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This warning comes from Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy, in a recent speech to the Chinese Democratic Education Foundation in San Francisco. Gershman points out that "...Chinese leaders have pursued a policy of perestroika (restructuring) without glasnost (opening). But their policy contains the seeds of their own undoing. Their goal of building a competitive market economy... is incompatible with maintaining a one-party communist system." (Go to link for President's Page--http://www.ned.org/about/about.html)

Gershman cites estimates by the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center that nearly 20 million workers in state-owned industries will have been laid off through restructuring by the end of this year. More lay-offs are imminent. There have already been mass demonstrations by angry workers. Problems in the industrial sector pale next to those in the agricultural sector.

Do the officers of banks and corporations now pouring money into China ever consider the political risks that lie ahead for their stockholders? They might do well to look at a sobering piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan, who punctures the cliché that more trade and investment inevitably promotes democratization. http://www.tnr.com/070901/kaplan070901_print.html

Kaplan contends that " the rapid expansion of China's trade ties to the outside world over the past decade has coincided with a worsening of political repression at home." He reminds that "...while capitalist Germany and Japan eventually became democracies, it wasn't capitalism that democratized them, and it certainly wasn't worth the wait. In China's case, too, no one really knows what might happen as we wait for politics to catch up with economics."

As Carl Gershman notes, one way the Chinese government can ". ..deflect opposition to its repression is by playing to -- and often actually inciting -- anti- Western nationalism." But, as the example of Yugo- slavia's Milosevic shows, "This kind of nationalism, even if it can be sustained for an extended period of time, offers nothing but a dead-end."

That intriguing idea is put forward by government "patriotism campaigners" in Beijing, but by two officials at respected academic institutions that have had long and close ties to the American labor movement. In the spring issue of China Human Rights Forum Kent Wong, Director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Elaine Bernard, Executive Director of the Harvard Trade Union Program, argue that American labor must change its stance toward China and China's state-controlled unions. RethinkingChina.html

Wong and Bernard argue that last year's labor-based campaign against granting China permanent normal trade relations and accession to the World Trade Organization was "... inevitably built on the Cold War framework and racially hostile sentiment towards China. At the April 12, 2000, demonstration against China held in Washington, D.C., this resulted in the embarrassing spectacle of Teamster President James Hoffa and right-wing demagogue Pat Buchanan addressing union members from the same stage. At the AFL-CIO rally, union leaders denounced China as a 'godless' society. Unionists wore T-shirts demonizing China and Chinese people, promoting an image of Chinese as ruthless killers and torturers."

Here, according to the AFL-CIO's press release, is what President John Sweeney actually said at the April rally against PNTR for China: "We cannot relinquish our only economic leverage against a country that offers up its people as sacrifices to multinational corporations, then persecutes them, puts them in prison and even puts them to death when they protest." Is that "demonizing" the Chinese people.

Wong and Bernard have another hefty axe to grind: they oppose the AFL-CIO's historic principle of refusing to accept political labor fronts controlled by authoritarian governments as true labor unions.

"China is home to the largest trade union confederation in the world," they write. "While it is true that Chinese trade unions are not independent from the government, they are legitimate worker organizations with 100 million members, and reflect great diversity depending on the industry, sector, geographic area and individual union leadership. The policies of the Cold War have prevented the American labor movement from establishing fraternal relations with trade unions in China."

The same issue of China Rights Forum carries a telling rebuttal to Wong and Bernard from the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions [HKCTU] and China Labor Bulletin [CLB]. These pro-democracy authors remind us that what Wong and Bernhard scornfully dismiss as American labor's "policies of the Cold War" in fact played a central part in bringing a happy ending to that gloomy conflict. They point out that:

"...[W]hile there were many profound and important differences between the former USSR of the late 1980s and today's China, there is one aspect of these two societies that must remain paramount for trade unionists: an organization that professes to be the embodiment of organized labor while simultaneously boasting political, legal and constitutional allegiance to the --usually dictatorial -- government of a country, is one that cannot represent the interests of the working class." RethinkingtheRethinkChina.html

It was the AFL-CIO's refusal--despite great pressures--to become entangled with the false unions of the Soviet world that enabled it to give vital support to Poland's Solidarnosc and its counterparts in Russia and other countries of the Bloc.

The challenge Wong and Bernard offer to AFL-CIO policy toward Chinese "official unions" has a rationale that takes us beyond the China debate. In their view, the AFL-CIO's campaign against PNTR for China "shifts attention from the structural problems of the global economy created by unregulated corporate power to targeting one country, China.... The main threat to economic security, dignity, and human rights of U.S. workers are domestic and global corporations and their institutions: the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. We need to keep our eyes on the prize, move beyond the Cold War, move beyond unilateralism, and move toward genuine international labor solidarity."

So--the extremes touch. For the commercial China Lobby, workers' rights are not important--what matters is China's engagement in the global economy. And now we hear voices on the Left arguing that workers' rights in China are not important--what matters is the unity of the anti-globalization movement.

One interesting bit of evidence for this New Left revival is the hot market for the book "Empire," to which the New York Times (July 7, 2001) breathlessly attributes "the Next Big Idea." Its authors are Duke University's Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, an Italian currently under house arrest for inciting violence in Rome during the 1970s. "Empire" has been sold out for some time in bookstores in Washington and New York, but will soon be back in print in no less than ten languages. [Readers of Notesonline can download it in Adobe Acrobat at: http://www.hup.harvard.edu//pdf/HAREMI.pdf

The thesis of "Empire" is that globalization and technology are dividing the world between "the multitude" and "the Empire," the system that organizes production. But because economic production is now based in knowledge and social interaction, the disenfranchised multitude will in due course rebel and do away with the chains of Empire. Sound familiar?

Many on the moderate left have argued that globalization needs to be shaped by a new social contract, a global New Deal, that would temper raw capitalism with some regard for social consequences. "Empire" looks on such half- measures with disdain, and presses on toward The Final Conflict.

Incidentally, New Democrats Online, the electronic newletter of the Democratic Leadership Council, gives the New Economy Information Service a generous plug, and notes that it was organized in part by U.S. social democrats. New Democrats Online is worth a visit. http://www.ndol.org/

It's an idea that appeals to some conservatives, who have seen the benefits of Headstart and the success of universal early education in the military. It would cost money, but it's money that proves a good investment. (The AFT's proposal would have participants pay part of the costs according to an income- based sliding scale.) The French do it, and the fact that it works for them shouldn't necessarily be held against it. Take a look at Ms. Feldman's speech. http://www.aft.org/press/2001/quest01_speech.html

Well, Muravchik isn't really quite as cheeky as we make him out here. He makes the bows expected from a junior scholar who comes into eye contact with an icon. But he nicely gets across the point that Kissinger's diplomacy of "realism", while a useful posture for "real men" in the foreign affairs nomenklatura, is rarely taken seriously by anyone as a guide to action. True, NATO bombed the Serbs in Kosovo. But U.S. support for democracy--some- thing the "realists" sneer at--delivered Milosevic to The Hague.

Documentation: Carpenters Disaffiliate; Nurses Sign Up

Labor unions don't get much serious attention in the media these days. This lack of coverage can create some interesting surprises. In the 2000 presidential campaign, Republican operatives were caught unawares by a surging grass-roots get-out-the-vote campaign: labor's ground war. The role of determined teachers' unions in defeating school vouchers, an idea once vested with inevitability by arbiters of public policy fashion, provides another example. Still, editors have all but eliminated the labor news beat.

Readers therefore may not know much about a blistering dispute that has been taking place between the leadership of the AFL-CIO and one of its biggest and most successful members--the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. On March 29, the 500,000 member Carpenters disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO. The optimistic word is that they'll be back for next winter's convention. But, who really knows?

The New York Times and the Washington Post tell us all about debates at the Board of Overseers over choosing a new President for Harvard, or schisms inside the Southern Baptists. But you'll search in vain for an account of this important development inside the trade union movement. Yet labor is probably the largest popularly-based institution in America, and provides much of the financing and organizational backbone for left-of-center politics.

We've put some of the documents that deal with the Carpenter's dispute on the Social Democrats' web site (Carpenters Documents). Other internet sources on this include We can't vouch for the accuracy of these other sites, but,in the absence of major media coverage, it's all we have. http://www.nwbuilder.org/july_carpenters_bolt_afl_cio.htm
http://www.labornet.org/archives/carpenters.html
http://www.local157.com/building_trade_unions_in_turmoil.htm

On the positive side, The United American Nurses, representing about 100,000 registered nurses who participate in collective bargaining agreements, voted last month to join the AFL-CIO. This union was set up a few years ago by the American Nurses Association, which itself has some 2.7 million members. Some observers expect that as the crisis in nursing intensifies (many hospitals report that 10% and more of their nursing positions are unfilled) unionization will grow. For more information see: http://www.aflcio.org/publ/press2001/pr0628.htm
http://detnews.com/2001/business/0106/29/b03-241668.htm

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