Exploiting labour

Five decades of neoliberal plunder by US corporations and local oligarchs, backed up by the lurking menace of US-trained death squads and paramilitaries and, more recently, accelerated by free trade agreements like NAFTA, pauperized millions of Mexicans and Central Americans. They can stay home and starve or head to the border. International financial capitalism crushed these people and their countries.

To focus on Mexico: Its state capitalism, which developed after the 1910 revolution, entailed official unions in the government, many nationalized industries and a fairly resilient social safety net. Mexican capitalists did well, the urban proletariat got by, and state-run ejidos distributed lands to peasants, with the benefit, from the government’s perspective, of containing agrarian radicals. In the ejido system, the state retained land ownership but allowed collective farming and production for national markets. Unluckily for all of these arrangements, US capital looked at Mexico and licked its chops.

Then Washington went about smashing the Mexican system, using the IMF, the World Bank and its chief tool, the free trade agreement. This culminated in “the dismantling of the nationalist capitalist project that emerged victorious from the Mexican Revolution. The birth of state-managed capitalism in Mexico was the result of a radical and impulsively nationalist uprising,” after which “an ascendant middle-class coterie was able to divide, defeat and co-opt mass popular movements.”

By 1990, US neoliberalism utterly demolished this state capitalism. The idea was “capital has a right to cross borders to exploit Mexican labor, but Mexican workers do not have the right to migrate.” It is “free trade without free people.” Not surprisingly these changes engendered a new, modernized colonialism. Chacon argues that the breadth, totality and speed of Mexican state capitalism’s collapse matched that of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, which crashed around the same time.

In short, the ‘80s and early ‘90s were a lousy time for workers, planet-wide. And now North American financial capitalism wants to do the same to China: “open it up,” or, more accurately, loot it (think, also, Russia under Yeltsin in the ‘90s; US financial marauders made out like bandits there). After all, the Mexican caper was so dazzlingly lucrative, US plutocrats attempted to mimic it all over the world.

Fast forward to 2021, and 30 years of “free trade” have emaciated the Mexican peasantry and dispossessed the urban proletariat. They flee to Texas and other points in the American Southwest, where, without rights, criminalized, hunted by ICE, they form a reservoir of easy, cheap, precarious labor for numerous predatory American corporations.

Excerpt: ‘Migrants: the Case for Amnesty’

Counterpunch.org