Save for some textile makers in the American Piedmont and some furniture assemblers in LA County, the standard of living of the US working class is artificially propped up rather than directly degraded by the character of US-China geo-economic relations. The material well being of the US working class is artificially elevated by the fact that the world economy still rests (although decreasingly so) on the pure dollar standard, i.e. a standard which allows the US to initiate expansionary economic policies (such as Bush the 43rd’s latest orgy of military Keynesianism) without having to pay the deflationary piper down the road. That segment of the super-exploited Chinese working class employed in the PRC’s massive export sector subsidizes the US’ expansionary economic policies (and hence the material well being of the US working class as a whole) because a big portion of the PRC’s huge hard currency receipts are parked in US T-bills and other dollar denominated assets. What’s fair is fair – if China has to abide by “universal” (sic) standards of labor rights, then the US has to abide by the consequences of the end of the dollar as the de facto global currency. The devastating consequences of the latter for the living standard of the US working class would far outweigh the miniscule benefits reaped from imposing import controls on goods embedded with Chinese “slave labor” (sic) content.
Any logically consistent and non-chauvinistic campaign on behalf of the _international_ working class must recognize that even if the Wall Street barons and the comprador elites of the periphery and semi-periphery (and the PRC is some kind of admixture of the two) were wiped from the face of the earth in one fell swoop, the relative (and perhaps absolute) living standard (in terms of the consumption basket) of the US working class will have to fall, not rise. Of course the two steps forward and one step back process by which the US is losing and will continue to lose seignorage privileges will objectively accomplish this anyway, but the choice is ours: will we steer this process in a progressive direction that enables the eventual vanquishing of metropolitan finance capital and “red capitalist” cadres, or will we succumb to counterproductive appeals that position the US state (the most malignant force on the planet) in between the respective working classes of China and the US?
John Gulick Knoxville, TN
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