BY JACK BARNES  
Rising interimperialist conflicts, combined with resistance by workers, working farmers, and youth, will further undermine the myth of a "common Europe." Even as the European Union--the new name of the European Community--grows in numbers, increased rivalry among these capitalist powers themselves will continually disrupt any steps toward a single currency or a common central bank, let alone toward a common foreign policy, armed forces, or "European government." That hope, which bubbled over decades and reached a crest verging on mania in the closing years of the 1980s, is now definitively behind us.

Instead, the European Union will be just that: a customs union, a common market within which capital, commodities, and labor will flow more freely across borders. For now, that setup advances a common interest of the national ruling classes in Europe in their competition against the U.S. capitalists, who enjoy a huge internal market and easier access to markets in Canada, Latin America, and the Pacific and much of Asia. Even these lowered trade and capital barriers within the European Union, however, are taking much longer than initially planned to implement, while those that have been put in place already have their rough edges. What's more, the freer flow of goods and capital exacerbates contradictions resulting from massive overproduction and redundancy of productive capacity throughout Europe--and throughout the world--in steel, auto, and other industries. This gives an added impulse to layoffs, plant shutdowns and restructuring, and employer demands for greater "labor flexibility."

The downsizing and cost-cutting process in Japan will be even more explosive, but it will also be more difficult and take longer to unfold. Nonetheless, over the past year the layoffs have been accelerating there too, notwithstanding the supposed "cultural tradition" of "lifetime jobs" we've all heard so much about. Toyota, Toshiba, Nissan, Komatsu, Nippon Steel, and other of the biggest Japanese companies have all begun carrying out extensive layoffs over the past year, as that country founders in its worst recession since World War II.

Stock market and real estate prices have plummeted in Japan since the opening of the 1990s. Its banking system, a big chunk of whose capital base is held in land and common stocks, is the most vulnerable of all the major imperialist powers. This Japanese bubble is yet to burst.

The deepening economic crisis is breaking up long-established capitalist parties and patterns of bourgeois politics in Japan. And there will be growing working-class resistance there too, although workers have more obstacles to overcome. Since the 1930s they have been subjected first to a semifascist imperial regime; then to Washington's antilabor occupation government under General MacArthur; then to the U.S.-organized Liberal Democratic Party's governments that succeeded in dealing blow after blow to the union movement in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. But as the pressures we've been describing build up, and layoffs and other assaults keep mounting, the myth of a permanent labor/management truce--punctuated by a ritual spring "labor offensive" at contract time--will come unstuck, sometimes explosively.

Cheap-labor "export platforms" in Asia can help slow falling profits rates for a time in Japan, but they don't resolve the fundamental conflict between capital and labor "at home," which will sharpen. Driven to export capital more deeply into Asia, moreover, the Japanese rulers will inevitably pursue an increasingly assertive foreign and military policy to protect their growing interests, bringing them into more frequent conflict with Washington and Wall Street and with governments throughout the region.  
 
Protectionism and 'trade talks'
There is enormous overproduction in capitalist agriculture as well as industrial goods. There is world overproduction in rice, in wheat, in soybeans, in sugar. That doesn't mean an end to starvation and famine in Africa or elsewhere, of course. (Under capitalism, overproduction is not measured in relation to social needs, but what can be sold at a price high enough to realize a competitive profit.) Nor does it mean that the prices of particular farm commodities won't jump because of a flood or weather conditions or massive commercial convulsions.

But the general pressure on prices of agricultural goods is downward today. U.S. capital is determined to bash down barriers to exporting its rice, apples, and meat products to Japan, Taiwan, and Korea; it's determined to push up the price of grain sold by its competitors in France, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Over the past fifteen years, the capitalist rulers in Western Europe, especially France, have challenged their U.S. rivals' world market share in wheat and some other farm products, but agricultural productivity remains much lower than in the United States, and European governments have had to bear much greater relative costs in subsidies to capitalist farmers.

The "trade talks" that go on around the GATT world tariff agreement and between Washington, Tokyo, Paris, Ottawa, and others--rough as these talks sometimes get, even publicly--are just polite cover for the real use of muscle to advance the interests of conflicting national ruling classes. U.S. military might stands behind its pressure on the capitalists in Europe, on its competitors in France, Japan, and elsewhere....

Every time we hear about one of these so-called trade deals on TV, or read about them in the papers, what we're watching unfold is the growing use of political and military clout to achieve economic ends. None of this has anything to do with advancing free trade, remedying unfair competition, or any of the other high-flown rationalizations emanating from the White House and bipartisan Congress. It's the use of power to drain surplus value from wherever it's produced by workers and toiling farmers into the pockets of capitalists in the United States.  
 
 
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