COLUMN LEFT/ JONATHAN SCHELL : Capital Is No Respecter of Ideologies : Having watched communism fall, we temper jubilation because we sense our risk.

The negotiations to create a free-trade zone encompassing the United States, Canada and Mexico, which Congress has voted to place on a “fast track,” have given rise to an interesting debate. Many business groups favor the zone. They gaze longingly over the border at cheap Mexican labor and itch to set up manufacturing plants there. For just this reason, many American labor unions oppose the zone. They fear the flight of American jobs south and downward pressure on wages for the jobs that remain in this country.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that this is a classic conflict between the rich (the businessman) and the poor (the laborer), for the net effect of the migration of jobs south would be to put money in the poorest hands of all--those of the Mexican laborers. Multinational capital, in this instance as in many others, proves a leveler.

It would be equally mistaken, though, to cast multinational businessmen as the Robin Hoods of the 20th Century. For, as Robert Reich has pointed out in his enlightening recent book, “The Work of Nations,” the compensation of executives has in recent years risen dramatically in comparison with the compensation of workers. Any leveling influence is strictly incidental. For the loyalty of large corporations is to neither American nor Mexican workers, but to making a profit wherever that can best be done.

In recent decades, American capitalism and American nationalism have tended to be allied. Today, however, as Reich points out, with the rise of a truly global economy, these two causes have begun to part ways. The international businessman is not dependent on the labor, capital or technical knowledge of any particular country. He can pick and choose from anywhere in the world. In this sense, he is not an “American” businessman or a “Japanese” businessman. He belongs to no country.

A moment’s reflection discloses that it could hardly be otherwise. The duty of a corporation is to multiply and be fruitful, not to advance the interests of a nation. Nationalism, like the equalization of incomes or, say, protection of the environment, is a social goal, and corporations are not chartered to pursue social goals--although they certainly believe their pursuit of wealth is itself a social good. They are no more likely, unless they find it in their interest to do so, to save a nation than they are to save a wild duck.

In the “Communist Manifesto,” a tract thrown like a stick of dynamite at the very foundations of 19th-Century capitalism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a passage that, while excoriating capitalism, paid awe-struck tribute to its powers: “The cheap prices of (capitalism’s) commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese Walls, with which it forces the barbarian’s intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst--to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

Today, in one of history’s most grandiosely ironic turns of events, we are watching that same heavy artillery batter down the walls of an empire--the Soviet empire--that supposedly was built on the principles of the manifesto. It is falling as if it were nothing but a second feudalism about to be dismantled by the protean energies of the market system.

If, in the United States, rejoicing at these events, which some say constitute a victory for us, is restrained, perhaps part of the reason is that Americans are not exactly flourishing; we sense that the forces overturning the Soviet Union are not wholly favorable to us, either. For capitalism, having developed and grown strong in certain countries, including ours, seems in the process of declaring its independence from us all, and we must wonder whether, in the new world that is taking shape, we are in fact the victors, or whether the heavy artillery is now pulling up before our own gates.