Why 'buy American' Is a Trap for Workers

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Socialist Action's campaign for City Goal New Renew. Total Pct.

subscriptions—Over the top! Milwaukee 10 21 2 23 230% Baltimore 60 83 11 94 157% As the election campaigns of the capitalist candidates heat up, we are being confronted with a barrage from most of them blaming the worsening economic situation facing working people on the "Japanese" or other foreigners. The answer is to "buy American," we are told.

The so-called union leaders jump on this bandwagon, because it deflects attention from the fact that they are doing diddly squat about fighting the bosses for our interests.

The whole debate about "free trade " versus "protectionism" is really an issue among the big owners of industry worldwide, as they each seek a competitive advantage against each other in the current situation of deepening international capitalist competition.

It is not in the interests of working people to take either side in this debate. We cannot fight for jobs with "buy American" campaigns any more than with, say, "buy Ford" or "buy GM" campaigns. If Ford workers were to go on such a campaign and GM workers did likewise, that would cut across the labor solidarity that all autoworkers need to fight the big owners, which is the only way we have ever won anything. The formation of the United Autoworkers Union, including both Ford and GM workers, was a recognition of that fact.

We should also note that the UAW was built as an international union, organizing workers here, in Canada, and Puerto Rico. That makes sense, since autoworkers in all three countries face the same profit-mad owners.

Socialist Action members and supporters—albeit with a little more time-made that extra effort that took us over the top! Our drive for 650 new subscriptions and renewals, which begin four months ago, was extended until January. At the end of the month, we had 692 subs, or 106 percent.

Many areas pitched in to accomplish this. Special notice should go to Baltimore, which raised its goal three times and went way over in this final effort. • Friends from the Milwaukee Revolutionary Socialist Group and the ArtWork group in New Brunswick, N.J., are also to be given a special thanks.

Most areas used the extra time to make their goals or come very close.

One thing we found out in this campaign is that there is a layer of people out there interested in the socialist perspective.

With the disarray of Stalinism, coupled with a propaganda offensive against socialism by the rich and their pundits, it is understandable that a good deal of confusion exists.

Nevertheless, there is a significant number of people seeking to cut through the lies and distortions and find a way out of the deepening crisis of capitalismand Stalinism. These people are open to the views of genuine The UAW also organizes, or tries to organize, autoworkers who work in auto plants in these three countries owned wholly or in part by Japanese capitalists or capitalists from other countries.

That makes sense too, because it's not the color of the capitalists' skin or their country of origin that matters. It's the fact that, as owners of industry, their interests in making as much profit off the labor of autoworkers as possible runs directly counter to autoworkers' interests in maintaining and bettering their standard of living and conditions of work.

In the struggle between the capitalist owners and "their" workers, the capitalists, although few in number, have many advantages. They have great wealth. Their wealth was not gained by hard work, as the popular myth has it, but through squeezing it out of the labor of the workers.

This great wealth is a powerful tool in the class struggle. You never see a capitalist going hungry during a strike.

Their wealth is used to control the capitalist political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, through which they currently control the government. The whole weight of the government is on their side in every conflict with the workers.

They control the media, too, and most other institutions of society-including the big universities, churches, foundations, etc. No wonder they dominate "public opinion!" In these and countless other ways, the rich capitalists effectively rule us.

As individuals, working people face the rich as practically powerMarxism.

We also found that it takes a less "wage slaves" them.

But workers have something the capitalists do not. That is our numbers and our role in production. When we unite, as in a union, to fight for our rights and interests, we suddenly gain strength. The underlying fact that we produce all the goods and create all the wealth the capitalists dispose of comes to the fore. They need us.

The whole history of the class struggle between workers and capitalists worldwide is one of the workers groping toward evergreater unity, with ups and downs in this process, and the capitalists seeking to keep us divided and weak.

Our "natural" condition as individual workers is to be in competition with all other workers to sell ourselves for wages to the capitalists. (There are strong countervailing forces once we are hired and working, for inside the workplace we are engaged in cooperative labor with each other.)

The first step towards bettering ourselves comes with the understanding that when we bargain over wages and conditions of work together, we can get a much better deal than doing it as individuals. This is the beginning of unionism.

Likewise, it is better to unite in whole industries to face the bosses, especially as industry becomes more and more monopolized and ownership centralized in the hands of fewer and fewer super-rich families.

To build such unity requires fighting against prejudices, fostered by the rich, against our By Sheppara fellow workers who are not white, not from the "right" countries, or who are women, etc. It means fighting against the discrimination all such workers faceon and off the job.

To face the centralized power of the capitalists, we need unity as workers not only in each industry but across the country.

And, since capitalism has become a worldwide system, we need unity across national boundaries, too. No matter how much they fight among themselves, the ruling rich in the advanced capitalist countries-with the capitalists of the "Third World" as junior partners-dominate the capitalist world. They suck the living labor of the workers everywhere. If we are going to fight them effectively, we have to fight together with other workers everywhere.

Falling for "buy America" or Japan-bashing leads us in the wrong direction. It makes us identify with "our" capitalists and against workers in other countries.

The rich always seek to keep us divided. The capitalist candidates, from David Duke to the Democratic Party clowns, are all trying to get us to blame the economic crisis on other workers, whether it is unemployed workers, foreign workers, women workers, Black workers, or others that are singled out.

When the competition between the big capitalist families of the world gets so severe that they wage war against each other to see which will get the lion's share, they use such national chauvinism to get the workers in each camp to go out and slaughter each other. Twice this century, they have plunged the world into this catastrophe.

In other smaller wars-from 1898 in the Caribbean and the Philippines to Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq—the ruling rich in this country have led us to wage wat against our fellow workers and peasants all over the world.

Our path to emancipation must go in the opposite direction. That is to cut across all the divisions of the working people worldwide. Obviously this is a protracted task, which begins inside each country but does not stop therewith steps forward as well as retreats and defeats.

Unity is the fundamental strategy of the working people, the backbone for working out all our tasks. That's why Karl Marx and Frederick Engels ended the Communist Manifesto of 1848 with the following call to action that remains even more true today:

"Workers of all lands, unite!"

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