NAFTA shapes class struggle

"The Washington-based Economic Policy Institute placed the 
net NAFTA job losses in the United States between 1993 and 
2000 at 766,030, with California suffering the biggest hit 
at 82,354." Within those job losses from NAFTA that the 
institute calculated, it appears that 37 percent may have 
been Latinos within U.$. borders. Industries that relied on 
undocumented workers in California, such as the garment-
industry, simply moved south of the border during NAFTA.
 
According to the Los Angeles Times, this means that 
relatively high-cost Mexican-Amerikan labor gets replaced 
with Mexican labor. The labor aristocracy within the United 
$tates is the main social reason that the border is closed. 
Without closing that border by force, the labor market would 
be much different, and that is one key reason that bourgeois 
economic theory is pretty much useless today. The problem 
with the labor aristocracy view in terms of class struggle 
is that it protects wages for some workers, but does nothing 
to advance the class struggle overall. In this way, domestic 
high wages are linked to chauvinist nationalism against 
foreigners. Those arguing for higher wages should also argue 
for opening the borders to advance the whole working-class 
of the world. Otherwise, people arguing for closed borders 
should be recognized purely as economic nationalists with no 
possibility for uniting the working-class. 

The U.$. economy 
has created 200,000 jobs in a typical month, so even if it 
is true that NAFTA cost 766,030 jobs over 7 years, it is 
really a trifling matter. Looking at the countless posters 
and rallies held by the social-democratic "Communist Party"-
USA, Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan against NAFTA, one 
would have thought that opening borders was the greatest 
danger to the international proletariat. In fact, the "CP"-
USA social-democrats seek to gain popularity through the 
easy demagogic route of gutter-level nationalism in 
imperialist countries. 

It is not in the interests of the 
international proletariat to have high-wage jobs protected 
by closing borders of imperialist countries. By definition 
the proletariat is the class with nothing to lose but its 
chains. When any workers or middle-class people of the 
imperialist countries seek to protect their economic 
position at the expense of the Third World proletariat, 
those imperialist country people become enemy.

Note: Evelyn Iritani of the Los Angeles Times in Boston 
Globe 24June2001, p. e6.