Patrick Bond
Divide-and-conquer
is an all too familiar gambit of a ruling elite under stress. Thus Seattle
demonstrators, together with a growing international movement struggling in the
same spirit in many other sites, have found themselves subject to both real and
invented splits since stepping up to the world stage last November 30.
Every
frightened establishment commentator now harps on about the partially-material,
partially-mythical breach between allegedly protectionist French farmers or
molly-coddled US trade unionists, on the one hand, and on the other, dirt-poor
peasants blocked from export crop production or low-paid Third World workers
suffering prohibitions on unionizing, a paucity of safety and health laws,
competition from child laborers, toxic environmental conditions.
With
pernicious intent, this caricatured division has been sewn and woven into public
debates about post-Seattle world order reconstruction, in a terribly confusing
way. The most disturbing manifestation may be the manner in which China-bashing
has distracted some of the Washington, DC consumer, environment and labor
leaders who otherwise last November began making important steps towards
internationalism. If we take as a first principle that internationalist
solidarity is violated by promoting the power of an oppressor nation against an
oppressed nation, especially without the consent and indeed request of the
people most affected, then it is easy to support boycotts against apartheid-era
South Africa and Burma–for whom sanctions called for by popular, democratic
movements translate into a strategic attack on local oppressors–but impossible
to stomach a moralizing Bill Clinton and those allied labor aristocrats whose
trade interests are imperialist or at best narrowly protectionist. But to
notice, to grapple with, and to transcend the establishment’s "wedge
issue" strategy, is also to recognize and squarely confront the grain of
truth here.
For
radicals will have to adopt an equally potent strategy to contend with the many
free-trade ideologues and bureaucrats from multinational corporations, media,
academia, the WTO and like-minded states and agencies who seek to seduce pliable
movement bureaucrats from NGOs, unions, and environmental groups with the offer
of "a seat at the table." Precisely this conflict of interests emerged
in Southern Africa late last year. In an eerie parallel to the Sweeney-Hoffa
rerouting of the Seattle labor march away from the Convention Center and their
repeated denials of intent to "shut down" the WTO, some leaders of the
Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) are also going
"corporatist," espousing utopian notions of social contracts between
big global government, transnational corporations and the leading fractions of
unions. This is surprising, not only because of SA’s recent history of vibrant
shopfloor protest, but also because, at first glance, it would appear that the
interests of the world’s workers lie in a concerted programme to raise the
standard of living (including gender equity and environmental protections) of
those at the bottom.
SA
is somewhere in the middle, and Cosatu regularly expresses concern about the
flight of jobs to Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, and other sites of ultra-cheap
labor. The goal for Cosatu, just as much for the AFL-CIO, is to slow relocation
and outsourcing by supporting struggles to raise wages and working conditions in
maquiladores, export-processing zones, and similar settings. But to this end,
the campaign to include social, labor, governance and environmental clauses
(known simply as the "Social Clause") in trade agreements became
extremely thorny during the 1990s. For after a second glance, many progressive
African social movements, NGOs, churches and women’s groups, development
agencies, technical think-tanks and intellectuals–some of them gathered in the
Ghana-based Africa Trade Network–began condemning the way in which
international institutions like the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary
Fund, as well as powerful Northern governments, impose conditions on what they
argue is already a terribly unequal trade, investment, and financing
relationship with the South.
These
differences emerged more clearly following a November 1999 Johannesburg
workshop–hosted by progressive staff of Oxfam/Britain–attended by key
officials of the Southern African Trade Union Coordinating Council (especially
from Zimbabwe and Zambia) and regional social movement activists. That
workshop’s "Statement on the Seattle Ministerial" rejected "the
widening of the ambit of issues under the WTO through the inclusion of the
Social Clause" because the potential value of clauses was outweighed, in
the activists’ view, by the damage done to power relations through amplifying
the legitimacy and power of the WTO.
But
Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi–who did not attend–immediately
disassociated the broader regional Council (which he presides over) from the
workshop statement. Instead, in Seattle a few days later, Vavi joined forces
with the South African government and local big business, in demanding from the
North a less-protectionist set of international trade rules, but nevertheless
including the Social Clause. The joint delegation gained prized access to Green
Room deliberations, though came back to Johannesburg as emptyhanded as Charlene
Barshefsky. The Social Clause strategy thus appears discredited, both because of
its wedge issue character, and its practical failure as the central trade
strategy of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, led by the
AFL-CIO. (Emblematic was the oft-violated textile sector pact between trade
unionists and executives, mediated by Clinton–indeed the only way that the
Nikes and Kathy Lee Giffords adapted their production practices even slightly,
was through international solidarity, militant direct action and other forms of
public consciousness-raising.)
Is
there a way around and above the Social Clause dilemma? To advance more
universal, unifying campaigning strategies requires an analysis based not on
worker- versus-worker sentiments, but on the broader corporate power relations
underlying international trade liberalization. Here it may well be that only
particular corporate and global-state targets–including South African-based
transnational corporations–work as unifying symbols of the system. Indeed, the
only logical way forward, if this strategy holds, is a united workers’ front
against any new WTO round, and indeed against the existence of a WTO that serves
primarily corporate interests. (Many of the more advanced Southern African
social/citizen movements have taken this "abolitionist" position.) My
point here is that in the run-up to the April 16 protests in Washington, the
last two decades’ worth of arcane attempts at reforming the IMF and World Bank
(through varied kinds of Social Clauses) can be dispensed with–as I’ll argue
more specifically in my next commentary–not only because they haven’t worked,
but because the interests of workers and eco-social movements across the world
are now, unequivocally, to stop and reverse the process of the construction of a
global state that serves only capital’s interests.
Patrick
Bond teaches at Wits University, Johannesburg, and is active in many local and
global social, labor, and environmental movements. He is affiliated to the
Alternative Information and Development Centre (http://aidc.org.za).