Class.
Some progressives will vote for the Green Party’s Ralph Nader, one of the strongest voices against China in the trade debate. Any serious progressive alternative to the two-party system is worthy of support, though the Greens are hardly a labor-based party (which is required to be effective in at least attaining reforms), much less a socialist alternative to capitalism. (By “labor-based” party I am not indicating a manifestation such as New York State’s Working Families Party, which essentially functions “independently” as the Democratic Party’s left wing. In terms of socialist alternatives, the dedicated will vote for one or another socialist or communist party that makes it on to the ballot, as this writer certainly shall.)
For its part, the Chinese economy will grow as a result of more normal trade relations with the U.S. and in its eventual membership in the WTO, but sectors of its own working class will probably suffer as a result of closed “inefficient” factories, exploitative labor conditions, and the continuing reduction in social services as the Chinese government adds more and more elements of capitalism to its socialist system. There are signs, however, that the Chinese working class is getting fed up with this situation. The number of strikes and protests against these conditions is increasing--and the government seems willing to make some reforms to avoid a confrontation with angry workers. It is still possible for the Chinese left to once again dramatically and decisively assert itself in favor of the humanitarian and egalitarian revolutionary socialist ideals and goals which motivated the Chinese revolution in the first place, only this time with a much larger and trained working class. (The genuine power brokers in American society are well aware that the Chinese political pendulum could swing back to the left, which is another reason why the ruling class essentially united behind PNTR and seeks to more quickly entrap China in a capitalist web.)
This writer supported the normalization of U.S. trade relations with China because it was necessary to openly oppose the demagogic Cold War arguments used to continue treating China as a second-class trading partner and a “rogue” country. I also support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization for similar reasons, even though I believe the WTO should be abolished, and hope that the Chinese working class eventually will take a stand against it as a tool of capitalist domination. The overriding issue for the left in this regard is the fight against anti-socialist/anti-communist red-baiting that threatened to infect the developing movement against the corporations. (“They first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist....” Pastor Niemoeller’s words must never be forgotten--in this context as well as Germany circa 1940, though I’m told his famous statement has been bowdlerized into, ”They first came for the Socialists....”)
Some of the arguments against China used by opponents of normal trade relations were provocative, to say the least, especially under the conditions that the United States is the richest country in the world and China--but 50 years out of colonialism, neo-colonialism, semi-feudalism and mass poverty--is a poor country, despite its economic growth. One among many fearful Emails I received from labor friends actually warned against “opening up the world's largest pool of forced labor to U.S.-based transitional corporations.” It was as though passage of the bill would have resulted in Darkness at Noon.
Some of the China bashing was just plain unseemly. We live in a society where over 85% of the jobholders have no union protection, but China’s trade unions were raked over the coals. Chinese unions, it was imparted in scandalized terms, reflect the views of their “human-rights-abusing” government, as though most U.S. unions do not reflect most of the views of their own “human-rights-abusing” government--from supporting the anti-worker assumptions implicit in the very structure of the free enterprise system to its penchant for world domination through force of arms.
We live in a society where workers have no say in the major decisions affecting their lives and only have the choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum for presidential office, but China doesn’t “deserve” equal trade rights because it spurns our kind of democracy. We live in a nation where scores of thousands of prisoners are working for subminimum wages, but China should be isolated for alleged “forced labor” practices. We live where tens of millions of workers are superexploited (not counting the merely exploited), where sweatshops continue to exist, where social services for the poor are dreadful, where health care is a commodity priced to high for many American workers, yet China should be denied trade equality because sectors of its working class are superexploited.
This is said not to justify inequality in China as it trucks on down the capitalist road, but to suggest that a certain dishonesty and opportunistic Cold War fanaticism resides behind the touching “sympathy” shown toward Chinese workers by liberal opponents of the trade deal. China is far better than the Cold Warriors say it is, and in any event the Chinese people will decide their country’s political future, not the “Americans for Algeorge Gorebush” movement. As a leftist I hope the Chinese people move toward socialism and away from theotherism, building on their revolutionary legacy; and as an American I’ll do everything possible to fight against the obstacles Washington will place in China’s way if this gets on the agenda.
The problem of the ever-expanding worldwide and domestic gap between rich and poor, which the growing new oppositional movement correctly opposes, is a problem of the global capitalist economic order, not of trade or the fact that corporations treat workers like dirt. There is only one dominant economy in the world today, and it presides over the lives and well-being of the six billion people of Earth. As such, this system must take responsibility for the fact that 20% of the global population consumes 86% of the world’s goods. The remaining 80% consumes 14% of the goods, including the poorest 20%, with 1.3% of the goods. This situation is getting worse, not better, as global capitalism consolidates itself. All things being equal, according to the United Nations in 1998, in 50 years some 8 billion human beings out of a projected world population of 9.8 billion, will be living in poor countries.
The current anti-corporation struggle launched by U.S. student and progressive forces, unions, liberal think-tanks, consumer and environmental groups is an important part of the struggle against global economic exploitation and oppression. This movement has some distance to go, however, to develop an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist critique. At the same time, this fight can be diverted by right-wing elements which agree with aspects of the struggle (against “free trade,” for example) but also bring with them strong reactionary views which must be opposed. In addition, a liberal force such as the AFL-CIO, while displaying a more progressive stance in recent years on a number of matters, is quite backward in suggesting the enemy of the U.S. working class is “communist China,” not the American corporations or--dare they?--capitalism itself. The union movement's million dollar “no blank check” campaign against normal trade and WTO membership for China contained elements of the old Yellow Peril racism, rightist nationalism and anti-communism wrapped into a new opportunist package for the 2000s.
In terms of saving jobs, curbing corporate abuses, and attempting to “humanize” such institutions as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, it seems bizarre that the labor movement and its supporters fail to recognize that it is self-destructive to support a political party (the Democrats) which has moved sharply to the center-right in recent years and increasingly opposes the very goals toward which labor is supposed to strive. Even greatly weakened compared to a few decades ago, the AFL-CIO could easily become a very powerful force in American progressive politics, especially in combination with the broad popular movements and hundreds of liberal/left single-issue groups, think-tanks, community groups and so on. It is long overdue to form a labor-based mass progressive party to challenge the two-party stranglehold on U.S. politics. But the current labor leadership, however much in advance of its predecessor, is too far behind to contemplate such a move. Until it does, American labor will remain the tail that will never be able to wag the corporate dog.
Even without a party, a progressive-leaning AFL-CIO could enhance its fight against corporate greed and runaway companies a hundred fold through launching a serious campaign of international working-class solidarity by forming close alliances with unions and movements in every country around the world, including with the 100 million member Chinese Federation of Trade Unions. The AFL-CIO has spent the last half of the 20th century undermining left, socialist and communist unions around the world for the CIA and the corporate bosses. And all it got for its efforts was greatly diminished political power, runaway shops, downsizing and a declining standard of living for the working class. Isn’t it time to try something new, such as militantly linking arms with worldwide labor (including the left for a change) against global corporations and taking vigorous action to back up its demands? Millions of Americans outside the labor movement would get behind such a campaign. This wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems, but it would be a big step in that direction.
Until then, let’s build the new movement against corporate greed and the institutions of “globalization,” but also work to bury Cold War thinking within our ranks, break up the two-party system and always keep our eyes on the proverbial prize (end)