Vol. 73/No. 18      May 11, 2009

This protectionist slogan has no place at May 1 actions. It is part of the employers' campaign to criminalize immigrant workers by blaming them for unemployment rather than the bosses who are the ones actually throwing workers into the streets.

NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement—is a trade pact between the United States, Mexico, and Canada that went into effect in 1994. The U.S. capitalists saw it as a way to strengthen their domination over Canada, a weaker imperialist rival, and at the same time to intensify their exploitation of Mexican peasants and workers. From the start, the main opponents of NAFTA have been liberal Democrats and union officials, on the one hand, and ultrarightists like Patrick Buchanan on the other. Both claim the agreement threatens "American jobs."

In his 2008 presidential campaign Barack Obama called for amending NAFTA. "Trade with foreign nations should strengthen the American economy," his platform said.

This narrow, nationalist framework—that U.S. workers have a common interest with their bosses in "strengthening the American economy"—is deadly for the labor movement. From there it's a small jump to another demand that has appeared on some May 1st Coalition literature: "No to labor export"—the idea that there are "American jobs" that must stay in the United States.

There's no such thing as an "American job," or a "Mexican job," for that matter. There are simply jobs. The rulers seek to boost their profits by getting workers to see each other as enemies in the competition to get hired.

The issue is not whether you are for or against NAFTA. What attitude class-conscious workers take toward a given imperialist trade policy doesn't start with that policy but how to unite workers around the world to defend our interests as a class and fight for jobs for all.

As Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote in the book Capitalism's World Disorder, "Class-conscious workers oppose NAFTA… . But we do so from an internationalist standpoint, rejecting any notion of common interests with the employing class in bolstering their competitiveness against their rivals or helping them reinforce the pariah status and superexploitation of immigrant workers."

The U.S. labor movement should oppose any tariffs or other restrictions on products entering the United States, just as it should oppose the U.S. government prohibiting exports to any country—including imperialist countries.

However, class-conscious workers support the right of semicolonial countries to use tariffs against the import of goods from imperialist countries. Such measures are a way to compensate for unequal trade relations, the gap in the productivity of labor between the imperialist countries and the countries they exploit, and the debt slavery imposed by the likes of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

This working-class approach to trade is not less applicable when unemployment is on the rise,

but all the more essential if the labor movement is to overcome the divisions imposed by the employers, one of the biggest being the division between U.S.- and foreign-born workers. And that starts with resolutely exposing all nationalist, "America first" slogans such as "Abolish NAFTA."
 
 
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