House Organ, March 2000

High Stakes. I think that there was more at stake in Seattle last November than is generally realized. First there is the question of the role of foreign trade and investment and hence of the WTO and other key international economic organizations in the future of world economy. Second there is the related question of the roles of organized labor, organized environmentalism, and for lack of a better word "internationalists" in the future anti-WTO movement.

Foreign trade: Foreign trade has been, is, and will probably continue to be the engine of world capitalist growth and development, and the WTO has been, is, and will probably continue to be the most important instrument of trade liberalization. The record is clear on both points. From 1950 to the present, the rate of growth of world exports has exceeded the growth rate of world GDP; in fact, world exports have been growing at an increasingly faster rate than world GDP. This means that if world economic planners wish to maintain any given world GDP growth rate, the rate of growth of world exports has to rise at an increasing rate. Without a growing ratio of world exports/world GDP, everything else being the same, world GDP would likely decline with nasty if unpredictable social and political consequences (unless the anti-WTO movement itself posed radical and politically practical alternatives to the world capitalist market).

The WTO’s brief and stormy history evidences the importance of trade liberalization and expansion for (particularly) the U.S. ruling class and political elite. Trade liberalization here means two closely related things. The first is to enlarge the WTO’s powers to strengthen global capital vis a vis local and national capital world-wide. At the limit, this means to free global financial markets (organized by finance capital), global production (organized by transnational corporations), and the global market for goods and services from any and all local and national rules and regulations. Second, trade liberalization means to charge the WTO, MAI, and other new and want-to-be global institutions and conventions with the task of transforming market economy into a more perfect market society. Market society is a state of affairs in which environmental laws, public health regulations, product safety rules and the like, and labor laws and other artifacts of social and class struggle, are regarded not as indicators of social progress but as so many barriers to international trade and investment and capitalist economic growth. One of the anti-globalization movement’s great virtues has been to reveal that the real goal of trade and investment liberalization is the more or less complete commodification of the world. This new world order would end the social/political regulation of the "conditions of production" (in CNS lingo) and ruthlessly privatize the very agencies and institutions that hitherto have measured social progress — the schools and universities, the health and welfare systems, science, culture, the integrity of environment and community. The utopian neoliberal model of world capitalism (like the tragic Emma Bovary) first builds castles in the air (neoliberal economic theory), then tries to live in them (the subordination of all social relations to exchange relations). The fundamentally psychotic nature of the neoliberal model, put into practice, is I think the WTO resistance movement’s main target.

I think that the dynamic element in the anti-WTO movement is internationalist (versus globalist) and materialistic (versus idealistic). The movement’s unifying theme opposes the sanity of the human species against the insanity of capitalism as a system of self-expanding capital. One way the movement advances itself is to "rip the veil" off global capital by opposing hence revealing all the harm that the global financial markets do; all the misery capital brings to the global workplace; all the destruction capital visits on land and other "natural resources" utilized for profit; and all the irrationality and prodigality "embodied" in capitalist use values or final products (fast food, the car culture, Hollywood products, and so on)

The anti-WTO movement thus opposes the very definition of capitalism as a "market economy" when behind the scenes, where sprout the signs "private property, keep out," "market economy" is revealed to destroy human culture and community, to exploit labor, and to often fatally harm nature. Last but not least, the WTO is the mouthpiece for the neoliberal model of democracy as a system of democratic procedures to elect representatives in ways that suppress radical democratic contents, for example, social and economic equality. The anti-WTO movement is thus a totalizing albeit it highly fragmented and ideological diverse movement, mobilizing reformers and revolutionaries, socialists and anarchists, small farmers and local business populists, communitarians, environmentalists and laborists, and students

The United States and the WTO. Since one country’s exports are another country’s imports, the ratio of world imports/world GDP is also increasing over time. Some countries however export more than they import while others import more than they export thus doing "more than their share" to sustain world demand for goods and services. This is precisely the role of the U.S., which has been called everything from the "market of last resort" to the "world’s cash register." First, in recent years, the growth rate of U.S. GDP has been faster than that of any other major economy (about four percent annually compared with a world average of between two and two-and-a-half percent each year). The result has been that U.S. imports have increased at a fast clip, stimulating exports from the U.S.’s trading partners. Second, the growing U.S. import surplus helped sustain world aggregate demand for goods and services, hence world economic growth, during the financial crises and recessions of 1997-1998, which sharply reduced the demand for U.S. exports. Last fall, for the first time, the U.S. ran import surpluses with every major region in the world, including Latin America, a traditional U.S. export market.2

What was driving the strong U.S. economy hence U.S. imports and import surpluses in the last half of the 1990s? One answer: the greatest business and household credit expansion in history (which includes borrowing to purchase more imports of energy and raw materials and capital and consumer goods). Between 1995-1999, non-financial corporate debt increased by 60 percent while household debt expanded by 50 percent. In the third quarter of 1999, corporate borrowing grew at a 12 percent annual rate while consumer borrowing increased at a nine percent clip. These are high rates of growth of new debt to be incurred at the end of a period of economic expansion. Hence when the U.S. economy turns down this year or next businesses and households will be financially over-exposed, which will cause (everything else being the same) a deeper recession than would otherwise be the case.3

The rapid growth of U.S. domestic borrowing and debt was both a cause and effect of the expansion of U.S. GDP and imports. It was a cause in that increased borrowing stimulated U.S. growth and imports directly. It was an effect in that the expansion of imports helped to cool inflationary pressures inherent in the U.S. boom itself. These pressures might otherwise have forced the Federal Reserve Bank to raise (instead of lower) interest rates at a time when U.S. economic growth was taking up the slack in world economy caused by the 1997-1998 crisis and recessions.4

A little more detail: it should be noted that despite the growth of the U.S. import surplus, the dollar remained relatively strong in foreign exchange markets hence U.S. business and consumers were able to acquire more for their money spent abroad than they might otherwise expect. The strong dollar, in turn, was the result of two general factors, first, the fast growth of U.S. GDP and stock and real estate markets (the markets for real assets) and the flight of money capital and speculative funds from Asia and other crisis-stricken regions to the U.S.; second, the U.S.’s imperial role in world economy as a whole.

U.S. world hegemony in effect partly suspends the law of supply and demand in the global market for dollars. In any other country running large import surpluses, the home currency would rapidly depreciate, reducing the country’s capacity to import goods and services and also increasing its ability to market its exports. The result would be a strong tendency (other things being equal) for the import surplus to decline or disappear. The U.S. however isn’t "any other country" but rather the proud owner of the world’s most important reserve currency — the dollar. Relatedly, most world trade and foreign investment is denominated in dollars. This means that most major players in world economy have a vested interest in maintaining the value of the dollar in foreign exchange markets. What happens if the world views the dollar as significantly over-valued, as was true in the mid-1980s? Then the central banks and treasuries of G7 joined forces and brought down the dollar slowly, ensuring a soft landing: from the late 1980s until April, 1995 the major capitalist states stage-managed a decline in the dollar to forestall a dollar collapse.

The result of the play of forces noted above is that the U.S. faces a growing contradiction of world economic significance. On the one hand, the U.S. government increasingly equates national security not only with U.S. economic growth (as is true in many other countries) but also with world economic growth (which is true of no other country). World GDP growth during the past five years or so has been relatively slow: weak in the EU, weaker still in Japan, negative in Southeast Asia and other regions struck by financial crisis and recession after 1997. The U.S. economy (as noted) has had to grow faster than normal to take up the slack in world aggregate demand. On the other hand, fast U.S. economic growth has necessitated a sharp increase in business and household debt as well as in U.S. foreign debt (the U.S. is now a debtor no longer a creditor nation). In short, the U.S. has been sustaining world growth at the expense of threats to both its internal and external financial stability. Thus it seems that the U.S. is able to go so far and no more to promote would GDP growth without potential damage to domestic GDP — and vice versa.

Today not only are the markets putting more pressure on the dollar, which since August, 1998 keeps slipping against the yen and (in 1999) many other currencies; but also both Asia and the EU are more interested in developing their regional economies, anathema to the U.S, which is fighting to keep a unipolar world. Economic planners in both regions not only in the U.S. seem to be unclear whether or not world economy can recover sufficiently to remove the pressure on the dollar via an expansion of purchases of U.S. exports.

The contradiction between the U.S. as market of last resort and the U.S. as national economy exploded in Seattle (as did, as noted above, the contradiction between market economy and market society). On the one hand, the U.S. came to Seattle with a single purpose in mind, to liberalize trade in ways that would benefit U.S. exports and foreign investments. This might take the pressure off the dollar and sustain a reasonable U.S. growth rate hence mitigate against over-indebtedness and a possible liquidity crisis. Every major item that the U.S. wanted on the WTO agenda, for example, an end to EU and Asian farm subsidies, liberalization of services, and hard-nosed intellectual property right rules, would benefit U.S. trade first and foremost. On the other hand, European demands, for example, to liberalize farm trade by killing U.S. farm subsidies and to restrict U.S. cultural products, were ignored, Also ignored were demands by South governments for market-opening measures in the North, for example, to reform U.S. anti-dumping laws and to promote technology transfer schemes, for instance, by legalizing local content rules. The U.S. pushed exclusively for its own interests to the exclusion of European and Asian interests. The rest of the world’s back went up and both North and especially South governments refused to give in to U.S. demands. This refusal combined with the anti-WTO resistance movement to produce total stalemate, a real defeat for U.S. world ambitions and the neoliberal project.

The "solution" chosen by the U.S. to protect the dollar and to avoid any serious threats to domestic finances (including the stock market) was to try to return to the period of the late 1980s through April, 1995, when U.S. markets overseas were expanding much faster than domestic spending and therefore functioned as a main engine of U.S. growth, without however having to significantly depreciate the dollar (as the U.S. was compelled to do in the earlier period). A glance at the other components of GDP suggests how important trade liberalization U.S.-style is to U.S. capital and the U.S. government. The present consumption-led boom is not sustainable, although it’s lasted two years longer than most everyone expected. Investment growth over the last four years has been strong but not stupendous: new investment in plant and equipment grew by $100 billion a year between 1996-1999 (to a total of $1.2 trillion in 1999, mostly high-tech equipment and information technology). Persistent world overcapacity in many sectors, such as steel and autos, discourage a more robust investment boom (hence big capitals expand more and more these days by merging with or acquiring other capitals than by building new plants). Higher costs of money, higher wages and benefits, and higher energy and raw materials prices are discouraging more investment. And government spending can’t be expected to play a strong role in expanding aggregate demand at home without a break in the neoliberal, budget-balancing coalition in Congress. The only way to try to sustain U.S. growth while defending the dollar and the integrity of the domestic financial system would thus seem to be to liberalize trade and expand U.S. exports.

While the U.S. was trying to convince (bully) the rest of the world of the importance of liberalizing trade for U.S. exports, the EU and Asia were making their own moves to accelerate regional growth and trade rather than relying so heavily on U.S. markets. The naked truth is that the EU and Japan and lesser economic powers refuse to act in the interests of world growth as a whole. They believe that the U.S. has the only economy big enough to pull this off and they also have other futures in mind. One of them is to develop regional economies, organized around Japan’s extensive sourcing system and China’s huge labor force and vast potential market in Asia, and around Germany’s (and the EU’s) growing hegemony in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Russia meanwhile making as many unilateral deals that they can, for example, Germany’s new trade agreement with Mexico and its economic offensive in Asia.

The Seattle crisis was thus the result not only of the contradictions of the world capitalist system but also of what the most important regions and countries are doing about these contradictions. More talk in Europe and Asia about opening more independent economic paths is in many ways a continuation of past policy, but seen in the context of Seattle where the U.S. expected thanks for holding up world economy and received only brickbats, the moves toward regionalism and a multipolar world are perhaps more significant for the world’s future than ever before.

What did Seattle settle? The internationalist rhetoric in Seattle was outstandingly good, the practice not so good. Take the case of the AFL-CIO trade unionist versus what I’ll call the internationalist positions. In words, the labor federation came out for a "new internationalism focused on building international solidarity around a pro-environment, pro-worker...international policy." In practice, the AFL-CIO wants international labor standards enforced by the WTO (and in practice has organized or participated in many campaigns against global sweatshops and for trade union solidarity) and also to keep China out of the WTO. What’s the sense of fighting for global standards then excluding one country most in need of them? U.S. labor of course is afraid of being undercut by Chinese labor in the world market and greens are afraid that expanding production in a country with weak environmental protection will worsen global warming, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, and the rest. That China might be more able to do the right thing on the labor and environmental fronts as a member of WTO rather than as the giant outcast nation seems not to have been considered.

Let’s look at the important example of technology transfer from North to South, a key demand by South governments which the North has honored more in the breach in recent decades (see Walden Bello’s article on the WTO and North-South relations, this issue). In this example, technology transfer takes the form of local content rules in China. Internationalists support China’s local content rules in the production of large-scale passenger aircraft because such rules redistribute technology, fixed capital, and (potentially) wealth from North to South (or from Boeing and Seattle to China). The unions (and the greens) oppose these rules because they don’t want to exchange their good jobs here for bad jobs (from labor’s point of view) in China. And why should they?

Note how each side defends what it believes to be a righteous position. On the labor side, why should North workers give up gains won over many decades of struggle so that the Chinese government can exploit Chinese workers who enjoy few benefits and fewer labor and human rights. Labor support for China’s local content rules would seem to be self-evidently self-destructive. On the internationalist side, why should the rich North monopolize aircraft technology, production machinery, and relevant labor skills? If Boeing wants to sell airplanes to China (the argument goes), the company should be willing to shift some of its production facilities to China. A Boeing refusal would reinforce the structure of inequality manifest in North-South relations generally hence make it harder for the South to industrialize. Do we really want to keep China from moving from an export-platform to an economy with a more integrated and balanced industrial structure? This question, too, answers itself. (The ecological argument that the world doesn’t need any more huge passenger aircraft makes perfect sense if and only if the North strips itself of its capacity to expand the production of these monsters while the South foregoes the opportunity to produce them.)

Boeing workers might say, "we’re not against industrialization in China or anywhere else but we’re the ones who suffer the bad consequences of technology transfer, and we refuse to." The internationalist rejoinder: "you don’t have to absorb the entire loss yourselves; join us and we can spread the loss over society as a whole via higher unemployment benefits, better job retraining programs, and government-assisted green investment." The question — how will or can this be accomplished politically? — has no good answer. The compensatory measures offered displaced workers and impoverished communities under NAFTA have turned out badly because there is no movement or political party willing and able to enforce a serious compensatory program. In the past, the only countries that systematicaly tackled regional and sectoral inequalities were the USSR, Yugoslavia, and some other ex-socialist countries dedicated to reducing inequality and possessed of the economic and political will to follow through. (The EU with its strong social democratic unions and parties and Japan with its system of "public works capitalism" at home are partial exceptions.)

Why the discord between labor and internationalists? Why can’t they even discuss the issue? I think the main reason is that labor is free-riding Boeing and the U.S. government and the WTO, whose rules ban local content laws, while the internationalists are free-riding the Chinese and South governments that favor local content rules generally. When you lack the political organization and ideological unity to develop an independent position on labor and environment, North-South relations, or anything else, but rather free-ride one or more other parties to the dispute, your own intentions have a way of becoming subordinate to those of the other parties. This happened a couple of weeks after Seattle when big labor and big green decided that the "next target" would be China, not the WTO, thus effectively undermining the fragile unity between trade unionist and internationalist positions within the anti-WTO movement. (Not so incidentally, a leading internationalist group decided to target not China per se but global capital using China as a low-wage export platform, while Nader’s people said their goal would be to reform the WTO and, failing that, agitate for its abolition — the "fix it or nix it" line, which as I understand it would have the world return to GATT. Spokespeople that I know from both groups, however, went out of their way to avoid any criticisms of the big labor, big green anti-China line, which is too bad, I think. Seattle was huge success precisely because the enemy — "opponent" to pomos — was identified as the WTO, not China nor the U.S. nor any other country or peoples.)

While Boeing workers oppose China’s local content rules to protect their past gains and present jobs (just as they would oppose scab labor during a strike), Boeing the company is against local content rules to retain control of aircraft technology and production in the U.S. The U.S. government opposes the same rules for the same reason and also because it wants to try to steer China’s industrial development in certain directions. In this context, a "labor vote" appears as a "company vote" and "U.S. government vote." On the other side, while internationalists oppose Boeing’s national monopoly of large-scale aircraft manufacture with the aim of benefiting labor and development in the South, the Chinese government demands local content rules to expand its own political power. When you’re the junior partner of those who desire the same good things you do but for bad reasons, you’ll wind up defending positions you oppose or reject.

This is so (it’s worth repeating) because labor (and greens) and especially the internationalists have little if any independent power either inside or outside the WTO. Power is held by Boeing and the U.S. government (carried over into the WTO), on the one side, and Southern elites and the Chinese ruling class, on the other. The debate between these parties overshadows or silences any debate that U.S. trade union and internationalist forces might have. If labor sides with Boeing et al., it’s against a redistribution of technology and capital to China; if internationalists side against Boeing and friends, they side with Southern elites against Northern labor.

The important point is that neither trade unions nor internationalists are deciding the premises and terms of the argument or debate. As noted, both are free-riders, trying to push their respective positions into the "real" debate and struggle between and within big capital and nation-states. So long as other forces frame the issue, the unions and the internationalists (and greens) can not and will not be able to agree on a common set of demands. If both (or all three) sides were to establish their positions independently of the "official" hegemonic positions, "our side" could work out differences and compromise because labor does in fact care about jobs and development and workers’ rights and environment in China and internationalists do care about preserving not eroding labor’s gains at Boeing. Both (or all three) sides could agree on the kind of investment and technology transfer strategy for China that would help employment, wages, labor rights, and environment, in both parts of the world. Instead of an independent movement, however, we have one part free-riding Boeing et al. and another part free-riding Chinese government demands.

These kinds of contradictions noted above make it all but certain that the unity gloriously but briefly established in Seattle will not settle anything but rather make the relevant issues and questions even more complex than they were (and are). Big labor and big greens left the internationalists behind in Seattle and returned to that safe harbor for labor and green lobbyists, Washington, DC, and with little or no public discussion came up with the "movement’s next target." Rather than keep the WTO squarely in the movement’s gun sights on the grounds that it was precisely anti-WTO feeling that made Seattle such a success, big labor and big green replaced the WTO with China as the main enemy. Labor and the greens metamorphized their Seattle allies — all those who demanded not only local content laws and market-opening in the North for the commodities of the South but who also struggle to defend South farmers and indigenous people against North/WTO imperialism — into opponents.

Another consequence of the deficit of independent politics. Greens don’t want the European Union (EU) to have to buy U.S. hormone-bloated beef and bioengineered soy beans and grains. U.S. agribusiness and the U.S. government insist that what’s good for the U.S. consumer is good for consumers everywhere. Greens want to ban (or at least label) such products in the U.S., too. Meanwhile, the EU and U.S. refuse to abolish state subsidies to European and U.S. farmers, respectively, ensuring that both regions have a big surplus of foods to sell on the world market, thus threatening one another’s farm economies and also countless small farmers in the South. How does the EU legitimate its farm subsidies? The Europeans argue that protecting their farmers isn’t only (or mainly) an economic issue but also a social and environmental issue. The EU regards subsidies as a way to preserve rural life and small market towns; help to preserve soils and water quality; and defend agreeable rural and farm landscapes. As noted, the U.S. (the only country that has been increasing farm subsidies) is fighting an escalating war with the EU based on the claim that European "preservationism" is a trade barrier and has to go. The EU (it is said) has seven million farmers who are unfairly subsidized in hidden and open ways, hence unfairly compete with U.S. agriculture both in Europe and in third country markets. And how does the U.S. legitimate its farm subsidies? The American agricultural powerhouse is needed (as Arthur Daniel Midland commercials are fond of saying) "to feed the hungry world." One claim is that EU policy keeps food prices high hence food consumption in the South low. In this case, who do we side with? Both sides are lying, but if I had to choose one or the other, I would choose Europe, because its lies are less disagreeable and best fit my prejudices.

But why side with either the U.S. or EU? The pragmatic reason is that the U.S.-EU debate is the only game in town: if you want your voice to be heard you have to enter the debate on the U.S.’s or the EU’s own terms. But the ecologically and socially desirable solution would be to finesse both the European and American positions, and reallocate the resources, including labor, now used to fatten beef cattle with dubious substances and to bioengineer crops with God knows what long-term effects, into low-input, alternative (organic) agriculture, the economic health of which today however depends on sales to upscale markets. A red-green plan (the various elements of which were in fact present in the internationalist discourse in Seattle albeit in a fragmented way) to use agricultural subsidies to make large-scale investments in alternative agriculture, so as to realize the economies of scale which organic farming needs to compete with chemical agriculture, would do away with bad and promote good agriculture in one fell swoop. Of course without an independent political movement with real smarts and muscle, such a plan is wish-thinking, difficult to even talk about never mind implement practically.

More consequences. Few if any commentators have analyzed the big contradiction in the way that WTO rules are defined and enforced. Take the case of Japanese pesticide residue standards on fruits and vegetables. U.S. producers declared that such standards unfairly reduce U.S. exports of fresh farm products to Japan. The WTO agreed, ruling that these standards were in fact barriers to trade. Here the WTO stumbles into deep conceptual muck. The WTO makes no clear distinction between a rule that is established to protect local producers from foreign competition, on the one hand, and a rule motivated by public health norms that also happens to function as a trade barrier, on the other. Even with the help of modern science, the problem of imputing motivation is difficult even in a court of law with full disclosure and cross-examination, and is better left to novelists and dramatists. Did I help my aunt kill herself because she’s rich and I am her sole heir or because I saw her in terrible pain every day, when she pleaded with me to end her life? A decent person would obviously hesitate to assist his aunt longer than he might otherwise do, just because he stands to gain a large sum of money hence wants to be as clear as possible about his motivation. Such a person therefore may inadvertently make his aunt suffer more than would be the case were he to inherit nothing. So, too, a decent person by WTO lights would go out of his way to ensure that any local standard is in fact legitimate (as a public health measure, say) in terms of movement standards (including but not exclusively scientific evidence), so as not to be caught in the demeaning position of trying to cheat on WTO trade rules hence on his uncles and aunts and second cousins abroad. On the other side, a decent WTO would go out of its way to be sure that a purported trade barrier is in fact just that, not an authentic attempt to elevate public health standards. But neither the Japanese government nor the WTO have any motive to act decently and in a mutually helpful manner because the former wants to protect its vegetable and fruit growers from cheap imports while the U.S. (backed by the WTO) wants to sell its surplus products in Japan whatever the cost to its own ethical credibility.

Ethics of course are conspicuous by their absence in matters of global trade. Trade is basically a two-sided activity in which both sides seek to exploit whatever advantage they have to the maximum. "Sharp traders" are admired and "let the buyer beware" is commerce’s first commandment. Cheating is often expected and there’s no one more pathetic in business circles than a tender-hearted salesman. This lack of ethics is precisely why economists try to sell trade as a life-giving activity, that is to say, why they assure us that the invisible hand guarantees that the selfish actions of each and every one of us inadvertently have the effect of making us all better off than we were before the trade was consummated. Any teenager knows that this is a crock and lots of college students know that cheating and bad intentions were not really what Adam Smith had in mind. Nevertheless, the truth about capitalism is that trade and market competition are the ways that property owners overcome society’s taboo against theft. And lenders and borrowers, landlords and tenants, capitalists and workers, and sellers and buyers enter into (at times extremely) antagonistic relations ranging from frontier justice to the sleights of hand of high-level corporate crime. I would guess therefore that WTO data pertaining to the pesticide residue issue is fairly meaningless. The Japanese government is subverting the game, and so are the U.S. and WTO. Who’s right and who’s wrong don’t count very much; who’s powerful and who isn’t counts a lot. It was the U.S. that coerced the world into the WTO, not vice versa.

So what would an independent movement do in this case? Nothing. Let the WTO self-destruct, meanwhile adding to its agenda new complaints and issues, so as to overload the organization to the point at which it ceases to function, as Walden Bello advises.

Finally. I see the anti-WTO movement in the U.S. as a coalition of organized labor (reds), organized environmentalism (greens), and internationalists (red greens). Here "red" means the struggle to redistribute wealth in its capitalistic form, the commodity form. "Green" means the struggle to redefine capitalist wealth in what might be call the ecological form. "Red green" refers to the struggle to redistribute and redefine wealth at the same time — the demand for equality and sustainability which incorporates elements of both red and green thinking into a project which transcends both trade unionism and environmentalism. The internationalist struggle to redistribute wealth from capital to labor, rich to poor, North to South, and so on is a "red moment" of internationalist practice; the internationalist "green moment" is the struggle to subordinate exchange value to use value and to create ecological societies. The red moment is the quantitative side of things, the green moment the qualitative side.

This schema is of course simple but perhaps not simple-minded. Consider for example the coalition of organized labor and internationalists. An important target is the "race to the bottom," the campaign to improve wages and labor standards in the South. Internationalists regard this as a moral crusade rooted in a strong concept of labor and human rights while organized labor sees the campaign as good trade unionism at a global level (which doesn’t mean that organized labor has no moral force or that internationalists have no interests). The campaign is both ethical and self-interested, as one spokesperson for organized labor put it, which is a nice trope on the ideology of the invisible hand. It’s clear however that the limits of trade unionism establish definite limits to the internationalist struggle to redistribute wealth (and tighter limits on the struggle to redefine wealth in human and natural ecological terms). I don’t know of any examples, say, of unions supporting the demand for market-opening in the North or North-South technology transfers.

I think that the internationalist wing of the anti-WTO movement (best represented by the Direct Action Network and a dozen or so other groups that spent more time resisting, less talking, in Seattle) has a rare chance to make a difference way out of proportion to its size. This is because internationalists alone are able to act independently, hence able to develop alternatives that do not entail the Hobson’s choices presented by reds and greens alone or together, as described above. Without political independence, no radical alternative is possible; with a radical alternative no real political independence is possible. What’s missing is organization. What else is new? — January 10, 2000

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Last revised September 12, 2000.