Return of the Luddites

By Charles Krauthammer

The mere words socialism and communism," wrote George Orwell 62 years ago, "draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." Today it is the bogeymen of globalization and world trade that bring out their own kooky crowd. There they were in Seattle last week: Zapatistas, anti-Nike-ites, butterfly defenders. They joined steelworkers and the Sierra Club, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in a giant anti-trade jamboree.

The mayhem was ecumenical. You had your one-world paranoids, who stay up nights fretting that David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission and a Wall Street cabal run the world through such shell organizations as the WTO. And you had your apolitical Luddites, who refuse to accept that growth, prosperity and upward living standards always entail some dislocation. A century ago, they tried to destroy the satanic mills of industrializing Europe. Today they want to stop the global redistribution of labor, in which previously starving Third World peasants get their start with low-paying industrial jobs while First World workers shift to the more antiseptic high-skill information economy.

But at the core of the anti-trade movement is the leftover left, Orwell's old gang. Having had little to do since the fall of the "socialist camp" a decade ago, the left finally found its voice in Seattle. "In the '60s, I marched for peace and justice," explained a Seattle demonstrator. "Now I'm back."

But the demonstrators of yesteryear opposed military intervention in places like Vietnam, El Salvador and Nicaragua on the grounds that the real problem in these places was not communism but poverty. And the solution was not war but economic assistance. As Senator Christopher Dodd said in a nationally televised 1983 address opposing President Reagan's request for military aid to El Salvador, "We must hear the cry for bread and schools, work and opportunity, that comes from campesinos everywhere in this hemisphere." Well, it turns out that the best cure for the poverty the left so agonized about then is precisely what the left is demonstrating against today--capitalism and trade. In one country alone, China, capitalism and trade have lifted more people out of poverty in a single generation than ever in human history.

Hasn't work and a chance for a better life for the once colonized been the great cause of the antimilitarist, anti-imperialist left for the past 40 years? Of course, earning a few dollars a day making running shoes is undesirable compared with the life of Western workers. But it is infinitely better than the subsistence farming these workers have left behind--and to which they would be forced to return should their supposed friends succeed in stopping trade by imposing Western-style labor and environmental standards that no Third World manufacturer could meet.

The left professes concern for Third World labor. But its real objective is to keep jobs at home. That means stopping the jobs from going to the very campesinos it claims to champion--and sentencing Third World workers to the deprivation of the preindustrial life they so desperately seek to escape. Some champions.