More than 150 years before NAFTA and the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas--the focus of the demonstrations now taking place in Quebec City), Karl Marx analyzed the significance of "free trade" in a way that is entirely relevant today. Here are brief excerpts from a speech he delivered in Brussels on Jan. 9, 1848.
Jack Smith
--------------------------------------------------------------- What is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action.
So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited.
It is really difficult to understand the claim of the free-traders who imagine that the more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers.
On the contrary, the only result will be that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out still more clearly.
Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word "freedom." Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.
All the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market.
One other thing must never be forgotten, namely, that, just as everything has become a monopoly, there are also nowadays some branches of industry which dominate all others, and secure to the nations which most largely cultivate them the command of the world market.
If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.
Do not imagine ... that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection. One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.
Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free trade competition within a country.
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. ---------- Reprinted from the April 26, 2001, issue of Workers World