May 19, 2000
Defending China's Right to Self-Determination:
Confronting Imperialism, Racism, Chauvinism, and Anti-Communism in the United States
By Eric Mann <ericmann at mindspring.com>
The current struggle over the People's Republic of China -- granting or denying that nation "permanent normal" trade status with the U.S. and granting or denying it admission into the World Trade Organization -- requires a strong intervention by those of us who see our work as building an anti-racist, anti-imperialist U.S. Left against U.S. chauvinism and in favor of China's rights to equality and self-determination in the world.
There is an urgent need to sharpen the anti-imperialist tendency at a time when a series of demonstrations in Seattle and Washington D.C. have the potential to become either a refreshing anti-imperialist intervention in U.S. society or the replication of pro-imperialist politics masquerading as progressive internationalism. In the United States, the world's only superpower, the litmus test of whether a movement is progressive or reactionary is whether it confronts or allies with U.S. imperialism, supports or undermines the movements of self-determination of oppressed nations against its own ruling class, builds or undermines a world wide united front against racism, xenophobia, colonialism, and imperialism.
Throughout U.S. history the vast majority of social movements have been objectively or consciously racist and pro-imperialist. Given the deep-seated racism, national chauvinism, and anti-communism of all sectors of U.S. society, and in particular, the chauvinism of most white U.S. progressives (even most of those calling themselves radicals or even revolutionaries), unconditional support for China's permanent normal trade status, and unconditional admission of China into the WTO are essential challenges to the hysterical and hypocritical moralism of the AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy, and many "human rights," "labor" and "environmental" groups.
Let me outline some of my core assumptions.
The United States and the G7 nations are the main danger to human rights, labor rights, environmental rights, and the main obstacle to anti-colonial forms of self-determination, including socialism, in the world today.
As the world's superpower, the United States dominates every international institution in which it operates -- UN, NATO, IMF, World Bank, WTO. When it fails to dominate an organization, it seeks to destroy it. Thus, during the height of its power after WW II the U.S. pushed the United Nations as one of its essential arms in world affairs (and fought to keep Communist China out for many years.) Then, when China was admitted and the Third World and socialist nations had some power in the UN, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Reagan/Bush evaded any UN authority to challenge U.S. imperialist intervention. Later, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and many anti-colonial forces in the Third World were disoriented and weakened, the U.S. and the Clinton administration turned again to the UN, twisting many arms to get UN approval of the attacks and blockades of Iraq. Then, in Kosovo, when the U.S. saw it did not have Security Council support for its aggression, (because of the opposition of the Soviet Union and China!) it undermined the UN and unilaterally invaded through NATO. In each situation the U.S. dominates and bullies the world. But no one votes whether or not the U.S. should be kicked out of the UN, or NATO, or the WTO. Instead, it is always the U.S. that manipulates discussions about everyone else's human rights records to serve its own objectives -- in the past to stop Communist China from impacting the UN, now to advance its own trade objectives by admitting China into the WTO, tomorrow to try to kick China out of the UN if China proves to be too strong an adversary.
It makes sense for the U.S. ruling class to have such tactical flexibility, but it is disgraceful for alleged progressives in the world's superpower to join in the hypocritical pontificating about whether they think China has made enough "progress" on human rights to warrant "normal" trade status, or should it be admitted into world bodies dominated by their own ruling class. This is little more than the white man's burden revisited.
When we more accurately rename these international institutions -- U.S.-dominated UN, U.S.-dominated NATO, US-dominated IMF, U.S.-dominated World Bank, and U.S.-dominated WTO -- it becomes more apparent just how offensive it is to hear the AFL-CIO and self-appointed U.S. "international human rights groups" demand "Keep China out of the US-dominated WTO."
The U.S. seeks to achieve unfair advantage in all of its trade dealings and will try to impose the most onerous conditions of trade and investment on China. The U.S. objective is to import Chinese goods at the lowest possible prices, and impose U.S. technology, investment, and exports on the Chinese people on terms most favorable to the U.S. -- as well as to use trade and investment as a Trojan horse to undermine Chinese sovereignty if possible.
Conversely, from the perspective of the Chinese people, regardless of their political difference, trade is fundamentally a weapon in the struggle against colonialism and foreign domination. China's objectives, regardless of whether we think their government is socialist or capitalist, is to sell its goods on the world market and to attract foreign capital on terms most beneficial to the Chinese government, the Communist Party, and the Chinese people.
Both parties understand that "normal" trade relations and mutual participation in world bodies such as the WTO do not end the struggle between the imperialist superpower and the Asian Third World nation -- it simply "normalizes" some of the rules of the conflict for an international class struggle between oppressor nation and oppressed nation.
Contrary to the assertions of anticommunist liberals such as Senator Paul Wellstone, "most favored nation" status is not a "privilege" to be doled out by the U.S. Congress based on annual reviews of China's behavior by the world's superpower. Granting China permanent normal trade status, and admission into the WTO will simply curtail the annual rite of imperialist judgementalism and hypocrisy -- and that will be a victory for the international united front against racism and imperialism.
The anti-imperialist left should support the unconditional granting of trade status with China, and the unconditional admission of China into the WTO to challenge the efforts by the Clinton/Gore and other G7 administrations to impose unfair conditions on China -- such as the demand that U.S. and other transnationals be allowed to own more 50% or more of Chinese enterprises. That is why the demand for unconditional admission by the Left is so important, for it then confronts the conditional and imperialist demands of the Clinton administration to exact even further concessions from the Chinese people. The protests of liberal democrats, pro-imperialist environmentalists, and the AFL-CIO against China simply strengthen Clinton's bargaining position -- trying to extract more concessions from China in order to justify his "taking on" the reactionary labor movement in his own country. In this international power play, the role of young white Seattle radicals in joining this shakedown of China is appalling.
Seeing the World Through An Anti-Colonial Lens.
The Chinese people have carried out one of the great revolutions of the 20th century, freeing their people from colonialism, opium, footbinding, prostitution, poverty, starvation, war, and subjugation. They stopped the U.S. invasion of Korea, supported the Vietnamese revolution, and been of enormous help for many Third World revolutions -- including the Black Liberation struggle in the U.S.
Conversely, they have also attacked Vietnam after its successful revolution, moved their economy and society in a capitalist direction, and suppressed internal dissent within the Communist Party, as well as in the trade unions and society at large. But as Mao said, "we must divide one into two" -- China, as with all societies, contains a struggle between progressive and reactionary tendencies. As Chinese leftists and democrats fight it out among themselves as to the best direction for Chinese society, the U.S. Left should focus its main blow on its own government, and the human rights atrocities throughout the world inflicted by the U.S. government.
The debate led by U.S. liberals, labor bureaucrats, and capitalists about the best way to use trade to "civilize" China is racist and reactionary. It must be opposed.
The U.S. Labor bureaucracy -- reactionary at home, reactionary abroad.
The AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy is perhaps most hypocritical. In the name of "human rights," "labor rights," and if you can believe this -- "the environment" -- it opposes China's admission to the WTO and opposes permanent and normal trade status. The strategy of the AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy and the Sweeney administration is reactionary -- a desperate effort to maintain the privileged status of U.S. workers versus other workers in the world, to seek unfair advantage by keeping out both Chinese imports and the export of capital to China by U.S. multinationals. If the AFL-CIO had its way, China could neither import or export unless each transaction helped U.S. transnationals generate a net surplus of jobs for U.S. workers in companies represented by, and long since "organized by" U.S. unions -- representing only a tiny percentage of U.S. workers in manufacturing industries anyway.
I have been working for more than 20 years in the U.S. labor movement -- 15 years of which were spent inside the Service Employees International Union, and the United Auto Workers, as a shop floor and assembly line worker. I have witnessed the U.S. AFL-CIO:
* suppress local labor insurgencies, collaborate with management to fire dissident workers, place dissident and democratic locals into trusteeship,
* work with management to secure every narrow capitalist objective, from labor union "cooperation," Japan bashing against Toyota, and the disgraceful kiss-up campaign of the Steelworkers, "Stand up for Steel" against Japanese steel imports
* deliver their own membership to the Democratic party hook, line, and sinker. The AFL-CIO is as close to a state controlled labor union as any in China or any other country, its only difference is that it is an arm of the Democratic party whereas the Chinese trade unions are an arm of the Communist Party. From my long-term perspective the Chinese party, while dominating its trade unions and often suppressing dissent, has done a lot better job for its workers and trade unions than the Democrats have done for their subordinates in the AFL-CIO,
* opposed every environmental and community based challenge to polluting industries in which their members work -- becoming often the armed protectors of the oil, chemical, and atomic industries, the auto industry, and every other polluting industry. Virtually every AFL-CIO union would rather protect one job for its last member making napalm or benzene or a host of known carcinogens rather than shut down production to challenge capital. The same UAW that is attacking China on the environment has become the enemy of the Honda Civic and the booster of every SUV that is a symbol of bourgeois consumption and a massive assault on the atmosphere.
The U.S. anti-imperialist Left needs a strong presence in the trade unions, and the trade union left needs the most direct confrontation with the AFL-CIO bureaucracy on its reactionary attacks on China. Most U.S. workers in the factories, especially the most privileged and well-paid and yes, white, male workers, see their jobs as part of empire, part of privilege. They rarely want to challenge their own company or their own union, but prefer to rail against the Japanese, the Chinese, anyone threatening their house or car payment. There is a new group of workers, immigrants, women, low-wage service and manufacturing workers who are crying out to be organized. But there is nothing progressive about organizing them against the Chinese, nothing progressive to demand that the U.S. government protect them against Chinese imports. This is a line in the sand -- the U.S. labor Left must take a stand.
Independence in the International Arena: An Anti-Imperialist Focus for the Left
What are some components of an independent, progressive, and internationalist policy?
1) Stop the China bashing -- admit China into the WTO and
grant China permanent and normal trade status without
conditions.
2) Focus the struggle on the role of U.S-based transnational
corporations and the U.S. labor bureaucracy that suppresses
worker rights, human rights, and environmental rights
inside the U.S. and in the world.
3) Generate independent anti-racist, anti-imperialist demands:
* Stop the U.S. blockade of Iraq
* Stop the U.S. embargo of Cuba
* Reinstate Aid to Families with Dependent Children
* Repeal the "Effective Death Penalty Act," the "Three
Strikes Law" and other racist and repressive criminal
justice measures
* Free Mumia Abu Jamal and hundreds of political
prisoners inside the U.S.
* Free the U.S. One Million -- the One Million
Overwhelmingly Black and Latino prisoners inside
U.S. jails, the largest percentage of prisoners of any
nation in the world
* Decriminalize drugs
* End the death penalty
* Zero tolerance for carcinogenic chemicals -- a banning
of all industrial and auto toxins
* Create a national network of shelters and safe houses
for battered women, and initiate a national campaign
against male brutality in the family
* No More Kosovo's -- An End to U.S. saturation bombing
of civilians and provocative attacks on other nations
These demands are not a coherent program, but an effort to hint at a coherent approach to demand development. As the new internationalist left is looking for a strategic sense of direction, focusing on institutions such as the WTO and the World Bank still avoids the main institution that must be named and targeted -- U.S. imperialism. It would be of far greater value for that movement to focus on lifting the blockades of Cuba and Iraq, stopping the U.S. domination of the UN, stopping the U.S. intervention in Europe through NATO, and fighting for international standards on worker rights, and environmental rights. The "race to the bottom" is not created by the Third world, it is created by U.S. imperialism. Demanding from the U.S. a series of policies to strengthen the hand of Third world nations -- such as the unconditional cancellation of imperialist imposed debt, (not forgiveness for Third World "sinners") is also progressive. Demanding that U.S. transnationals be required to pay high minimum wages in any country in which they do business, these demands are already being raised by many in the international human rights, workers, rights, and environmental movement.
If we agree that the primary strategy at this point in history is the construction of a world-wide anti-racist anti-imperialist united front, the fight to grant self-determination for China allows the left to find an independent voice against the bullying and hypocrisy of its own ruling class.
For those of us who were active in the mass movements against the war in Vietnam and in the Black liberation movement, there was once an understanding that a U.S. left to be progressive had to begin and end with the struggle against empire. Today, before a potentially progressive new set of struggles is contaminated with white chauvinism and xenophobic moralism, the debate about China will allow us to ask a new generation of activists, in the struggle against U.S. imperialism, which side are you on?
--
Eric Mann was an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and a shop floor activist with the United Auto Workers. He's presently the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and a member of the Planning Committee of the Bus Riders Union. The views in this article are his own.
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