20 years since anti-WTO Seattle protests: the communist stance

….What is the communist stance towards the WTO? The imperialist powers, and above all Washington, constructed this body to serve their interests. Communists call for its abolition as part of opposing the policies of Washington and its imperialist allies. At the same time they explain that Washington, not the "ultra-national" WTO bureaucracy, is the chief enemy of working people in the United States and of humanity.

The political demands and explanations put forward by the liberals, trade union bureaucrats, and other activists who are involved in organizing the anti-WTO protests in Seattle take a completely different tack. The WTO, they say, violates "our" national sovereignty.

Following the U.S.-China trade pact last week, many of the protest leaders have started to concentrate their fire on China. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney AFL-CIO vowed forcefully to fight against approval of the deal by the U.S. congress, which means the labor tops will organize a larger mobilization in Seattle. Sweeney cited the jailing of labor activists in China.

This stance provides cover and rationale for Washington's warlike policy towards China and dovetails with the anticommunism and the America First program of the ultraright. Fundamentally, the U.S. rulers are not cultivating long-term closer ties with Beijing. Rather they are preparing militarily, especially on the nuclear front, for more confrontations. They recognize that the "hidden fist" described by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman — the U.S. navy, army, and air force — is their only sure road to overturning the gains of the Chinese revolution.

Instead of promoting trade and other sanctions against Beijing, the labor movement needs to expose and oppose Washington's war preparations. It must stand in unconditional solidarity with the workers state against these threats, in spite of the bureaucratic, Stalinist character of its leadership.

What of "labor rights" in China and the Third World? The labor movement needs to organize solidarity with the struggles organized by the farmers and workers of countries oppressed by imperialism — taking care to sharply differentiate its policy from the self-serving, crocodile tears of the powers that be in Washington and other imperialist citadels. It needs to support demands by many working people in those countries for the cancellation of the Third World debt.

But this is not the approach of the union bureaucracy. At best, they bewail the "White Man's Burden," looking on these toilers as victims needing the civilizing hand of the imperialist powers to protect them from local despots. They extol the virtues of imperialist democracy.

At worst — and this is much more fundamental to their policy — the AFL-CIO officials depict workers in the Third World as rivals for the jobs that they claim belong to "American" workers. The Teamsters union is conducting a campaign against the NAFTA-provided entry of more truck drivers from Mexico into this country. This is blatant chauvinism ! It drives working-people away from the international solidarity they need. At the same time, it opens the workers movement to the conscious enemies of the labor movement like Patrick Buchanan. In recent remarks, the ultrarightist politician praised Teamsters president James Hoffa. The latter, for his part, said Buchanan's "tough trade policies… would protect American workers."

Buchanan said he's joining "his friend" Hoffa in Seattle, urging his supporters to sport Teamsters jackets and accompany him to "speak to some troops." The Buchanan brigades are attracting cadre for what will become fascist, antilabor street gangs.

These are the kinds of political questions the socialist propaganda teams will address in Seattle in the next two weeks. As the socialists raise the banner of international solidarity and revolutionary struggle, they will find individuals and groups of young people — especially those being politicized by experiences along the natural lines of resistance of the working class — who have strayed into these actions, who have been sucked toward this nationalist campaign looking for an answer to the evils of capitalism. The YS and SWP members will work to peel off these individuals from the morass of America Firstism and into joining the communist movement.  

 

Full aticle:

https://themilitant.com/1999/6342/634220.html

Anti-WTO Seattle protests were an orgy of America-First snake oil

It would be interesting to compile a list of all the petty-bourgeois left snake-oil The Militant did not fall for.  

Here's one: the anti-WTO snake-oil:

….A wide range of unions and other groups have endorsed protests that will occur in Seattle at the same time as the WTO meeting. Organizers' declare that this is "the protest of the century." However exaggerated this claim, the WTO event and anti-WTO protests have become the subject of widespread interest and discussion.

Many unionists and working farmers rightly view capitalist organizations like the WTO with suspicion. The imperialist powers created the WTO and use it as a tool in their drive to squeeze yet more profits out of the labor of toilers around the world. Class-conscious workers oppose the organization and its policies. They call for the governments of the countries in which they live to withdraw from this organization, and all similar formations.

At the same time the trade body acts not as an independent force, but registers the class relationship of forces in the world. The most powerful imperialist power, Washington has already indicated it will defy WTO rulings when it considers its "national security" is at stake.  

 

Protests promote economic nationalism

Class-conscious workers will not participate in the protests that are being organized against the meeting in Seattle, however. The basis of these actions boils down to different expressions of economic nationalism —support for the bosses of the United States and their government — under the progressive cover of defending the environment, or opposing the low pay and bad working conditions that many workers in the semicolonial world endure.

"Make the Global Economy work for working families," states a leaflet issued by the King County Labor Council and the AFL-CIO in Seattle, urging workers to "Join us Nov. 30, the opening day of the World Trade Organization meeting… to demand changes." The national union federation has assigned two full-time field organizers to organize this protest and an associated conference. Officials from the United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers of America (USWA), Teamsters, and the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union are among those involved in the event.

The heavy involvement of these union officials does not endow the protests with a working-class character. The union bureaucracy occupies a position between the union membership and the employers, acting to disorganize workers and minimize the impact of the struggles they undertake. They perform the same function in politics, including foreign policy, acting as "labor lieutenants of capital" in this field too. Since the buildup to World War II, the AFL-CIO leaders have advanced the foreign policy thrust of the ruling class.

In that period Washington established itself through military and economic conquest as the predominant imperialist power. It either defeated militarily — in the case of Germany and Japan — or elbowed aside —as with Britain and France — the other major imperialist powers.

Others planning to join the protests include environmental and church groups; the National Farmers Union, which is dominated by wealthier farmers; and those associated with Ralph Nader, a well-known activist who criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for "exporting jobs" when he ran for president in 1996.

Other protests are planned overseas at the time of the Seattle conference, with a similar nationalist character. A demonstration planned in France for November 27 will call for measures to supposedly protect France from being bought up by giant U.S. pension funds. The coalition building it includes both right-wing and leftist members of parliament, as well as many political organizations considered part of the Left. France and the United States, the world's two largest agricultural exporters, have frequently found themselves at loggerheads.  

 

Calls to defend 'sovereign nation states'

"The WTO has elevated corporate power above the sovereign powers of all nation states," reads a leaflet issued by People for Fair Trade, striking a common theme. The picture of a WTO standing over the imperial-ist powers like Washington, Tokyo and Berlin has no basis in fact. The trade body is a group of bureaucrats based in Brussels with an annual budget of $75 million dollars.

Workers have no interest in protesting to defend the national sovereignty of Washington or any other imperialist power. Sovereign Washington, and its sovereign allies and rivals, are the brutal enemies of working people at home and abroad. The WTO is their creation, and it will fall by the wayside if it loses its usefulness to them or cannot contain their conflicts.

In trade conflicts, many of the anti-WTO protesters lend support to Washington against the governments of semicolonial countries that are oppressed and exploited by imperialism. Many statements bewail rulings by the WTO against U.S. trade restrictions on imports of shrimp from Asia and oil from Venezuela.

The U.S. restrictions claimed that the foreign imports were associated with environmental damage. Washington and its rivals, whose profit-driven capitalist system is fundamentally inimical to environmental preservation, play on environmental concerns to win popular support in their trade conflicts.

Among those planning to participate in the November 30 AFL-CIO demonstration are the "Tibetan Rights Campaign," which is calling for "Free Tibet" and demanding that China not be allowed to join the WTO. This position dovetails with Washington's drive to weaken and militarily surround the Chinese workers state.

Before the Chinese revolution of 1949, Tibet was subjected to feudal rule by the class that the Dalai Lama — cultivated by Washington — now represents. The "free" Tibet advocated by liberal forces will be a return to that oppressed condition.

Despite the rhetoric used against the trade body, many of those organizing the coming protests call for its reform rather than its abolition. The "call for a turnaround of the WTO [is] a theme being echoed by a growing consensus of activists worldwide…" reports one anti-WTO publication. This is the approach of the labor officialdom.

"We are not going to be denouncing the WTO, asking that it be killed or go away," said Ronald Judd of the King County Labor Council, who is helping to organize the November 30 union rally. The mild criticisms voiced by AFL-CIO officials reflect their political support for the Clinton government and its trade policies. Judd called for the WTO to enforce "sanctions against [countries that violate] workers' rights."

This is consistent with the AFL-CIO's record in the past of opposing imports on the grounds that American workers' jobs were at stake. The federation's president John Sweeney, touted as being more progressive than his predecessors in the job —an image that the November 30 protest will reinforce in the eyes of many middle-class political activists — put the AFL-CIO's policy bluntly in 1996. "We want to help American business compete in the world and create new wealth for your shareholders and your employees," he said.  

 

A bridge to the ultraright

The nationalist approach not only backs up Washington's aggressive stance in trade matters and other aspects of its foreign policy but it also paves the way for workers, who are disillusioned with the established political parties and the bosses they loyally represent, to lend political support to rightist political figures.

Fascist-minded and other reactionary politicians have surfaced in many imperialist countries, given life by the rightward direction of government policy, and by the social and economic crisis which unfolds even in the upward swing of the business cycle.

The People's Party led by the industrialist Christoph Blocher in Switzerland and the Freedom Party of Jorg Haider in Austria won second place in recent parliamentary votes. Both parties waged nationalist campaigns against "foreigners" and against the European Union, portraying themselves as representing "the people."

In phrases strikingly similar to those employed by many groups planning to protest in Seattle, the ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan bemoans "the surrender of our national sovereignty to the WTO." Buchanan's "brigades" represent the initial recruits to fascist gangs that will, in the future, be turned loose on the organizations of working people.

Teamsters union president James Hoffa is taking the bridge of the economic nationalism of the union officials to Buchanan to its logical conclusion. The right-wing magazine the American Spectator reports that "Hoffa is committed to backing Buchanan... during the primary season." In France, a number of forces formerly in socialist and left wing groups have been drawn to the Bonapartist, strongman figure of former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who has compared the WTO to the Third Reich.

In opposing the imperialist trade body of the WTO, working people need to reject the nationalist politics represented by these forces — the same politics that underpin the protests in Seattle.

As Jack Barnes writes in Capitalism's World Disorder, a book that socialist workers are campaigning with in a number of countries, "The only 'we' we recognize is that of working people and our allies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico – and the rest of the Americas and the world. Not 'we' Americans, 'we' English speakers 'we' the white race, or anything else that chains us to the class that grows wealthy off the exploitation of our labor and that of our toiling brothers and sisters the world over."  

Full article: https://themilitant.com/1999/6340/634056.html

20 years since political dead-end of "Battle of Seattle"

Anti-WTO protests give social cover to U.S. imperialism  

 

In a letter on the facing page, reader Brian Miller argues that the Militant has taken too critical a stance against the protests surrounding the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) "Although the 'America First' crowd is certainly one of the significant tendencies... they are by no means the only ones" involved, Miller states.

But the actions, and the participation of the demonstrators--whether unionists or others—had no redeeming value whatever from the point of view of the interests of working people. The protests, regardless of the views of participants, gave social cover to and reinforced the American nationalist framework promoted by Washington and the billionaire families it serves. Often in the guise of criticizing U.S. corporations and even the U.S. government, their real targets were governments of other countries—mainly nations oppressed by the U.S. capitalist families—and they appealed to Washington to pressure these governments, mostly through the weapon of trade tariffs and sanctions. They ended up prettifying U.S. imperialism as a supposed agent of progress and social enlightenment, rather than targeting it as the number one exploiter and warmonger in the world.

This "solidarity" that portrays working people in the Third World as pitiful victims in need of a benevolent U.S. cop is one they don't need. In today's context of sharpening trade conflicts between the U.S. rulers and their capitalist competitors abroad, all these protests were in the America First camp, giving a social varnish to Washington's big stick. A couple of examples of seemingly progressive demands help illustrate the point.

Many protesters focus on concern over the environment. People for Fair Trade, one of the groups organizing the actions, states on its web page that "corporations [are] favored over environment" by the WTO.

But what were the concrete demands of the environmental protests in Seattle? One of the most prominent was for the restoration of a portion of the U.S. Endangered Species Act that supposedly protects sea turtles—which are in danger of extinction—from being killed in shrimp nets. The central point of this law is to ban the import to the United States of shrimp caught by fishermen in countries where "turtle-safe" nets are not universally used—particularly in the semicolonial world, such as Malaysia and India. Who benefits from this? U.S. capitalists who profit from the protectionist import ban. It is the toll of the capitalist market dominated by U.S. and other imperialists and the drive to reduce costs to compete that makes environmentally friendly equipment of little interest to the bosses.

The campaign over the sea turtles points people toward identifying with the U.S. government. "Don't trade away our sea turtles," declares one piece of literature produced by the Sierra Club, calling on Clinton to fight the WTO for more vigorous enforcement of the shrimp ban. "Our turtles"? That's a dead giveaway of the American nationalist content of this demand and how it pits working people in this country against those in the Philippines, Malaysia, and elsewhere.

Another prominent demand is for "standards against child labor." This is presented as a fight to protect children around the world from being forced to work long hours under hazardous conditions. But the organizers of this campaign again appeal to U.S. imperialism to impose penalties on governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

U.S. president William Clinton, in fact, poses as one of the big defenders of children. At the WTO summit, he demonstratively campaigned for a declaration by the International Labor Organization, a U.S.-dominated body of the United Nations, "banning the worst forms of child labor," falsely presenting the U.S. government as the champion of better standards of working people around the world.

Earlier this year, Clinton issued an executive order that highlights the actual content of such "child labor standards." The measure banned the purchase by the U.S. government of any goods allegedly produced with child labor—targeting particularly imports from countries such as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Guatemala. This puts a progressive mask over the "buy American" campaigns spearheaded by the U.S. labor officialdom and U.S. businesses, such as textile companies, competing with industries in those nations.

Child labor and low wages are not a result of "bad policies" by governments in the semicolonial world, with U.S. corporations "taking advantage" of them. Rather, these conditions are a result of the normal workings of the imperialist system, with the U.S. government as its top enforcer. The wealthy families that rule the small number of imperialist countries dominate and exploit labor and resources throughout the world. They systematically plunder the semicolonial countries, not only by superexploiting labor in their factories there but through the loan shark squeeze of the Third World debt and through imperialist-dictated unequal terms of trade that are reinforced every day—with or without the WTO.

Class-conscious workers have an obligation to fight first and foremost against the capitalist rulers in their own countries—most of all in the United States. Accepting the arguments of the anti-WTO protests leads you in the opposite direction. You find yourself marching side by side with the "incipient fascists and jingoists of many stripes" who as Miller notes, were part of the Seattle actions. How many protest organizers tried to distance themselves from the pro-war aims of Washington's anti-China campaign? In the name of "human and labor rights" they abetted it.

Working people in the United States should oppose Washington's participation not only in the WTO but all other international forums set up by the imperialist powers to mediate and defend their class interests—from NATO to the United Nations. We're for abolishing all of them. But this is not a slogan to campaign around, and the Militant doesn't.

What this paper has consistently advocated is a campaign around demands that can unite working people internationally in struggle by clearly posing the issues in class terms:

Cancellation of the Third World debt, a demand that can unite workers in the United States with our fellow workers and farmers around the world against our common enemy: the U.S. ruling class;

A shorter workweek with no cut in pay and massive public works to create jobs for all;

Affirmative action programs with quotas, including a substantial raise in the minimum wage, to cut across the racist and sexist divisions the bosses try to impose on working people.

Stop the deportations—equal rights for all immigrants.

These demands point to the only force that can change society—not U.S. government sanctions against other governments and individual companies, but workers and farmers fighting together across national borders against our employers and their governments. They highlight the need to build a mass working-class political party capable of leading millions to take power out of the hands of the exploiters and to join the worldwide struggle for socialism, as working people in Cuba have done through their revolution.

This is what socialist workers and youth presented as they intervened in the swirling discussions that took place in Seattle. They set up literature tables on the streets and spoke up in forums and workshops, looking for those who are attracted to an internationalist working-class perspective. Their results—including the sale of dozens of copies of Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, a book that presents a clear, working-class alternative to the American nationalism dished up at the WTO protests—are evidence that only a sharp, objective class analysis can have a shot at explaining the working class's divergent interests with the anti-WTO protests and its organizers.

—Naomi Craine