Noam Chomsky is fond of quoting a secret 1948 State Department document by George Kennan, one of the architects of post-war U.S. foreign policy. Kennan points out that, with 50% of the world's wealth and 6.3% of the population, the U.S. cannot afford to stand for "vague and ... unreal objectives" and "idealistic slogans" like human rights, democracy and rising living standards. He wants to get real--start talking pure power politics. This observation, says Chomsky, has driven American action abroad for over 50 years, notwithstanding the rhetoric.

Chomsky's point is well taken. But it has some disturbing consequences for the political movement that came together to oppose the WTO last December--consequences which the movement will ignore at its peril.

Put simply, the dilemma is this: the standard of living that most Americans enjoy, including workers, is unsustainable on a global scale. Consequently, any movement for worldwide economic justice will, sooner or later, run headlong into U.S. workers' efforts to defend their jobs from corporations that flee to the Third World.

It is this basic dynamic that made it possible for some in India, for example, to suppose that the whole anti-WTO protest was orchestrated by the Clinton administration. As bizarre as this logic appears to the U.S. left, it makes sense from the point of view of many in the Third World. The United States, whose hypocrisy on the subject of human rights is boundless, happily exploits the problem of sweatshops as a cover for sheer protectionism, while violating core labor standards of the International Labor Organization itself.

American unions, whose record on international solidarity is spotty at best, are potential collaborators in this maneuver, to the extent that they make their own members' jobs (or their officers' salaries) the sole priority in combating corporate domination.

So far, the movement has been able to gloss over this dilemma by focusing on sweatshops. We do need to ensure that all workers everywhere have the right to organize, a living wage, and safe and healthy workplaces, and that children are not pressed into wage labor out of horrible necessity.

But the unfortunate truth is that, as our present economic system is structured, globalization will mean downward pressure on wages, even with the basic floor that these reforms would institute. There is no way that a worker in Decatur, Illinois, can compete in the matter of wages with a worker in San Salvador or Manila--sweatshops or no sweatshops--unless the Decatur worker is willing to accept a standard of living unthinkable in the U.S.

Consider this: per capita GDP (total annual economic activity of a country in dollars per person) is somewhere between $26,000 and $31,500 for the U.S., depending on whose numbers you believe. For Madagascar, by comparison, it's between $200 and $750. For most of the globe it doesn't exceed $10,000. The 1998 worldwide average was $6,600 per person.

That's about half the income level for the poorest 20% of U.S. citizens ($12,990). It's 16% of U.S. median income, 32% of per capita income, and one quarter to one fifth of U.S. per capita GDP. While per capita GDP is not a measure of income, these comparisons offer a graphic reminder of the disparity between what we consider "poor" and what much of the world considers affluent.

Even if incomes were distributed exactly equally in the United States, our share of the world's wealth would vastly exceed our numbers. For the foreseeable future, workers in Indonesia will be competing for jobs with workers in Kansas from grossly uneven starting points.

How will the U.S. labor movement and its allies react? The historical parallels are not encouraging. The Populist movement, which many of today's progressives look back on fondly, was never able to get over its racism and xenophobia. More recently, during the Cold War, many U.S. unions effectively traded international solidarity for short term gains. Many unions also reacted with hostility to the civil rights movement, resisting workplace integration in the mistaken belief that it was an economic threat.

In short, the working class is not immune to the deadly combination of racism and short-sightedness that infects the rest of America. Middle class consumers, of course, are no better, and when these groups start seeing serious inroads into their (relatively) comfortable lifestyles--far worse than anything we've seen to date--there is no guarantee that the veneer of international solidarity we witnessed last November 30 will survive.

Which means that we'd better start thinking now about strategy.

Obviously, we have to keep fighting for wealth redistribution. But we also need to be prepared to resist the backlash that has already found its political symbol in Pat Buchanan. Despite the ironic frisson that people on the left may get when they hear Buchanan spouting crypto-Marxist rhetoric, there is a very real danger that opposition to the WTO will all too easily morph into opposition to poor brown people. We need to be very clear about which side we're on, and what that means in concrete, practical terms.

In the long run, it means we're going to have to give up a lot of what we take for granted, or our kids will. It's that simple.

In the short run, it means that every organization working on anything related to globalization will have to make real economic assistance to the Third World a central priority. Not phony "development" aid, which usually makes a very quick round trip back to the financial centers in the North, but real assistance that stays in poor countries. And we will have to make genuine international cooperation standard operating procedure, with Third World groups as leaders on issues affecting them.

Take environmental protection laws. Third World observers make the pertinent point that, absent technology transfers and substantial financial assistance from the developed world, environmental standards place an intolerable burden on poor countries. Assistance replacing CFCs, promised as part of the 1986 Montreal Protocol, has not been forthcoming, nor have similar promises made at Rio in 1992 been honored. Environmental groups need to make this assistance a top political priority.

Labor groups similarly need to take leadership from Third World allies, and not be seduced by Clintonoid moves to unilaterally impose standards, riding roughshod over democratic process among nations and brushing aside the legitimate concerns of poor countries.

An obvious measure that deserves support from all groups opposing globalization is Jubilee 2000, the debt relief proposal for the world's poorest nations. According to the Jubilee 2000 Coalition's web site: "The debt burden of the poorest countries is 93% of their income. In Zambia, every citizen now owes the country's creditors $790--more than twice the average annual income." Since most of this debt was acquired in the course of development projects that did little to aid the ordinary people who are now being forced to pay it off, there is a powerful argument that it is illegitimate to begin with.

If we don't act with genuine international solidarity, corporations will use the very real contradictions within our movement to hammer down wages at home while continuing their ruthless exploitation of poor nations unabated.

Lots of people know this already. They've got their work cut out for them, taking the message back to their organizations, making global equity the top priority for constituencies--whether labor, environmental, or other groups, whose vision all too often stops at the water's edge.

Suggestions for further reading: Third World Network (http://www.twnside.org.sg/) and Focus on the Global South (http://www.focusweb.org/).