NAFTA/USMCA Down With U.S. Pillage of Mexico! No to Protectionism!

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Workers Vanguard No. 1149	22 February 2019

NAFTA/USMCA

Down With U.S. Pillage of Mexico!

No to Protectionism!

Last November, Donald Trump was joined by the leaders of Canada and Mexico in signing an update to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). For 25 years, NAFTA has served as a key tool in the economic plunder of Mexico by the imperialist U.S. and its Canadian junior partner, laying waste to the countryside and brutally exploiting Mexico’s working class. The new version of NAFTA—in the U.S. dubbed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—will, if ratified by lawmakers in all three countries, enable the U.S. ruling class to squeeze ever more superprofits out of the Mexican proletariat, while also undercutting the economic viability of Canadian small farmers.

The NAFTA agreement finalized by Democratic president Bill Clinton wiped out the livelihoods of a great mass of poor rural workers, peasants and others in Mexico, as technologically advanced, highly productive and subsidized U.S. agribusiness gained unfettered access to its markets. Before NAFTA, Mexico was largely self-sufficient in food production, but by 2014 it had become a net importer of food, buying much of its corn, meat, dairy products, eggs and poultry from the U.S. In addition, NAFTA was a great impetus to the explosive growth of the maquiladora industry and set off a wave of union-busting, wage-gouging and privatizations of nationalized industry demanded by the U.S. imperialists. In the U.S. and Canada, the NAFTA era has seen an intensification of the bosses’ war on unions and social benefits.

We have opposed NAFTA from its inception. As it was being negotiated in 1991, the Spartacist League/U.S., Grupo Espartaquista de México and Trotskyist League of Canada (now the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada) issued a joint statement titled: “Stop U.S. ‘Free Trade’ Rape of Mexico” (see WV No. 530, 5 July 1991). It declared: “There is a burning need for an internationalist proletarian opposition which stands with the working class and impoverished peasantry of Mexico against the imperialist assault. The Canadian, U.S. and Mexican sections of the International Communist League are dedicated to building a revolutionary vanguard that can unite the working masses of the continent in common class struggle.”

In contrast, U.S. labor officialdom, in concert with Trump and many Democrats, opposes NAFTA from a position of chauvinist protectionism. The union bureaucrats promote the lie of a commonality of interests between the U.S. working class and the capitalist rulers. In fact, the profits of this country’s capitalists are derived from exploiting both U.S. and foreign workers. By waving the flag of “America first” protectionism, the union tops treacherously set workers in this country against their Mexican, English Canadian and Québécois class brothers and sisters. The scapegoating of foreign workers for the loss of jobs in the U.S. also fosters anti-immigrant prejudices. Against attempts to pit native-born and immigrant workers against each other, which can only benefit the bosses, we say: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!

The purpose of NAFTA was to increase the flagging competitiveness of U.S. imperialism against its main rivals, Germany and Japan. The modern capitalist world is characterized by the export of capital. A handful of imperialist powers carved out spheres of exploitation, including markets and sources of cheap labor, which they compete to redivide, a process described by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

NAFTA/USMCA and other imperialist trade blocs, such as the German-dominated European Union (EU), which the ICL opposes on principle, are reactionary attempts by the great powers to get a leg up on their adversaries. The push by Washington to revise NAFTA and to impose other protectionist measures comes amid the continued relative economic decline of the United States, which still dominates the globe militarily. The USMCA proposes to increase the percentage of auto components that must be sourced from within the territory covered by the agreement. This provision is aimed at U.S. imperialism’s competitors in Europe and Japan as well as China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Already, Trump has launched a trade war with China and is threatening one with the EU. As history shows, trade wars lead to shooting wars.

Trade-Union Tops Spew Protectionist Poison

The USMCA has yet to go before Congress, but many Democrats have already voiced opposition, primarily on the basis that it is not protectionist enough. False “friends of labor” in the Democratic Party, joined by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a darling of the left, wrap their protectionist prescriptions in talk of “strong enforcement mechanisms” for supposed labor and environmental protections. The labor bureaucrats have been singing the same fraudulent tune, adding a hypocritical veneer of concern for poorly paid Mexican workers. One so-called worker protection in the new NAFTA that the union tops want strictly enforced is a provision that 40 percent of a car’s components be manufactured in plants where workers make at least $16 an hour—over four times the current average wage of Mexican auto workers. The concern, though, is not to get Mexican workers better wages but to get Mexican jobs shipped to the U.S.

While the free flow of U.S. capital has wreaked havoc in Mexico, it has simultaneously enhanced the size and potential social power of the Mexican proletariat. The further integration of North American production under NAFTA has increased the opportunities and necessity for united class struggle of workers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Witness the massive strike wave that has swept through the maquiladoras in Matamoros and is extending into neighboring cities (see article, page 1). Many of these factories produce parts or do assembly work for General Motors, Ford and other automakers; the strikes idled at least one Ford assembly plant in Canada and threatened production at others.

The strikes in Matamoros come on the heels of the announcement by GM that it will close five plants in Ohio, Michigan, Maryland and Ontario, Canada, throwing thousands of unionized auto workers out on the streets. Militant action by U.S. workers alongside their Mexican and Canadian class allies against the auto bosses is urgently posed. Criminally, the United Auto Workers misleaders, along with Canada’s Unifor union bureaucrats, are calling to boycott GM cars assembled in Mexico! So much for improving the lot of Mexican workers.

The upper echelons of the AFL-CIO chastise some Mexican unions for not being sufficiently independent from the bosses. That’s rich! The U.S. union bureaucrats preach a false partnership of labor and capital and abject reliance on the Democratic Party, of which they form a key part. Bought off with crumbs left over from U.S. imperialist pillage, these labor lieutenants of capital police the unions to head off class struggle. They have presided over decades of giveback contracts, wage cuts, the proliferation of tiers and the wholesale erosion of the unions, barely lifting a finger to organize the unorganized.

The AFL-CIO tops have a sordid history of serving as direct agents of the U.S. imperialists. During the Cold War, the U.S. labor bureaucracy worked with the CIA in Latin America to destroy militant, left-led unions and helped engineer right-wing coups. In 2002, the international arm of the AFL-CIO had a hand in the attempted coup in Venezuela against then-president Hugo Chávez, including by channeling CIA funds to the coup plotters.

Revitalizing the unions as militant battalions of the multiracial working class requires a fight to forge a class-struggle leadership, independent of and in opposition to the capitalists and their political parties. Break with the Democrats! For a revolutionary workers party!

Workers Revolution Will Sweep Away Imperialism

The USMCA also provides the U.S. rulers a new weapon in their counterrevolutionary drive against China, the most powerful remaining country where capitalism has been overthrown. One clause allows the U.S. to pull out of the accord if a signatory pursues a separate trade agreement with a “nonmarket country,” giving Washington a veto over Canada or Mexico negotiating a pact with China.

China is a workers state, albeit deformed from its inception since it has been ruled by a parasitic Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy rather than organs of workers democracy. The 1949 Chinese Revolution, led by Mao’s peasant-based army, expropriated the capitalists and landlords and liberated the world’s most populous country from imperialist subjugation. Behind the U.S. trade war with Beijing is the goal, shared by Republicans and Democrats alike, of destroying the Chinese deformed workers state and restoring capitalist rule there.

It is in the interest of the international proletariat to defend China against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. The ruling bureaucratic caste must be ousted through a proletarian political revolution that establishes a regime based on workers democracy and committed to the fight for world socialism.

Another new element in the USMCA is the elimination of Canadian tariffs on a higher amount of U.S. dairy imports, after Trump made opposition to them a battle cry. Granting American dairy interests freer access will almost certainly result in the ruination of many Canadian small dairy farmers, the majority of whom are concentrated in nationally oppressed Quebec. The slashing of these tariffs is overwhelmingly opposed in Quebec. But since Quebec has no national sovereignty, negotiation of the USMCA was carried out by the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie, which did not hesitate to sacrifice Québécois dairy and other farmers in hopes of securing Ontario’s auto industry. This underscores the need to struggle against the national oppression of Quebec, which can be a motor force for workers revolution. The ICL fights for Quebec independence and working-class rule.

The U.S. rulers have long oppressed Mexico, including stealing half its territory in the 19th century. A workers government in the U.S. would return to Mexico certain contiguous regions, predominantly Spanish-speaking, of the Southwest that were seized from Mexico in the 1846-48 Mexican-American War. Specifically, the region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande/Río Bravo will be given back. This land was falsely claimed by Texas after it signed the Treaties of Velasco and seceded from Mexico in 1836. Such a territorial transfer would send a powerful message that U.S. workers in power repudiate the chauvinism of the previous ruling class, bolstering support for proletarian revolution throughout the hemisphere. The International Communist League, in our fight to reforge Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International, seeks to construct the communist parties that are necessary to lead those revolutions.