Free trade and resistance

Capitalists have long used migrant workers and the unemployed to beat down employed workers. Work harder, longer, and cheaper, or the capitalist will find someone else, cheaper and more pliant, to replace you - on the streets or off the boats! Or, now, with globalisation - in another country.

In labour history, one answer to the capitalists' use of the unemployed and migrants has been crony-unionism (reserving jobs for a chosen section of the working class). Another has been support for anti-immigrant legislation. Both were self-defeating in any but the short term and destructive of socialist politics in any term at all. The solid answer always was and is united organisation of the employed and unemployed, and of native workers and migrants, to demand improvements for both sections. The battles in France since 1995, where unions and unemployed organisations have combined - sometimes by staging 'invasions' of the unemployed into workplaces - to demand shorter hours with a guarantee of new hirings, are a recent example of the feasibility of that socialist response.

The same goes for the capitalists' use of other countries. The answer is not reimposed trade barriers, or 'going local', but internationalism, united organisation of workers in different countries. Of course it will take much discussion and debate to work out exactly what this global solidarity and new internationalism mean, and how they can be organised. They are not tasks of a few minutes, any more than uniting the employed and unemployed, or natives and migrants, ever have been. Yet preconditions exist, and the organising has begun.

'Internationalism' is not the whole answer to every particular struggle. If capitalists threaten to move jobs to another country - or to sack the whole workforce and replace them with recruits from the unemployed - the appropriate immediate answer may be to call their bluff, or to seize the workplace and the machinery and use them as bargaining counters. The long-term program of uniting workers, employed and unemployed, native and migrant, and across national borders, is not dispensable, but it is not to be counterposed to immediate struggles either.

Governments in countries with lower wages, restricted trade-union rights and fewer social guarantees use those as selling points to attract multinational investment. Not only Third World governments do that, but also, for example, Ireland and Britain, 'selling' themselves as lower-cost production sites in Europe. How can labour be internationalist if we do not demand levelling-up of standards, and as much legislative force as can be achieved for that levelling-up? Maybe rich-country labour movements demanding international guarantees of labour standards will seem to be, or actually be, 'covering for' rich-country protectionism. The antidote is to ensure that trade unions in the poorer countries are seen to take the lead in the demands for 'levelling-up', and to link the demands with calls for a transfer of funds from the richer countries to the poorer ones to reduce the 'comparative disadvantage' of the latter in infrastructure, education, and so on.

Such a transfer actually exists - in a very corrupt, bureaucratic form - in the European Union. In fact, over the decades of European integration, on the whole labour movements in Europe have proved strong enough, even despite lamentably feeble international coordination, to make the 'levelling' of wages consequent on that integration more a levelling-up than a levelling-down. Spanish wages have risen much closer to German wages, and not by German wages being beaten down in the same way as US wages.

Those US wages have been beaten down by US capitalists, not by Korean or Chinese workers, and mainly by the employers' offensive within the US, where wage rates for jobs which cannot be moved to Third World countries - janitors, retail workers, etc. - have been pushed down just as much as those for those which can. World-wide, there has not been a levelling-down of wages. There has not been a levelling at all. Workers in some previously low-wage countries have won big improvements thanks to strong and courageous union organisation (South Korea being the prime example), but, overall, averages of income have become more unequal between countries, rather than more equal.

It is not true that industrialisation must follow low wages. The Australian Financial Review Magazine (April 2000) reports on how over the last 25 years hundreds of thousands of textile, clothing and footwear jobs have been moved from Australia to China and other south-east Asian countries. 'Chinese factories pay workers at 69 cents an hour when the hourly rate in Australia is $11.50.' But the calculation is not as simple as it seems. Most capitalists do not go where the wages are lowest. Most industry is still in relatively high-wage countries. Very little multinational industrial investment goes to the lowest-wage countries. Taiwan, Korea, Mexico and Brazil, with their relatively higher wages and stronger unions, have faster-growing industry than Africa. Availability of skilled labour and nearby markets, and networks of transport, communication, supply, services and distribution, are generally much more important for capitalists in choosing production sites than wage levels alone.

Naturally, multinational capitalists would not like it if Chinese workers' wages doubled, their hours were shortened and their factories made safe, or if they gained legal freedom to organise trade unions. It does not follow that the multinationals would cease to invest there. If the improvements for workers went together with a clear-out of bureaucratic corruption, a cutback in China's huge military establishment, and the establishment of a more-or-less clear and reliable rule of law, then investment might well even increase. And if it didn't? The resources currently siphoned off by China's bureaucratic and military establishment are ample to generate a continuing rapid expansion of Chinese industry.

There is no way to pursue working-class struggle without annoying or disturbing capital, or risking reprisals. Improvements in one workplace - or in one country - may be met by 'strikes of capital'. But by fighting for improvements, workers increase their confidence, organisation and solidarity, increase their chances of making general political and social gains, and push the capitalists into technical and social investments they would not otherwise make. This argument - necessary against 'give-backs' in every workplace - is surely even more true for improvements won or defended in whole countries than for those won or defended in particular workplaces.

A general rise in wages in Brazil, for example, could not conceivably happen without a great strengthening of the labour movement in Brazil and huge knock-on effects (not just in Brazil). It would create conditions for a more successful international resistance to the rules of profit, even if it did trigger a 'strike of capital'. And it is not at all certain that capital would find it feasible or advisable to respond by a 'strike'. Trade-union militancy has won huge increases in wages in South Korea - it must have been one of the fastest wage-upswings in any country at any time in world history - and capital has not stopped investing there.

Aid and debt relief are not sufficient for the industrialisation of poorer countries. By themselves they can well lead to nothing much but the enrichment of a government and crony-capitalist elite, and the expansion of military establishments and prestige construction projects. Wider benefits depend on the development in those poorer countries of labour and popular movements strong enough to shift government policies. At the best the benefits from aid and debt relief are by-products of a process driven fundamentally by the self-interest of capitalist states (military alliances, construction and supply contracts, straightening out international banks' balance-sheets, etc.). The details are decided at so great a distance from any democratic processes that it is foolish to imagine that lobbying and petitioning from below can change that fundamentally within a stable capitalist regime. Even the meagre by-products, however, may be very important for some of the poorest countries. Korea and Taiwan owe their dramatic economic lift-off in large part to 'aid' militarily-motivated from the United States. And any socialist world policy must include massive, democratically-controlled aid from the richer countries to the poorer. The fundamental socialist answer remains not to petition the billionaires to please invest some of their wealth in this place rather than that one, or to dispense a little more in philanthropy, but to take the billions from them and put them under democratic social control.

Transitional demands along those lines might include: opening the books of the multinationals; information and veto powers for international shop stewards' committees over multinationals' investment plans; action by international shop stewards' committees to demand 'levelling up' of wages and conditions; aid from rich countries to poor ones under the control of workers' and community organisations in those countries, and along the lines of workers' reconstruction plans worked out by those organisations; taxing the rich in countries where industry is shutting down to finance workers' reconversion and reconstruction plans there; and so on. All these, and others, flow from a general approach of working for workers' control over social wealth, rather than petitioning the World Bank, IMF, WTO or whomever to act more charitably.

'Fair trade, not free trade' is nonsense (even if good ideas are sometimes proposed beneath that nonsensical banner). As Karl Marx demonstrated long ago in The Poverty of Philosophy and On the Question of Free Trade, a system based on trade cannot be made non-exploitative by pleading for fairer and more equitable exchanges. It must be replaced by democratic social provision for human need. To free trade we counterpose not protectionism, but working-class resistance and solidarity.