Engels on GATT

[Brian James <hillbily@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Engels' 1888 preface to Marx's 1848 "On The Question of Free Trade:"

Full text at
http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1848-FT/1888-ft.txt

[....] Protection at home was needless to manufacturers who beat all
their foreign rivals, and whose very existence was staked on the
expansion of their exports.  Protection at home was of advantage to none
but the producers of articles of food and other raw materials, to the
agricultural interest, which, under then existing circumstances in
England, meant the receivers of rent, the landed aristocracy.  And this
kind of protection was hurtful to the manufacturers.  By taxing raw
materials, it raised the price of the articles manufactured from them;
by taxing food, it raised the price of labor; in both ways, it placed
the British manufacturer at a disadvantage as compared with his foreign
competitor.  And, as all other countries sent to England chiefly
agricultural products and drew from England chiefly manufactured goods,
repeal of the English protective duties on corn and raw materials
generally was at the same time an appeal to foreign countries to do away
with -- or at least to reduce in turn -- the import duties levied by
them on English manufactures.

After a long and violent struggle, the English industrial capitalists,
already in reality the leading class of the nation, that class whose
interests were then the chief national interests, were victorious.  The
landed aristocracy had to give in.  The duties on corn and other raw
materials were repealed.  Free Trade became the watchword of the day. To
convert all other countries to the gospel of Free Trade, and thus to
create a world in which England was the great manufacturing centre, with
all other countries for its independent agricultural districts, that was
the next task before the English manufacturers and their mouthpieces,
the political economists.

That was the time of the Brussels Congress, the time when Marx prepared
the speech in question.  While recognizing that protection may still,
under certain circumstances, for instance in the Germany of 1847, be of
advantage to the manufacturing capitalists; while proving that that Free
Trade was not the panacea for all the evils under which the working
class suffered, and might even aggravate them; he pronounces, ultimately
and on principle, in favor of Free Trade.

To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist
production.  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.

[....]

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 as 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: misery of the great mass of the people, in
consequence of overproduction.  This overproduction engendering either
periodical gluts and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic
stagnation of trade; division of society into a small class of large
capitalist, and a large one of practically hereditary wage-slaves,
proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are at the
same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in
short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping
but by a complete remodeling of the economic structure which forms it
basis.

>From this point of view, 40 years ago 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.  But if
Marx declared in favor of Free Trade on that ground, is that not a
reason for every supporter of the present order of society to declare
against Free Trade?  If Free Trade is stated to be revolutionary, must
not all good citizens vote for Protection as a conservative plan?

If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to
please the socialists.  It will do so because Free trade has become a
necessity for the industrial capitalists.  But if it should reject Free
Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of
the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of
socialism in the least.  Protection is a plan for artificially
manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially
manufacturing wage laborers.  You cannot breed the one without breeding
the other.

The wage laborer everywhere follows in the footsteps of the
manufacturer; he is like the "gloomy care" of Horace, that sits behind
the rider, and that he cannot shake off wherever he go.  You cannot
escape fate; in other words, you cannot escape the necessary
consequences of your own actions.  A system of production based upon the
exploitation of wage labor, in which wealth increases in proportion to
the number of laborers employed and exploited, such a system is bound to
increase the class of wage laborers, that is to say, the class which is
fated one day to destroy the system itself.  In the meantime, there is
no help for it: you must go on developing the capitalist system, you
must accelerate the production, accumulation, and centralization of
capitalist wealth, and, along with it, the production of a revolutionary
class of laborers.  Whether you try the Protectionist or the Free Trade
will make no difference in the end, and hardly any in the length of the
respite left to you until the day when that end will come.  For long
before that day will protection have become an unbearable shackle to any
country aspiring, with a chance of success, to hold its own in the world
market.