<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 4:24 AM<br>Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: NAFTA’s gravediggers?<br>To: "<a href="mailto:CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a>" <<a href="mailto:CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a>>, WSFDiscuss List <<a href="mailto:WorldSocialForum-Discuss@openspaceforum.net">WorldSocialForum-Discuss@openspaceforum.net</a>>, "<<a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>>" <div dir="ltr">
<br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Sid Shniad</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shniad@gmail.com" target="_blank">shniad@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 3:11 PM<br>Subject: NAFTA’s gravediggers?<br>To: <br><br><br><div dir="ltr"><a href="http://isreview.org/issue/95/naftas-gravediggers" target="_blank">http://isreview.org/issue/95/naftas-gravediggers</a><br>
<h1>NAFTA’s gravediggers?</h1>
<div>Review by <a href="http://isreview.org/person/todd-chretien" target="_blank">Todd Chretien</a></div><div><a href="http://isreview.org/issue/95" target="_blank">Issue #95</a>: <a href="http://isreview.org/section/reviews" target="_blank">Reviews</a><br><br></div><div><div><div>
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<h4>Continental Crucible:</h4><div>Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America</div>
<div>By <a href="http://isreview.org/person/richard-roman" target="_blank">Richard Roman</a> and <a href="http://isreview.org/person/edur-velasco-arregui" target="_blank">Edur Velasco Arregui</a></div> <div><span>Fernwood Publishing, Ltd.</span>, <span>2013</span> · <span>148 pages</span> · <span>$19.95</span></div>
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</div></div></div><div><div><div><p>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 <a href="tel:1994" value="+661994" target="_blank">1994</a>. 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="tel:1982" value="+661982" target="_blank">1982</a> peso devaluation, and a decade of
wholesale privatization. However, as <i>Continental Crucible</i>
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.” </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Continental Crucible</i>
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. </p>
<p>The real contribution the authors make is to force us to think in terms of an integrated <i>continental</i>
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
<i>US labor movement. </i>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) <i>because</i> of the availability of Mexican labor. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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). </p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>“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. </p>
<p>I hasten to add that <i>Continental Crucible</i>’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. </p>
<p>None of this should obscure the importance of <i>Continental Crucible</i>.
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.</p></div></div></div><br></div>
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