In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, removing tariffs on most goods exchanged between the US, Mexico, and Canada and deregulating foreign investment. At the time, Democratic President Bill Clinton said the deal would, “Promote more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace.”

Thirty years on, we’ve seen the exact opposite. Economic growth is stagnating, inequality has reached previously unimaginable levels, and the ruling class continues to wreak environmental havoc and prosecute bloody wars in their reckless pursuit of profit.

A disaster for American and Mexican workers

By eliminating tariffs and barriers to cross-border investment, the agreement made it cheaper for capitalists to produce abroad, particularly in Mexico. Since NAFTA, 91,000 manufacturing plants have left the US—taking five million jobs with them.

It was also a disaster for ordinary Mexicans. Unable to compete with cheap, subsidized, tariff-free corn from the US, 2.5 million Mexican farmers and agricultural workers lost their livelihoods in NAFTA’s first decade. Many were forced to emigrate to the US in search of work. Millions of new manufacturing workers in Mexico toiled in appalling conditions for low wages, and many of their jobs have now been offshored to Asia.

Clinton’s fight for NAFTA was a turning point for the Democrats—a capitalist party which, for decades, had leaned on workers and unions for electoral support. During the postwar boom, they could afford to give workers a few scraps from the capitalists’ table. After the crisis of 1973–75, the party could no longer even pretend to support the working class. In 2016, Senate Leader Chuck Schumer cynically summed up the new Democratic tactic: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Schumer cynically summed up the new Democratic tactic: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose … we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs. / Image: Third Way Think Tank, Flickr

Workers need our own party

Workers instinctively understand that both major parties do not represent them, but there is a political vacuum where a mass working-class party should be. A layer of workers, especially in places hit hardest by NAFTA, have gravitated toward Trump, who promises to use protectionist measures to return the lost manufacturing jobs.

In 2018, Trump replaced NAFTA with a slightly altered agreement, the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement, but was unable to bring the promised jobs back. In fact, 1,800 factories closed down in just the first two years of his term. The Biden-Harris administration continued Trump’s protectionist policies, maintaining tariffs on Chinese goods, with similarly lackluster results.

It’s not a matter of presidents or policy decisions, but of the underlying economic processes that condition them. Capitalism is in deep crisis, and neither protectionism nor free trade can deliver a decent life for workers. Like water finding and collecting at the lowest point, the ruling class will seek the cheapest place to make maximum profits.

The Democrats, Republicans, and reformist union leaders have all attempted to pave over the cracks in our society by stoking up national chauvinism. This is a dead end for the working class. The American worker who lost their job at Master Lock in Milwaukee when it left for Nogales, Mexico has more in common with the Mexican worker who got that job than with the American capitalists who shuttered the plant so they could further enrich themselves.

Only class struggle can deliver stable, well-paid jobs for everyone. A workers’ government will democratically plan the economy and create millions of secure union jobs through useful public works programs to upgrade infrastructure, transportation, housing, and more.