As the meeting approaches the imperialist powers, with Washington at their head, are pressuring countries in the semicolonial world and the workers states to open up their markets to foreign goods and investment, while they selectively maintain protectionist barriers. And those same powers are locked in disputes with each other over access to each other's markets, and over their domination and economic plunder of the majority of humanity.

A wide range of unions and other groups have endorsed protests that will occur in Seattle at the same time as the WTO meeting. Organizers' declare that this is "the protest of the century." However exaggerated this claim, the WTO event and anti-WTO protests have become the subject of widespread interest and discussion.

Many unionists and working farmers rightly view capitalist organizations like the WTO with suspicion. The imperialist powers created the WTO and use it as a tool in their drive to squeeze yet more profits out of the labor of toilers around the world. Class-conscious workers oppose the organization and its policies. They call for the governments of the countries in which they live to withdraw from this organization, and all similar formations.

At the same time the trade body acts not as an independent force, but registers the class relationship of forces in the world. The most powerful imperialist power, Washington has already indicated it will defy WTO rulings when it considers its "national security" is at stake.  
 

Protests promote economic nationalism

Class-conscious workers will not participate in the protests that are being organized against the meeting in Seattle, however. The basis of these actions boils down to different expressions of economic nationalism —support for the bosses of the United States and their government — under the progressive cover of defending the environment, or opposing the low pay and bad working conditions that many workers in the semicolonial world endure.

"Make the Global Economy work for working families," states a leaflet issued by the King County Labor Council and the AFL-CIO in Seattle, urging workers to "Join us Nov. 30, the opening day of the World Trade Organization meeting… to demand changes." The national union federation has assigned two full-time field organizers to organize this protest and an associated conference. Officials from the United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers of America (USWA), Teamsters, and the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union are among those involved in the event.

The heavy involvement of these union officials does not endow the protests with a working-class character. The union bureaucracy occupies a position between the union membership and the employers, acting to disorganize workers and minimize the impact of the struggles they undertake. They perform the same function in politics, including foreign policy, acting as "labor lieutenants of capital" in this field too. Since the buildup to World War II, the AFL-CIO leaders have advanced the foreign policy thrust of the ruling class.

In that period Washington established itself through military and economic conquest as the predominant imperialist power. It either defeated militarily — in the case of Germany and Japan — or elbowed aside —as with Britain and France — the other major imperialist powers.

Others planning to join the protests include environmental and church groups; the National Farmers Union, which is dominated by wealthier farmers; and those associated with Ralph Nader, a well-known activist who criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for "exporting jobs" when he ran for president in 1996.

Other protests are planned overseas at the time of the Seattle conference, with a similar nationalist character. A demonstration planned in France for November 27 will call for measures to supposedly protect France from being bought up by giant U.S. pension funds. The coalition building it includes both right-wing and leftist members of parliament, as well as many political organizations considered part of the Left. France and the United States, the world's two largest agricultural exporters, have frequently found themselves at loggerheads.  
 

Calls to defend 'sovereign nation states'

"The WTO has elevated corporate power above the sovereign powers of all nation states," reads a leaflet issued by People for Fair Trade, striking a common theme. The picture of a WTO standing over the imperial-ist powers like Washington, Tokyo and Berlin has no basis in fact. The trade body is a group of bureaucrats based in Brussels with an annual budget of $75 million dollars.

Workers have no interest in protesting to defend the national sovereignty of Washington or any other imperialist power. Sovereign Washington, and its sovereign allies and rivals, are the brutal enemies of working people at home and abroad. The WTO is their creation, and it will fall by the wayside if it loses its usefulness to them or cannot contain their conflicts.

In trade conflicts, many of the anti-WTO protesters lend support to Washington against the governments of semicolonial countries that are oppressed and exploited by imperialism. Many statements bewail rulings by the WTO against U.S. trade restrictions on imports of shrimp from Asia and oil from Venezuela.

The U.S. restrictions claimed that the foreign imports were associated with environmental damage. Washington and its rivals, whose profit-driven capitalist system is fundamentally inimical to environmental preservation, play on environmental concerns to win popular support in their trade conflicts.

Among those planning to participate in the November 30 AFL-CIO demonstration are the "Tibetan Rights Campaign," which is calling for "Free Tibet" and demanding that China not be allowed to join the WTO. This position dovetails with Washington's drive to weaken and militarily surround the Chinese workers state.

Before the Chinese revolution of 1949, Tibet was subjected to feudal rule by the class that the Dalai Lama — cultivated by Washington — now represents. The "free" Tibet advocated by liberal forces will be a return to that oppressed condition.

Despite the rhetoric used against the trade body, many of those organizing the coming protests call for its reform rather than its abolition. The "call for a turnaround of the WTO [is] a theme being echoed by a growing consensus of activists worldwide…" reports one anti-WTO publication. This is the approach of the labor officialdom.

"We are not going to be denouncing the WTO, asking that it be killed or go away," said Ronald Judd of the King County Labor Council, who is helping to organize the November 30 union rally. The mild criticisms voiced by AFL-CIO officials reflect their political support for the Clinton government and its trade policies. Judd called for the WTO to enforce "sanctions against [countries that violate] workers' rights."

This is consistent with the AFL-CIO's record in the past of opposing imports on the grounds that American workers' jobs were at stake. The federation's president John Sweeney, touted as being more progressive than his predecessors in the job —an image that the November 30 protest will reinforce in the eyes of many middle-class political activists — put the AFL-CIO's policy bluntly in 1996. "We want to help American business compete in the world and create new wealth for your shareholders and your employees," he said.  
 

A bridge to the ultraright

The nationalist approach not only backs up Washington's aggressive stance in trade matters and other aspects of its foreign policy but it also paves the way for workers, who are disillusioned with the established political parties and the bosses they loyally represent, to lend political support to rightist political figures.

Fascist-minded and other reactionary politicians have surfaced in many imperialist countries, given life by the rightward direction of government policy, and by the social and economic crisis which unfolds even in the upward swing of the business cycle.

The People's Party led by the industrialist Christoph Blocher in Switzerland and the Freedom Party of Jorg Haider in Austria won second place in recent parliamentary votes. Both parties waged nationalist campaigns against "foreigners" and against the European Union, portraying themselves as representing "the people."

In phrases strikingly similar to those employed by many groups planning to protest in Seattle, the ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan bemoans "the surrender of our national sovereignty to the WTO." Buchanan's "brigades" represent the initial recruits to fascist gangs that will, in the future, be turned loose on the organizations of working people.

Teamsters union president James Hoffa is taking the bridge of the economic nationalism of the union officials to Buchanan to its logical conclusion. The right-wing magazine the American Spectator reports that "Hoffa is committed to backing Buchanan... during the primary season." In France, a number of forces formerly in socialist and left wing groups have been drawn to the Bonapartist, strongman figure of former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who has compared the WTO to the Third Reich.

In opposing the imperialist trade body of the WTO, working people need to reject the nationalist politics represented by these forces — the same politics that underpin the protests in Seattle.

As Jack Barnes writes in Capitalism's World Disorder, a book that socialist workers are campaigning with in a number of countries, "The only 'we' we recognize is that of working people and our allies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico – and the rest of the Americas and the world. Not 'we' Americans, 'we' English speakers 'we' the white race, or anything else that chains us to the class that grows wealthy off the exploitation of our labor and that of our toiling brothers and sisters the world over."  
 
 
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