<html><div style='background-color:'> <DIV><HTML> <DIV> <DIV><HTML> <DIV> <DIV><HTML> <DIV> <DIV><HTML> <P>Hans Magnus Inzensberger wrote on globalization:</P> <P>'[Karl Marx] certainly would not have dreamed of being "for" or "against" [globalization].'</P> <P>From Marx's "Speech on Free Trade," from 1847: "But, generally speaking, the protective system in these days is conservative, while the free trade system works destructively.  It breaks up old nationalities and carries antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point.  In a word, the free trade system hastens the Social Revolution.  In this revolutionary sense alone...I am in favor of free trade."</P> <P>Engel's comment on this written in 1887: "The question of free trade or protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists, who want to do away with that system.  Indirectly, however, it interests us, inasmuch as we must desire the present system of production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible; because along with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and which must destroy the whole system...From this point of view...Marx pronounced, in principle, in favor of free trade as the more progressive plan, and, therefore, the plan which would soonest bring capitalist society to that deadlock."</P> <P>Marx's speech and Engels commentary  are essential background for sorting out the relations between free trade/protectionism, and the political movements supporting one or the other.</P> <P>Marx's possible reply to the "shadow-boxing" of the global justice movement, excerpted from the "Critique of the Gotha Programme": "Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of democracy [i.e., social democrats today]) has taken over from the bourgeois economists [notabley, J.S. Mill] the consideration and treatment of distribution [struggle between the "have and have-nots"] as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution...The distributioin of the means of consumption at any time is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the! personal condition of production, viz., labor power. Once the elements of productioin are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically...Instead of [stating] "the removal of all social and political inequality"...[it should be stated that] with the abolition of class differences [based on the distribution of the conditions of production] all the social and political inequality from them would disappear of itself."</P> <P>Note that is the destructive nature of free trade, which the global justice movement finds most objectionable, that Marx finds most revolutionary.  This is a perspective that Marx raises against democratic socialists--inability to see the revolutionary side of free trade, poverty, oppression, and war.</P> <P>RS</P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></div><br clear=all><hr>Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at <a href='http://go.msn.com/bql/hmtag_itl_EN.asp'>http://explorer.msn.com</a><br></html>