Protectionism or free markets, capitalists solutions to a market problem. Both are a recipe for disaster for working people.

This paragraph is from the AFL-CIO
May 12, 2009

"This week, actor Danny Glover and the Rev. Jesse Jackson are joining workers, lawmakers and community allies in an 11-state, 30-plus city "Keep It Made in America" bus tour sponsored in part by the United Steelworkers (USW). As USW President Leo Gerard says: "This jobs crisis goes deeper than auto companies and assembly workers in Detroit. Reducing U.S. auto manufacturing drives down overall employment, from the people who make auto catalogs and shipping boxes to workers making glass for windshields, rubber for tires and other materials."

So much for international solidarity. Let's join with our bosses in order for them to drive their foreign rivals from the marketplace therefore eliminating jobs in other countries. This is a disastrous position. Of course, free trade, capitalist style, is equally destructive, both free trade and protectionism are capitalist solutions to the inherent crisis of overproduction, itself a product of the private ownership of the means of production. They are feared of protectionism remembering the Smoot Hawley protectionist provisions that were introduced to combat the great depression but exacerbated it and paved the road to world war as other countries retaliated. But they'll resort to it in the last analysis, driven by the system itself; just like they have been forced by the system to nationalize whole swaths of industry and finance. We have free choice alright but under conditions not of our own choosing.

The steel, auto, other industries are international in scope and produce for a world market as practically all major industries do. Some years ago, Jack Henning, former head of the California State Labor federation, called for global Unionism to fight global capitalism. Well, we have global Unionism, the problem is that the leadership of these Unions have a national and pro-market strategy.

The global steel and auto Unions should be meeting to discuss and plan a global strategy to fight the bosses such as coordinating global strikes,reducing the workweek, and for taking the industry under worker's control and management and planning transportation globally as a service for what it should be for, the transportation of human beings from one place to another in all our walks of life that is in harmony with the environment.

In this way we are not thrown in to competition with each other on an international (and what will become a racial) level by siding with the capitalists that own the industry as they go to war with their foreign rivals for who profits most from their workers and who can corner the market in whatever sphere of production their capital occupies. Workers abroad will simply be forced to do the same driving down wages, conditions and our quality of life; it's a bosses dream, the Team Concept internationally.

To do what Gerard of the steelworkers and all other Union leaders advocate, as well as Jesse Jackson and Danny Glover, is the road to disaster for working people both in the US and internationally.