I wrote:
> >Suppose one is in favor of "free trade." This is a venerable leftist and
> internationalist position,<
Mine Aysen Doyran writes:
>Respectfully, I don't think so. Not every leftist would agree on this
>definition.
I didn't say _the_ venerable leftist and international position but _a_
venerable leftist and internationalist tradition.
>The idea that we should be in favor of free trade for the sake of
>internalization and free movement of capital misses the point that free
>trade is the mirror image of capitalism and imperialism.
I didn't say that. Instead I contrasted free trade vs. labor alliances with
employers against foreign workers.
>This free trade reminds me of the Orthodox Marxist position of Kautsky:
>fatalistic beleif in markets and the pure mechanical necessity for the
>collapse of capitalism. The argument goes something like this: Socialism
>will automatically come if we wait for the economic process to work itself
>out. Let the free market operate without any conscious interference on the
>part
>of the working classes, including *revolution* (since revolution is
>automatically assumed to happen). I find this orthodoxy (natural laws of
>capitalism rhetoric)quite passifying Marx's dialectical unity of theory
>and "praxis". It robs Marxism off its political charecter, and turns it
>into a passive image of free trade ideology. It fails to inform and guide
>its historical agency--that is the working class. To reiterate Gramsci,
>Marxism needs a theory of praxis to understand why it is that pure
>economism is not alone sufficient to have socialism. ......
BTW, Marx himself gave a speech in favor of free trade in which he
suggested that it would speed up the movement to socialism. Even though he
was wrong, that indicates that it wasn't Kautsky who started this tradition.
> >against economistic unions whose leaders and/or members think they can
> prosper by allying with employers to lobby for legislation that works
> only at the expense of foreign or foreign-born workers.<
>that is very true. I would only add that capitalism creates this false
>dichotomy between free trade and protectionism....
Right! In fact, I'd add that nowadays, most of capital is mobile or not
threatened drastically by free trade. So labor's efforts to find allies
against free trade often ends up empty.
> >To me, no matter what one's position of "free trade," the key thing is
> to increase solidarity and organization amongst workers, both within
> and between countries. (That's the only way to fight and counteract the
> power of capital, which seems to have a tendency toward a "natural"
> unity, not as some kind of elite conspiracy but as part of the "laws of
> motion" of the system.)
>As i said before, elites are part of the capitalist class. They are
>functional for capitalism to maintain itself, not only economically but
>also culturally, politically and socially. They form an "organic block" in
>relation to various levels of competing forces in civil society (organic
>media, associations, universities, unions, think tanks, etc..) and the
>state. This is their ideological function in the reproduction of the
>system. You may call this conspiracy theory, but this is what capitalism is..
There is a competition of elites -- what Schumpeter called "democracy" --
which prevents the capitalists from approaching being a conspiracy. On top
of that, their control of us isn't simply through bureaucratic hierarchies
(as in corporations) but also through markets. Their control of the means
of production, technology, and accumulation, plus the persistent reserve
army of the unemployed (which nowadays shows up in greater worker
insecurity of tenure) give them the power to run society as long as workers
aren't well organized. The conspiracies (the FBI, CIA, etc.) and the direct
application of force come into fore when workers are well organized and
capitalist elites unite to undermine that organization.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
