World Trade Organisation
Rattled in Seattle!
THE COLLAPSE of the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle at the end of last year was a major setback for the advocates of Thatcherite "neo-liberal" policies in the USA and Europe. Not only were the objectives they hoped to achieve at the WTO’s so-called "Millennium Round" not achieved: the spotlight of the world’s media began to focus on areas of government policy which are seldom if ever publicly discussed. Pete Cooper and John Lister weigh up the issues.
Click for Seattle campaign info!
New Labour has been revealed as a co-conspirator with the US State Department and other imperialist governments in promoting the global agenda of big business.
The anger of the free marketeers
"It is hard to say which was worse: watching the militant dunces parade their ignorance through the streets of Seattle, or listening to their lame-brained governments respond to the ‘arguments’." ( The Economist )
"If you are a Salvadoran mother desperate to feed your family or a Chinese teenager with no local job prospects, that ‘sweatshop’ and ‘exploitation’ might look more and more like opportunity." ( Wall Street Journal )
"The ragged coalition of protesters at Seattle use the language of socialism but have no agenda of their own. The ‘n30’ protesters accuse the WTO of helping ‘the exploitation of our plant and its people by the global capitalist system’. Instead they demanded ‘alternative social and economic structures based on cooperation, ecological sustainability, and grassroots democracy’, which sounds like the Communist Manifesto rewritten by Christopher Robin. (… ) In the end, the WTO is on the side of the angels. It is what the world’s poor need most…" ( Andrew Marr, Independent on Sunday )
Delegates from third world countries which stood to lose most from the new round of trade liberalisation going ahead – and with serious objections to WTO plans on issues such as free trade in agriculture, services, and trade-related intellectual property rights – resisted the massive pressure placed on them to sign up.
Their resistance was made easier by the divisions between the main imperialist counties, notably the differences over agriculture between the EU, Japan and the USA.
There was further trouble when Bill Clinton insisted on the inclusion of new standards dealing with labour and environmental issues.
But the shambles became a collapse under pressure from the vocal and visible opposition to the process mounted by demonstrators in Seattle and worldwide. There were mass mobilisations across the globe, but above all in the US and in Europe (notably in France). Delegates from third world countries admitted to being encouraged to resist US government bullying by the mobilisations they saw in the streets.
The course of the demonstrations, which linked up many different and contradictory campaigns – including anti-poverty campaigners, unemployment activists, third worldist non-governmental organisations (NGOs), feminists, trade unionists, peasants, and direct action elements – has been extensively chronicled and analysed.
As many bourgeois commentators delighted in pointing out, the demands for labour and environmental standards supported by trade union bodies (the world-wide ICFTU, the American AFL-CIO and the British TUC) amounted to a (not very thinly) disguised protectionism.
These policies were in contradiction to the positions adopted by many (but not all) NGOs: they argue that such issues are not appropriate for inclusion in world trade negotiations.
However there was a real and rapid convergence amongst the protesters in the course of the demonstrations, both in terms of understanding, solutions, and methods.
There were many reports of demonstrating US steelworkers, for example, proclaiming with other protesters their new understanding of the common anti-corporate (if not yet anti-capitalist) basis of their opposition to the WTO.
This rise in the level of consciousness and change of orientation should not of course be overstated. There is certainly no sign of the major western trade union leaders shifting their positions on these issues.
The Seattle debacle was not neo-liberalism’s first major political defeat. That was the defeat of the reactionary Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1998. But what Seattle did above all – in a way that the MAI defeat did not – was to spotlight and expose the global aspirations of neo-liberalism and the imperialist countries on the world public stage.
What next?
Despite the setback, the US and EU are not letting the grass grow under their feet: nor have they changed their objectives one iota.
The US government’s main priorities are:
The elimination of agricultural subsidies and tariffs, especially those of the EU and Japan. In this they are supported by other agricultural exporting countries such as Canada, Australia and Argentina.
The liberalisation of trade in services including health and education is also high on their agenda.
They also want to enforce Trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) which would uphold US-style patenting laws world wide, and would prevent countries such as India manufacturing cheap generic medicines.
The USA wants to beat back restrictions on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and technical barriers to trade: they want the WTO to be judge and jury on health and safety matters such as beef hormones.
Labour standards. It is not clear whether this forms part of the US core agenda or whether it is Clinton paying lip service to the US protectionist lobby, including organised labour. It has been suggested that WTO negotiations on this issue may be delayed until after this year’s US Presidential elections when the issue can be safely dropped.
The EU agenda is substantially the same, with the exception of agriculture and culture.
It may come as some surprise to realise how eager European governments appear to be to open up their "public" services such as health and education (multi-billion industries) to the intervention of US corporations.
But the EU, enthusiastically supported by the British government, is equally keen to expand this as a potential export area. The WTO agenda on these public services is of course closely linked to agenda of the privatisation and schemes such as the Private Finance Initiative, both domestically and internationally.
Short shrift
New Labour has become the most avid proponent of this extension of the free market, and one-time "left" minister Clare Short the most shameless in arguing for it.
She has even claimed that opening up public services to competitive tender in Third World countries would be a "blow against corruption"! (Short fails to mention, of course, the huge corruption which would inevitably ensue from multinational firms bribing poorly paid state officials in these countries to award these lucrative contracts).
Agriculture remains a contentious area, since the changes the US wants from the WTO would mean the end of small farming in Europe and Japan, not to mention in large swathes of the 3rd world, under the onslaught of cheap (subsidised) exports from the US and the Cairns group of agricultural exporting countries.
The EU itself is divided on this issue. The projected expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe signifies the beginning of the end of the Common Agricultural Policy, which was never designed to support the mass of small farmers of those countries. But there are real political problems in many key EU countries in deciding how fast agricultural subsidies can be abandoned in the west.
GMOs and TRIPS will still be high on both EU and the US agendas, after a humiliating climb-down by EU environment ministers present, including Michael Meacher. They refused to allow a US proposal for a WTO working group on biotechnology and to negotiate on reducing protections for forests – despite the fact that the European Commission had earlier agreed to support it.
While there is more agreement than dissent between the USA and the EU, it is not entirely clear yet how these governments intend to achieve their ends.
Expected failure
The failure of the round was widely anticipated, which explains the notable absence of world leaders at Seattle. But it also means that some alternative contingency plans are already being implemented.
Agriculture, Services, and TRIPS for example are permanent items on the WTO agenda and are therefore not excluded from negotiation by the failure of the Millennium Round. Indeed negotiations are due to start on these issues in January 2000.
But other mechanisms are being utilised to carry through the EU-US agenda.
WTO: a secretive, reactionary rich nation’s club
Nearly 30 of the WTO’s 134 member countries are too poor to have a representative based at its headquarters in Geneva, while the US delegations number hundreds.
The WTO’s panels – which sit in judgement on trade disputes and have the power to overrule elected governments – are made up of unelected "experts", whose names are not disclosed. They only meet in secret session, and hear no outside witnesses.
Once a WTO panel finds against a country and imposes sanctions, these can only be lifted by a unanimous vote of all member countries – including the one which laid the complaint!
Under the WTO’s new ‘international court of justice’, national laws are all regarded as "barriers to trade".
Under WTO rules no country is allowed to ban genetically modified organisms. Any country refusing to import products on grounds of health and safety has to provide scientific proof.
According to George Monbiot in the Guardian, one of these will be the Transatlantic Economic Partnership (TEP) whose advocates include representatives of the leading European multinationals, grouped in the ‘European Round Table’, which has for years played a key role in shaping EU policies.
The TEP agenda is to form a single transatlantic free-trade area with the North Atlantic Free Trade Area (NAFTA), which includes the USA, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA in turn is also extending its reach into the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. Additionally the US Congress last year carried legislation effectively creating a free trade area with most of Africa.
So if this agenda is carried through, a free trade area would be created comprising Europe, North and South America, and Africa, without any involvement of the WTO’s structure and processes.
In addition, following a WTO ruling against India, major bilateral treaties have been recently concluded between the US and India reducing import tariffs on food, textiles and consumer goods. Similar deals have been struck between the US and China, as part of bringing China into the WTO.
Under WTO rules "most favoured nation status", and "national treatment" mean that the terms negotiated by the US with these giant countries apply to all 135 WTO member states.
So the major imperialist blocks are already pursuing their economic policy agendas using a multi-track approach.
The British government’s position is out-and-out reactionary on all the main issues; if anything it is to the right of the US government.
Blair’s government is opposed to the EU position on subsidies for EU agriculture. And while it gives only reluctant support to the US position on core labour standards this is not out of solidarity with the third world, but because they potentially constitute a barrier to free trade. New Labour argues that the issues should be delegated to the toothless International Labour Organisation (ILO).
The International Labour Movement
The main labour movement body internationally is the International Congress of Free Trade Unions (ICTFU), which began in the cold war and is still heavily dominated by the US labour movement and its allies, notably the TUC. Its general secretary is right wing former AEU leader Bill Jordan.
Generally speaking the ICFTU supports the neo-liberal agenda, but calls for the WTO in consultation with the ILO to impose core labour standards as a condition of access to markets. These standards are the ILO core standards adopted in a Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work in June 1998:
freedom of association;
the right to collective bargaining;
elimination of forced labour and child labour;
elimination of discrimination in employment.
The Declaration’s supporters don’t often mention that it is hedged around with caveats about the above rights not affecting the competitive position of countries, which effectively nullify its impact.
Unfortunately sections of the left such as the Morning Star supporters, in accordance with their system of alliances with the "left" international labour bureaucracy, take the same position. They claim that the imposition of labour standards is not an attempt to price third world industries out of world markets, since they make no reference to labour costs as such.
Nevertheless power to discriminate against such industries and countries would be handed over to unelected international WTO trade bureaucrats, whose concerns and interests lie altogether elsewhere.
The majority of Third World governments are opposed to the issues of labour and/or environmental standards being linked to world trade. They argue that this would be no more than (not very well) disguised protectionism by the "developed" world and its labour movements.
Of course the position of most third world governments is in turn merely the protection of their "own" capitalists’ right to exploit their own populations. However NGOs and most genuinely independent trade unionists in the third world generally take the same position.
They say that the issues of trade union rights should be dealt with not by means of international trade regulation, but through building up independent labour movements within those countries, and by international solidarity with those movements in the face of repressive governments. This is the position which socialists should take.
The WTO and similar organisations, which take their decisions behind closed doors, with no reference to trade unionists or anyone from the countries concerned, are heavily dominated by the imperialist nations and would use the clause act as partial judge and jury on behalf of the imperialist corporations.
In fact no country in the world passes the four tests – certainly not the last one. The British anti-union laws violate ILO conventions. There are three million child labourers in Britain, mostly illegal, and many more in the USA. On that logic the WTO should take out sanctions against Britain and the USA.
Of course the standards would inevitably be only selectively applied. Would the WTO raise tariffs against Nike subsidiaries or suppliers using child labour on the same basis as a third world based competitor? To pose the question is to know the answer.
Advocates of labour standards like Bill Clinton or the TUC don’t expect them to be used against US or European multinationals. As a commentary by Filipino socialists put it, "Clinton’s agenda on these issues is hypocritical and a double-bladed weapon, intended to give the WTO extra powers in micro-managing the economies of third world nations, in addition to what the IMF and the World Bank have already been doing."
On the issue of "free trade", socialists defend the right of oppressed countries to impose tariffs and/or subsidies while we oppose protectionism in the advanced capitalist countries and above all of our own ruling class.
Such protectionism, as we saw in Seattle, merely seeks to draw in workers and their organisations behind nationalist, "anti-foreign" sentiment and policies. The result is a nationalist cross-class bloc, such as that between the US labour unions and Pat Buchanan and the Republican right, or British Stalinists and left reformists with the Tory right on the issue of the euro.
"Free trade" is not really free at all. 30% of world trade is now intra-corporate. This component is therefore subject to price and quantity decisions made by ever more dominant monopolistic corporations, and are often determined by such considerations as differential rates of taxation, arbitrary location of manufacture, capital and currency speculation, political boycotts etc.
There is no question here of genuine competition arising from transactions between a large number of buyers and sellers – as in neoclassical economic theory.
The issue of economic, social, political and increasingly military equality, or rather the lack of it, is central to the issue of free trade. Since before the modern epoch of imperialism the lack of equality in these relations has meant that semi-colonial countries have been consigned to the role of producers of international primary products and of cheap labour.
It has been the latter role which has taken on more importance in the last twenty years – in South East Asia for example. But as the SE Asian crisis demonstrated, such development is unstable and fraught with peril.
The basic relationship has not changed over the last century, with the countries in which the vast majority of humanity lives lacking access to the capital which alone would enable them to break out of the cycle of under development.
The imperialist dominated WTO and other agencies are effectively making a bad situation worse for the peoples of these countries by denying them any possibility of the slightest economic and political autonomy which would allow either significant productive capital accumulation and/or redistribution of meagre surpluses through public services.
The position which socialists would take within the dominated countries is of course entirely different, fighting for the socialisation of industries and against giving subsidies to their "own" feeble ruling classes via tariff and other barriers.
Campaigning against the WTO
The British labour movement is divided between the New Labour supporters of out and out free trade, and the majority of the trade union bureaucracy, which supports linking core labour standards to market access.
Unfortunately because the labour standards supporters rely on international agencies such as the WTO and the ILO, they have no wish to mobilise round these issues, apart from endless rounds of international meetings which pass solemn and worthy resolutions for a better world.
Nor are they willing to upset the Blairite apple-cart on this or any other issue.
The main forces which are active on globalisation and the WTO are a network of NGOs, green activists including the Green Party, and Reclaim the Streets.
Latterly the SWP has become active, but it remains to be seen what form this takes and how long this lasts.
These forces have a myriad of ideologies, which range from liberalism to anarchism. For example the World Development Movement, which plays an influential role in the MAI coalition, concentrates on lobbying governments and political parties.
It professed itself both pleased and disappointed with the outcome of Seattle: disappointed because they appear to genuinely believe that it could have had a positive outcome for world development, and (here they have a point) for fear of something even worse, such as for example, US bilateral deals.
Other forces such as RTS have few such illusions and constitute a radical wing of the movement. However their ultra left ideology and methods make united mobilisations difficult, despite their developing orientation to workers in struggle, such as the Liverpool dockers and more recently the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation.
There is also a whole network of independent activists mainly locally organised around green and development issues, such as the Nestle activists, and Schnooze.
The main distinguishing feature of these groups is that they are above all into (mainly non-violent) direct action, sometimes quite spectacular, such as the occupation of the London Eye occupation and of Nestle’s Halifax factory.
It is easy to criticise their lack of viable strategies, but this is to miss the point, which is that these layers are fighting the most important developments in world capitalism, neo-liberal globalisation and its consequences, at a time when practically nobody else is.
Many of these activists are increasingly explicitly anti-capitalist, a trend which will have been enormously boosted by the Seattle events. Socialists should support them, not by passing pious resolutions in labour movement bodies, but by helping them build genuine united fronts on the key issues.
The Thatcherite/Reaganite neo-liberal offensive has been vigorously pursued for over two decades, and is now fully supported and deepened by Blair, especially within the EU. For the last 15 years there has been little trade union opposition or Labour left opposition, let alone any serious attempt at a coherent alternative.
The lack of any real movement against unemployment and job insecurity in Britain has been a real weakness in mounting opposition to globalisation.
However there are grounds for renewed optimism in the aftermath of the battle of Seattle. The events put fundamental questions of exploitation and the workings of capitalism and imperialism on the news agenda, and drew in a new layer of activists.
The task now is to ensure that the issues are further popularised and used as a way of building a serious current which is not just "anti-capitalist", but which goes on explicitly to embrace a socialist, internationalist agenda.