After Seattle: Strategic Thinking About Movement Building

Monthly Review, July, 2000 by Martin Hart-Landsberg

Groups such as Public Citizen and leaders of the AFL-CIO oppose the China deal for a number of related reasons. They consider China to be a "world-class" dictatorship, unfair trader, and exploiter of working people. They believe that China's entrance into the WTO will intensify downward pressures on working and environmental conditions in the United States and elsewhere. In sum, they find the China deal to be symbolic of all that is wrong with current globalization dynamics and they are convinced that they can use the momentum from Seattle, as well as public distrust of China, to win the vote against NTR for China and strike another blow against those that support unregulated international capitalism.

Recognizing the potential significance of the China-NTR debate, the Wall Street Journal, in a front-page story entitled "WTO's Failure in Bid to Launch Trade Talks Emboldens Protestors," offered a profile of leading progressive voices in the movement to keep China out of the WTO:

The [WTO] talks' collapse left foes of free trade euphoric. And they left Seattle with a new energy, intent on fighting the Clinton administration's next major trade goal: getting China in the WTO. "China. We're coming atcha," yelled Mike Dolan, master planner of the Seattle protests, as he celebrated the disintegration of the WTO ministerial meeting. "There's no question about it. The next issue is China." [2]

The article quotes a number of people associated with the AFL-CIO making similar statements. AFL-CIO spokeswoman Denise Mitchell said, "The China vote is going to become a proxy for all of our concerns about globalization." The article also highlights the position of Jeff Faux, president of the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI), who opposed China's entrance into the WTO because its presence would make it "impossible to get labor and environmental standards." The reason is that China is not only a dictatorship, it is also too big a country to push around.

This strategy of making the China issue our main issue is problematic for several reasons. Most importantly, it encourages people concerned about labor and environmental conditions in the United States to see China as largely responsible for these conditions, not U.S. capitalists or capitalism in general. This leads people to think that the best response to U.S. problems is to force China to change its system, perhaps by adopting U.S.- shaped labor and environmental regulations, and by extension, that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with U.S. capitalism.

These are not abstract fears. A case in point is an article by Robert E. Scott, an EPI economist, which was published in the progressive journal Working USA. [3] Scott opposes China's entry in the WTO for several reasons, the most important of which is that its statist system does not allow for fair trade. Thus, its admittance into the WTO will result in increased trade problems for the U.S. economy.

Scott proposes three conditions which, if met, would allow him to end his opposition: