The Militant - May 7, 2001 -- Capitalist trade pacts

Vol.65/No.18 May 7, 2001

Capitalist trade pacts
(editorial)

Working people are bombarded with arguments to make us accept the notion that "we" have a stake in one or another set of U.S. government and employer trade policies. These range from "protecting" the "American worker" with tariffs and other measures that increase the cost of imports to so-called "free trade" policies that will give U.S. companies an advantage on the world market. Workers and farmers are subjected to such arguments from the employers, government and trade union officials, the big-business media, and various organizations that claim to speak in the interests of working people.

Accepting this framework--in any of its guises--for how to confront the effects of the growing world capitalist economic crisis is a deadly trap for all working people. The bosses and their two parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, present the false notion that "we" in the United States have a stake in one or another of their proposals. This disguises the fact that the United States, Canada, and Mexico are class-divided and that we--workers and farmers--have nothing in common with them--the capitalist exploiters and landlords.

Capitalism has been "globalizing" since its very birth more than two centuries ago. There is no point in trying to make the capitalists organize their economy in a different way, as some "antiglobalization" opponents of "free trade" policies seek to do. The real question to address is what we as workers and farmers can and must do--and that is to join together across borders and fight for solutions that advance our common needs as a class.

Millions of working people around the world are discovering as they enter into struggle the fact that we are an international class and have common interests. In contrast with proposals that foster competition among ourselves for jobs and other basic rights, the only course that serves working people in the cities and countryside is one of joining together in a united struggle against our common enemy: the employers and their government, above all Washington.

Decades of struggles by working people have demonstrated that the only way to prevent the employer class from deepening its assaults and ultimately imposing fascism and world war on working people to resolve the deep-going crisis of the outmoded capitalist system--their solution twice before in the 20th century--is through revolutionary struggle by working people against the capitalist rulers and their government. The international fight for socialism does not start from a good idea. It begins with the most basic needs of the producing classes to defend ourselves from the assaults, brutalities, wars, and oppression by an outmoded and violent system.