> On Jan 26, 2025, at 6:58 PM, Marv Gandall via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/index.htm
Thanks Marv, I hadn't read that before. Reading it was time well spent. Engel's
conclusion to his essay resonated with me:
"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."
To me this quote applies to capitalism across the centuries. But this quote is
bound to an earlier epoch:
"Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of
electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this
development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable
results ... productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as
against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they
are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the
social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and
the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery."
IMHO, this argument was true in the 19th century, but not today. The "immense
productive powers" are more than "fully developed" to the point that we have
entered a new epoch where the productive forces are destroying Earth's human
ecosystem. That is, the "productivism" evident in this quote has become
"destructivism" today, in the twilight century of liberal capitalism.
Mark
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