Imperialism's Labor Lieutenants

Down With AFL-CIO Tops' Anti-China Protectionism!

With the profit-bloated capitalists looting pensions and ripping up health benefits, working people are saddled with a labor “leadership” that has overwhelmingly capitulated to the bosses’ giveback demands. With few exceptions, rather than using the weapons of class struggle, like strikes, to fight against the bosses and their government, the labor tops push corporate boycotts and spend millions in union money to promote the “lesser evil” capitalist Democrats. And nothing more clearly exemplifies the union misleaders’ role as “labor lieutenants” of capital than their anti-Communist campaigns against China for “stealing American jobs.”

Charging that the Chinese government “systematically denies workers’ rights,” the AFL-CIO leadership petitioned the Bush administration in June to “immediately take action,” such as hitting China with trade sanctions. The labor tops claim that suppression of workers’ rights by the Beijing regime gives companies in China a competitive advantage, causing the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Joining the AFL-CIO in filing the petition were two Congressmen, Democrat Benjamin Cardin and right-wing Republican Christopher Smith, while another 40 Congressmen signed a letter to Bush supporting it. On July 21, the administration rejected the petition but took the opportunity to chime in with “serious concerns with labor rights and working conditions in China” (AP, 21 July).

Pushing national protectionism is poison for the U.S. workers movement; it means scapegoating foreign workers for the loss of jobs in the U.S. instead of fighting the capitalists at home. It is doubly pernicious when directed against China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The fact that capitalist rule was overthrown in China by the 1949 Revolution, leading to the building of a collectivized economy, represents a historic gain for the working class internationally. The aim of the U.S. and other imperialists is to destroy the Chinese workers state and restore capitalist rule in order to turn the Chinese mainland into one gigantic sweatshop.

The imperialists have a two-pronged strategy for counterrevolution in China. On the one hand, they aim to undermine the workers state by strengthening internal counterrevolutionary forces, including through capitalist investment. Thus Washington is today not inclined to disrupt U.S. economic penetration by issuing trade sanctions against Beijing. On the other hand, the imperialists are exerting unremitting military pressure against China. U.S. incursions into Afghanistan and Central Asia have significantly tightened the military vise around China, while over the past decade the Pentagon has strengthened its military deployment in the Pacific Rim, placing antiballistic missile systems in the region and signing a joint declaration with Japan last year in defense of capitalist Taiwan.

Just as workers in the U.S. must defend their unions against the bosses despite the sellout labor leadership, it is the duty of the international working class, especially in the U.S., to defend China against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, despite the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime’s accommodation to capitalism. Insofar as it offers up low-wage Chinese workers to U.S. corporations, the Beijing bureaucracy acts as a labor contractor for the American bourgeoisie. The same Stalinist regime conciliates imperialism at the international level, by such acts as voting in the United Nations Security Council to condemn the North Korean deformed workers state’s missile testing. CCP rule thus undermines the system of nationalized property and the defense of the deformed workers state itself. It is the task of the Chinese working class, led by a Trotskyist party committed to defending and extending the gains of the 1949 Revolution, to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy through proletarian political revolution.

As the accompanying article “China’s ‘Market Reforms’—A Trotskyist Analysis” makes clear, Beijing’s economic measures are deeply contradictory. While penetration by offshore Chinese and imperialist capital strengthens internal counterrevolutionary forces, increased trade and investment have led to a marked increase in development, including through the importation of industrial machinery.

But who are the AFL-CIO tops to scream about the lack of workers’ rights in China? These same labor fakers, who accept the capitalist profit system and defend the interests of U.S. imperialism, have for decades overseen massive attacks on the wages, benefits, jobs and working conditions of their own members. The United Auto Workers misleaders, who are among the loudest voices clamoring for trade restrictions against China, caved in to the Delphi and GM bosses’ demands for givebacks and job-slashing without even the pretense of a fight at those companies, not to speak of the need to organize non-union auto plants. A real fight on behalf of workers in the U.S. could also begin at Wal-Mart—not through campaigns against the Chinese exports that fill Wal-Mart’s shelves but through a concerted effort to unionize Wal-Mart. That will take the kind of hard class struggle that built the industrial unions in the 1930s.

In 2004, an alliance of AFL-CIO unions issued a petition calling on the Bush administration to pressure Beijing to revalue its currency, the yuan (also called renminbi), or face sanctions. The so-called China Currency Coalition united trade unions like the Teamsters, Machinists and others with capitalist enterprises, manufacturers’ associations and 35 (mainly Democratic) Congressmen. Two members of that coalition, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, sponsored a bill that threatens to slap a draconian 27.5 percent tariff on all Chinese imports. We oppose the labor bureaucracy’s efforts to deny China the elementary right of any state to engage in economic commerce, to buy and sell on the world market. Not accidentally, the recent AFL-CIO petition effort feeds into the drive by the Democratic Party—the other party of capitalist imperialism—to retake control of Congress from the Republicans in the November elections, in part by portraying Bush as “soft” on China.

Andrew Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union and of the Change to Win Coalition, led a delegation to China in 2002 that broke with AFL-CIO protocol by meeting with the leadership of the All-China Trade Union Federation. But despite its split from the AFL-CIO last year and its “global union” rhetoric, Change to Win does not in any way represent a break with the class collaboration and chauvinist protectionism of the AFL-CIO tops. The UNITE HERE hotel, restaurant and garment workers union, a key component of Change to Win, has a long history of collaborating with the textile bosses in pressuring the U.S. and Canadian governments to limit Chinese imports.

The anti-Communist trade-union bureaucracy has a long track record of dirty work on behalf of U.S. imperialism, particularly its championing of “free trade unions” as a means of undermining the Soviet Union and East European deformed workers states during the Cold War. In the 1980s, the AFL-CIO tops channeled millions of dollars of CIA money to Polish Solidarność, a reactionary movement masquerading as a trade union that was in the forefront of the drive for capitalist restoration in East Europe. In 1989-92, as the fate of the Soviet Union hung in the balance, the AFL-CIO tops funneled in money and “advisers” to win combative Soviet miners to support U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary Boris Yeltsin. More recently, the AFL-CIO sponsored the “Labor Committee for a Free Cuba,” a collection of Cuban gusano counterrevolutionaries and CIA Cold Warriors who dream of smashing the Cuban Revolution and retaking the island for their imperialist masters.

The U.S. labor tops are trying to repeat in China the scenario played out in East Europe and the former Soviet Union, where capitalist counterrevolution, prepared by decades of Stalinist misrule, plunged the working people into mass unemployment, falling life expectancy and all-around social degradation. Capitalist restoration in China would mean even deeper misery, poverty and devastation for its population, and would further embolden the capitalists worldwide in their attacks against workers and minorities.

Working-class struggle must be consciously waged as an international fight, based on the understanding that the interests of labor and capital can never be reconciled. In the U.S., that understanding means fighting to break the ties forged by the labor bureaucracy to the Democratic Party and the capitalist state and building a revolutionary workers party. As we wrote a decade ago in “Protectionism vs. Class Struggle: Exchange on Boeing Strike” (WV No. 634, 1 December 1995): “Our watchword is not the deadly dangerous trap of ‘defending American jobs’ against foreign competition, but the words which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels inscribed on their banner nearly 150 years ago: ‘Workers of the world, unite’.”