> On Mar 12, 2016, at 9:21 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 3/12/16 12:11 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: >> This is another good example of armchair Marxists quoting scripture as a >> guide to action without any experience or appreciation of current realities. > > You assume too much. I just posted this on the Marxism list: > > On 3/12/16 10:01 AM, Jim Farmelant via Marxism wrote: >> And I should point out that the young Karl Marx was rather dismissive >> of Friedrich List. >> https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1845/03/list.htm >> >> Nevertheless, List, posthumously, influenced German economic policy >> after that country was united under Bismarck. >> > > Back in 2003, we had a subscriber named Julio Huato who came from Mexico > to work on an economics PhD at the New School. He has since gotten his > degree and teaches in Brooklyn. > > He raised quite a few eyebrows defending NAFTA like this: > > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.politics.marxism.marxmail/23891/ > > I think the key to understanding M&E's support for free trade is their > identification with the bourgeois revolution. As the article I linked to > before indicates, they were in favor of anything that developed the > productive forces.
…Which, you neglect to add, will result in socialist revolution. It’s mistaken to assert that Marx and Engels linked free trade with the bourgeois revolution. They well understood that bourgeois revolutions in England, Germany, the US, and elsewhere had preceded the advent of free trade. That they instead identified free trade with a later stage in the evolution of capitalism, with its full development and impending demise through socialist revolution, is clear from this passage in Engels’ essay: "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; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, 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. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created — for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.” > In the 20th century protectionism is a deeply problematic stance to take > if the nation adopting it is like Germany or the USA. Trump is much more > the traditional protectionist while Sanders focuses more on how bad free > trade agreements like NAFTA and TPP are. For me the real question is how > the Golden Age of American capitalism can be restored. From Trump's > "making America great again" to Sanders speechifying about helping the > middle class, there's a great deal of denial involved. Wages have been > going down because American manufacturing (except in certain sectors > like aerospace and software development) is not profitable. You can't > get the genie back in the bottle. Nobody is arguing to put the genie back in the bottle. You’re confusing open access to the world market, which is progressive, with how global capitalism has structured that access through so-called free trade deals in its own interests. Neither Sanders nor any of the left-wing opponents of these deals are against access to the world market. They are for restructuring these deals so that they do not serve to suppress wages on a global scale and allow corporations to attack state regulation of the economy and social spending. Whether they have illusions that such restructuring can be done short of a socialist revolution is another matter, but insofar as they are widely identifying the character of these deals, that is positive. You suggest otherwise, however, in your subject line, and I think that is how Sanders and the others who have taken a stance against NAFTA, the TPP, and other deals would interpret your counterposing Marx and Engels to their position - as an hostile act. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
