Trond Andresen says: "I challenge list participants to give specific
examples of how supranational blocs are better at saving the
environment, as opposed to smaller national units being free to make
own decisions and play a pioneer role or come together under the UN
umbrella and make voluntarily binding world-reaching decisions."
I think the logic of Trond's argument applies to other areas, as well. In
the course of PEN's Great Free Trade Debate, folks Stateside -- where
many of the advocates of the PI seem to reside -- argued on several
different occasions that labour shouldn't focus narrowly on the
concerns of importance merely to local, regional or national subsets of
the working class, that would should focus on raising the importance of
international labour solidarity.
I don't understand this argument. First off, labour has to organize
where it's at -- within the particular workplace, to begin with. Then, if
that's successful, it becomes possible to make links with other work
sites. Successful organizing beyond that makes it possible to conduct
company-wide and sectoral efforts, i.e. in steel, phone, etc., and
ultimately to make international organizational linkages.
If this effort is successful, there is no necessary conflict between
addressing workers' immediate problems and engaging in meaningful
international organizing and building international solidarity. If there
are such conflicts, I would suggest that they are rooted in internal
labour politics. Where such problems do exist, they must be addressed
directly; they cannot simply be willed out existence by elevating the
issue to the international sphere.
The key point is that in the absence of addressing workers' immediate
needs, there is no *organizational* basis for engaging in local, regional
or national efforts. And without an organizational base, efforts at
international solidarity can be little more than goodwill exchanges.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the argument raised by PI-ers places
workers' attempts to address their own, immediate concerns in an
inferior position vis-a-vis efforts to organize international links. This is
a position I simply don't understand.
In the context of a prostrate labour movement such as that which exists
in the States, isn't more than a bit fanciful to argue that priority must be
placed on the building of *international* organizational links? Implicit
in this position, it seems to me, is that the basic issues and problems
facing US workers have already been addressed. Have the US
advocates of the PI position simply written off the situation Stateside?
On a related point, the continued insistence on the objective desirability
of anything internationalist -- even when we are discussing
internationalist projects like the EU, which are the creation of
transnational capital -- mystifies me.
In response to a couple of points made by Fred Guy: when Trond
Andresen described California's clean air regulations, I don't think he
was casting it as an issue of "local virtue vs. federal bungling". I thinks
his is a logically incontestable proposition -- that it's easier and more
practicable to organize around a set of progressive goals (labour,
environmental, whatever) within a relatively limited jurisdiction and to
use this as a base from which to broaden out than it is to pursue the
realization of such goals everywhere at once.
Fred again: "If the same sort of solution can't happen in the E.U., it
seems to me that the problem is the particular set of rules adopted by
the E.U., not the concept of European union." This is the key point.
The issue is the particular set of rules adopted by the E.U. These rules
have been designed of, by and for the transnational corporations. Why
should progressives sign on to such a project despite these central
flaws?
"The fact that local technical standards are illegal trade barriers while
regional (i.e., European) air quality standards can be vetoed by one
country simply shows that the E.U. has not progressed beyond the
Thatcherite vision of a free trade area." Again, this is precisely the
problem. Given the undemocratic, bureaucratic nature of the EU
mechanisms that have been put in place, what reason do we have to
believe that this fundamentally flawed mechanism will be reformed
along progressive lines in the future?
An unrepentant PN-er.
Sid Shniad
