[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: NAFTA’s gravediggers?

Sun Apr 5 15:15:37 CEST 2015

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:24 AM
Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: NAFTA’s gravediggers?
To: "CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk" <
CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk>, WSFDiscuss List <
WorldSocialForum-Discuss at openspaceforum.net>, "<
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sid Shniad <shniad at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 3:11 PM
Subject: NAFTA’s gravediggers?
To:

http://isreview.org/issue/95/naftas-gravediggers
NAFTA’s gravediggers?
Review by Todd Chretien <http://isreview.org/person/todd-chretien>
Issue #95 <http://isreview.org/issue/95>: Reviews
<http://isreview.org/section/reviews>

  Continental Crucible:
Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America
By Richard Roman <http://isreview.org/person/richard-roman> and Edur
Velasco Arregui <http://isreview.org/person/edur-velasco-arregui>
Fernwood Publishing, Ltd., 2013 · 148 pages · $19.95

Rather than bemoan the twentieth anniversary of the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui have
written a call to arms in their provocative new book Continental Crucible:
Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America.
Free trade has become such a bipartisan mantra that it may surprise some
readers to learn that then president Bill Clinton had to strong-arm the
treaty through the Democrat-controlled House and Senate in the summer of
1994. Or as Rahm Emanuel, serving as a senior presidential advisor,
prosaically warned reluctant lobbyists, “Look, your bosses are for this, so
stop fucking bad-mouthing us.”

Breaking the book into three parts, Roman and Velasco first demonstrate how
significant sections of the US, Canadian, and Mexican capitalist classes
created powerful corporate organizations in the 1970s (the Business
Roundtable, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and El Consejo
Coordinador Empresarial), all aimed at radically shifting the balance of
class forces in their respective countries.

Though the US may have been the dominant promoter of the free trade agenda,
Roman and Velasco demonstrate that the Canadian and Mexican ruling classes
had their own reasons for turning to neoliberalism. “We are not talking
about a situation of weak, dependent, comprador capitalists in Canada and
Mexico,” the authors write. Especially interesting is their description of
how this dynamic unfolded in Mexico.

Ruling Mexico for seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) pursued a path of “state-guided” capitalist development in the years
after World War II, leading to a huge boom based on import substitution and
oil. This all came crashing down with the global credit crunch in the late
1970s, the 1982 peso devaluation, and a decade of wholesale privatization.
However, as *Continental Crucible* shows, this was not merely a pragmatic
scramble on the part of the old state-sector bosses and PRI politicos, it
also signaled the rise of a new power in Mexico, “an increasingly strong,
concentrated Mexican capitalist class.”

However, as Roman and Velasco are quick to point out, no iron wall
separates the “old” and the “new” bourgeoisie in Mexico, as many of the
old-line PRI power brokers used their positions in the state to seize
control of lucrative business ventures during the massive privatizations of
the 1980s and 1990s. To top it all off, after losing its one-party
dictatorship to the pro-business National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, the
PRI is back in power under the neoliberal, Clinton-like Enrique Peña Nieto.

The authors expertly catalog the statistics of misery suffered, if to
varying degrees, by workers both north and south of the US–Mexico border.
The old methods of union organizing restricted to single nations and based
on a limited social contract no longer work, they contend, insisting that
“solidarity must replace competition” among workers in North America. The
good news is that, despite the dire situation, as *Continental Crucible*
argues, “The corporate offensive has also sown the seeds of resistance both
by the intensification of hardship and suffering and the unintended
promotion of cross-border working-class links.” These connections exist
because, first, many US and Canadian workers belong to the same
internationals—even if these organizational ties have been degraded over
the last decades. And, second, mass migration on the part of Mexican labor
into the United States (and Canada to a lesser extent) has created an
integrated “continental” working class.

The real contribution the authors make is to force us to think in terms of
an integrated *continental* working class, as opposed to, as is all too
often the case—at least in the United States—simply thinking about the
impact of immigration on the *US labor movement. *This point of view opens
important vistas. With respect to economics, US capital’s access to the
growing Mexican reserve army of labor in the wake of NAFTA was not an
“insignificant factor in maintaining the general rate of profit” in the
United States in the 1990s, they argue. As tech boomed, Mexican immigrant
labor helped restrain wage growth, especially in the service sector upon
which high tech relied for its operations, freeing up capital for
investment. Thus, according to Roman and Velasco, there was not a tech boom
that subsequently drew in Mexican service sector labor; rather, there was a
tech boom (partially) *because* of the availability of Mexican labor.

But Mexican workers are not simply victims; they may also be
neoliberalism’s gravediggers. Here, Roman and Velasco advance a set of
interlocking theses in which they contend that Mexican workers are
“radically different than . . . their northern counterparts.” In sum, the
Mexican working class faces greater exploitation and repression (both in
Mexico and in the North), it retains “strong revolutionary traditions . . .
from the Mexican Revolution,” and the Mexican regime itself has become
destabilized by decades of economic restructuring and the state’s loss of
its monopoly of armed force because of the drug war.

There are elements of truth in all of these observations as anyone familiar
with the concurrent 2006 rebellion in Oaxaca and the immigrant rights May
Day marches all over the United States knows. Moreover, as last year’s
Mexican teachers’ strike, the 2012 student movement, and the rise of
self-defense militias against both the drug lords and the state all
demonstrate, the level of social and class struggle remains qualitatively
higher in Mexico than in either the United States or Canada (with the
partial exception of Quebec).

All this notwithstanding, the authors veer at times too close to presenting
a one-sided analysis of the complexities of the tri-national class
struggle, placing too heavy a bet on what they call the “Mexican spark.”

“The Mexican working class,” they write, “is rich in traditions of struggle
and collectivity but weak in terms of organization and resources. The
Canadian and US labor movements, as weakened and under attack as they are,
are rich in resources and organization.” The danger here is that
international working-class solidarity is conceived of as divided into
distinct active and passive agents.

I hasten to add that *Continental Crucible*’s authors generally present a
much more dynamic picture than this; they note that “the spark and the fuel
can come from different sources.” They also have no truck with the common
notion that US and Canadian workers are “bought off” or somehow benefit
from Mexican workers’ exploitation and oppression. Yet, their emphasis on
Mexican working-class militancy can obscure the challenges immigrant
workers face in the United States when putting forward class demands that
are independent from the rising, and increasingly influential, Latino
middle class, which has its own economic and political ambitions.

None of this should obscure the importance of *Continental Crucible*. At
just 144 pages, it is accessible, sharply written, and pulls no punches in
asserting that the only force capable of undoing the damage NAFTA has
wrought is international solidarity. Roman and Velasco model a materialist
understanding of the nature of class struggles to come and lay bare the
golden strings that unite the continent’s rulers even as they jockey to
extract the maximum advantages possible from one another. However, not
content with analysis, the authors end with a hope: “Rather than gold to
line the pockets of the corporate alchemists, the intense heat may produce
the energetic and resolute re-emergence of the salt of the earth, the
working classes of the continent, imbued with a renewed determination to
build a new North America.” It is a hope we should all share.

_______________________________________________
NetworkedLabour mailing list
NetworkedLabour at lists.contrast.org
http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20150405/2472af9c/attachment-0001.htm 