By Dick Nichols
MANILA — What stance should the working people, peasants and poor of the Asia-Pacific region take towards Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the instrument of regional capitalist integration conceived by the Australian Labor government in 1989?
This question was at the centre of the Slam APEC! conference held in Manila to coincide with the fourth meeting of APEC heads of government on November 22-24. The conference was held in the abandoned "Rubberworld" factory, once owned by Adidas and employing 15,000 workers, but now a monument to "excessively high" Filipino wage rates in the footwear business (Adidas has departed for Malaysia).
The conference was sponsored by the following Philippine mass organisations: Sanlakas, BMP (Solidarity of Filipino Workers), KPUP (Fraternity of Union Presidents of the Philippines), National Confederation of Labour and BPMP (Solidarity of Progressive Farmers of the Philippines).
The audience was overwhelmingly made up of working people, unionists and urban poor shanty-town dwellers. This was not a passive audience listening to "experts" deliver their wisdom. Each session ended with penetrating questions from the floor, and the whole conference culminated in the adoption, after an exhaustive democratic process, of resolutions detailing a comprehensive people's response to the agenda of APEC.
After hearing greetings from a wide range of international and national organisations, including a delegation from the Mexican Zapatistas, the 1500-strong conference got down to the business of analysing APEC and globalisation and tackling the thorny questions that arise from them.
These issues are already more keenly felt in an oppressed country like the Philippines because the main thrust of APEC — to eliminate tariff barriers among the APEC members by 2010 (for the developed countries) and 2020 (for the developing countries) — has the potential to devastate entire sections of the Philippines economy.
The various "sectoral" presentations to the conference brought this out in great detail. Dr Leonor Briones of the University of the Philippines (Diliman) spelled out how, in a country where 30% of the work force is either unemployed or underemployed, APEC's tariff elimination program would hit the most labour-intensive industries hardest while the rate of creation of new jobs would be uncertain at best.
Balan Nair, the secretary for Asia of the International Federation of Building and Wood Workers, peeled away the mystifications surrounding neo-liberal ideology like "world's best practice".
Citing the fact that 12 million Chinese prisoners who produce cheap consumer goods receive no wages at all, Nair stressed that competition with such production was simply impossible.
Dr Teodoro Mendoza of the Department of Agronomy of the University of the Philippines (Los Banos) detailed the impending devastation for entire sections of Philippines agriculture: how would the Negros sugar industry be able to compete with imports of Australian sugar? What should be done about Vietnamese rice imports, which even now were undercutting domestic Philippines rice?
The very posing of such issues implies a protectionist counter-program to the APEC free trade agenda, and several addresses to Slam APEC! carried a strong protectionist message.
Congressman Wigberto Tanada called for an "economic nationalism" in "our national development work" based on three broad principles — preference to Filipino producers, workers and farmers, a "new protectionism" to strengthen local industry and agriculture and "a truly comprehensive program that embodies food security, environmental sustainability and an equitable distribution of income and wealth".
Tanada contrasted the Philippines' "transnational-dominated assembly based industry" to this vision, and invoked South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore as examples of successful development planning opposed to the free-trade dogmas of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and APEC.
R.C. Constantino Jnr, the national chairperson of Sanlakas, argued that "Globalisation means recolonisation because it seeks to integrate every economy into a global world economy under the direction of unaccountable global corporations".
For Constantino, in the face of such an onslaught, it was now necessary to defend the positive aspects of the 1986 Philippines Constitution, the by-product of the anti-Marcos "people power" revolution.
"During the campaign period for its ratification, I was a vocal critic, especially of its economic provisions ... Yet, today, the fight to preserve the 1986 Constitution is a progressive act ... First, because our 1986 Constitution is a line of defence for survival against today's totally unfettered reign of the global corporations ... The controversial 60-40 ownership sharing in favour of the Filipino partner is now regarded as a disincentive by foreign investors."
For Constantino, this was part and parcel of the progressive nature of the nationalist struggle of an oppressed country like the Philippines — even in today's "globalised" world.
"The nationalist struggle is still as valid and relevant today as it was in the past. It is the umbrella under which the different marginalised sectors may unite and through which the diverse sectoral struggles may be fought in concert ... The methods of struggle for economic independence are many and waged on various fronts. Their common thread, however, must be a strong consciousness of basic problems defining Philippine reality which can be inculcated through a process of mass education and mass mobilisation."
However, another theme at Slam APEC! accompanied that of the defence of the victimised and degraded Philippine nation — the need to counterpose the regional solidarity of labour to that of capital. As the preamble to the labour policy recommendations, adopted at the final plenary, put it:
"The key to overcoming the crisis that labour is mired in lies in internationalising the united struggles and organisation of the trade union movement in solidarity with other social movements. It is through this course of action that the world's working class and the world's populace is given a fighting chance to stand up to monopoly capital on its own turf, in the global arena."
And this writer, speaking for the regional solidarity of labour, stated: "Australian unions and unionists know far too little about the working conditions, life and struggles of their brothers and sisters to the north, and the Australian (and New Zealand) unions have a big job of acquiring knowledge and spreading solidarity". This was a precondition for building up the internationalist consciousness of workers against the dog-eat-dog outlook of neo-liberalism.
While the conference didn't (and couldn't) give any organisational expression to the principle of international workers' solidarity, it set it very firmly in place as the starting point for the working people's alternative to APEC.
The next — very big — step will be to gear up the workers' organisations of the region, to carry out solidarity and support actions with the coming struggles of their brothers and sisters. Slam APEC! was a very promising, very inspiring start to that journey.
[Dick Nichols addressed the Slam APEC! conference on behalf of the Democratic Socialist Party and Links, the international journal of socialist renewal.]