Look at the U.S. left's response to globalization
Amsden, Alice & Hikino, Takashi
With this issue Dissent inaugurates a new series entitled "Brave New Globe." Over the next two years a diverse group of writers will analyze, debate, and worry aloud about the world economy. The...
...The great majority of white-collar workers, on the other hand, need to be attracted to new socialist policies that address their true needs in a world of increasingly global technology flows...
...economy is now Number One internationally, and open world markets are in the interests of corporate America but not American workers...
...But now international trade is dominated by flows of capital goods and technology...
...But don't make human rights conditional on access to American markets...
...A large pool of unskilled labor was once the norm...
...Intellectuals and dissidents in the affected countries, from left to right, have given such demands their support...
...Mark Levinson, chief economist for the Union of Needlecraft, Industrial & Textile Employees...
...The global wage gap, however, has widened to the order of twenty to one...
...Why the withdrawal symptoms of the American left...
...International working class solidarity" has turned out to be a shaky edifice on which to build progressive globalism...
...Rethinking foreign economic policy, therefore, will require rethinking domestic economic policy...
...ALICE H. AMSDEN is professor of political economy at MIT...
...This line-up is ironic...
...But many progressives have also gone much further...
...If Mexico gets its act together, it could provide a market of 120 million people for American products—a win-win situation...
...Ensuing issues will features James K. Galbraith, economist at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin...
...Global demands for labor standards that raise foreign labor costs are just protectionism in disguise...
...There is a bigger gulf between high- and low-paid workers in the United States, say the bottom 10 percent to the median 50 percent, than almost anywhere else in the industrialized world...
...The unprecedented growth in output and real wages experienced first in Japan and then in other Asian emerging economies, where per capita incomes doubled in a decade, has been despised for its lack of democracy, endemic corruption, and vulnerability to financial ups and downs...
...After this first set of articles, these authors will do a second round in 2000-2001...
...The situation has changed, however, and now most American workers are white collar and well educated...
...Now it's the other way 'round, at least in the United States...
...For many progressives, DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 7 BRAVE NEW GLOBE environmental and consumerist concerns have even made economic development a dirty word...
...When international trade was composed mainly of primary products, and world competition only extended to workers whose wages differed by a ratio of, at most, two to one, it was easy to conceive of egalitarian models of economic integration...
...In practice, such solidarity has become wishful thinking at best and nationalistic at worst...
...In theory, progressives' commitment to working class solidarity remains stronger than ever...
...White-collar workers have interests that increasingly dovetail with their cohorts abroad, all of whom work long hours in nonunionized software factories, information-processing plants, retail stores, banks, and other genteel sweatshops...
...The United States could end the most egregious human rights abuses in a matter of days if it embargoed arms and military assistance to foreign dictators, or even if it forbade hotmoney American investors to truck in such countries...
...Moreover, they justify their positions as being in the interests of both American and foreign workers, just as free marketeers claim to have God on their side...
...Under these conditions the presumption of international working class solidarity has became implausible, to say the least...
...workers have interests that conflict with low-paid foreign workers...
...It's been five years since NAFTA came into effect, and employment generation in Mexico by foreign investment is the most dynamic component of Mexican employment...
...Low-wage American workers need to have special policies to protect them when their jobs pass to poorer workers overseas...
...This may have less to do with their poor education than with their good sense...
...The U.S...
...They have opposed virtually all aspects of globalism, from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the trade-driven developmental strategies practiced by Japan and its East Asian neighbors...
...These dramatically raise the productivity of workers in the most underdeveloped countries...
...The conviction was that workers in one country had less in common with their middle-class compatriots than with workers in other nations...
...Ruling-class ideology favors a blurring of international borders and global growth in order to employ cheap, productive foreign labor and to acquire cheap, up-andcoming foreign firms, while left-wing internationalism is largely defensive of American workers' past glories...
...If labor standards raise wage costs prematurely, before alternative economic activities can be created, the end result may protect American workers but at great economic hardship to the poor countries allegedly being helped...
...Why this extraordinary policy shift between right and left...
...Among both Democrats and Republicans, the battle cry is the same: liberalize, privatize, and deregulate...
...But the typical worker is still conceived of as being blue collar and unskilled...
...Let's acknowledge that there is a dual labor market in the United States...
...Just as wisely, they have urged a return to the managed-trade policies characteristic of the postwar Bretton Woods arrangements...
...So what's so terrible about NAFTA...
...Uninhibited flows of resources across borders will make everyone rich...
...Wisely, they have demanded capital controls on "hot money" flowing into and out of emerging economies in order to reduce financial chaos...
...Ironically, the effect of NAFTA on American workers has been peanuts, since the portion of American outward investment going to Mexico remains infinitesimally small...
...and Susan George, Paris-based political and economic critic...
...TAKASHI HIKINO is associate professor of economics at Kyoto University...
...After all, the free trade agreement was hardly free...
...European socialist parties have contributed to the creation of the European Union...
...Japanese socialists tend to support regionalism to reduce the domestic power of the Japanese state...
...It gave tariff protection to the United States and Mexico from every other country in the world except each other, and BRAVE NEW GLOBE Mexican workers had nothing to lose economically and everything to gain from U.S...
...The Left and Globalization It symbolizes wildly free markets in every corner of the world and in every aspect of economic life—trade, foreign investment, finance, and even labor...
...To improve low pay and poor working conditions throughout the world, socialists and social democrats were in the vanguard of devising economic development policies, including the export of capital to the third world...
...Thus, socialist policy has to be thoroughly rethought or it will continue to slide into isolationism...
...American progressives have generally stood in opposition to this Brave New World...
...It is the policy of tying labor standards and human rights to third world exports of manufactured goods...
...Socialists have tended historically to be oriented toward helping the lower end of the scale...
...A more complex answer is that the world was never quite what socialists imagined it to be...
...THIS PRESUMPTION, however, remains an article of faith in the one international policy today that bears a socialist imprimatur and that socialists have championed as quintessentially their own...
...Moreover, progressives see this as a win-win situation: if exports are "tied," American workers are no longer threatened by 'unfair' foreign competition while impoverished workers overseas will get higher wages, better working conditions, and more human rights...
...The lowest paid U.S...
...Certainly by comparison with socialist movements in other countries, American leftists have recently been isolationist, opposing virtually every aspect of the global economy...
...Better working conditions without jobs is a Pyrrhic victory...
...The reality is that not all factories overseas are satanic mills (some are far better than American workplaces...
...The series begins here with Alice Amsden and Takashi Hikino making an argument about how the left should think about globalization...
...This in no way negates the need for progressives to fight against child labor and in favor of basic human rights—everyone deserves to live with due process and without fear of torture...
...In some countries, these exports have even provided a stepping stone to serious industrial transformation and economic development...
...Ens...
...American socialists historically were internationalist while conservatives were isolationist...
...The hostility of progressives to NAFTA on the grounds that it was bad for both American and Mexican workers was also self-serving...
...and Canadian long-term investment...
...Ultrafree markets work no better than rigid central planning...
...Therefore, the slightest threat of low-wage competition from abroad brings forth a knee-jerk reaction of sealing the borders...
...The ideology of international working-class solidarity was always extremely vague and unspecified in economic terms, comparable to the fuzziness of "working-class consciousness...
...But by any stretch of the imagination, human rights conditionality has not created any obvious groundswell of support among foreign workers...
...Only if these standards meet advanced country specifications, the argument runs, should imports from these countries be allowed into 8 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 the United States at low duties...
...A simple answer is that the world has changed...
...Cheap, labor-intensive exports to North Atlantic markets have created jobs for millions of unemployed, landless third world workers...
...DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 9...
...The jobs that have been created have not substituted for higher paid Mexican jobs but for no jobs at all...
...The huge divisions in income distribution within the United States, even below the managerial level, are partly to blame...
...The Establishment kept to the Monroe Doctrine (political and economic hegemony in Latin America, detachment elsewhere) while socialists joined a movement that championed international working-class solidarity...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
