Vol. 73/No. 14      April 13, 2009

BY JACK BARNES  
Our politics, proletarian politics, on what the capitalist rulers call “free trade” also start with the world.

In his January 1848 “Speech on the Question of Free Trade,” Karl Marx warned working people and democrats not to be “deluded by the abstract word Freedom!” Whose freedom? he asked. “Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.” Under capitalist social relations, Marx pointed out, whether free trade or protection happens to be current government policy, either way the worker “goes to the wall.”¹ Since Marx first prepared that speech for publication more than a century and a half ago, the structure of world capitalism has changed significantly, with the rise and consolidation of the global imperialist order. What hasn’t changed, however, is the correctness of Marx’s concluding words: that in judging the trade policies of one or another capitalist government, the position of the workers movement is determined by what “hastens the Social Revolution.”

We start with the interests of the working class, which is an international class. We have no blueprint good for all times, all situations, and all places. With regard to products coming into the United States, our position on free trade is very simple: we’re for it. Communists in other imperialist countries take the same position with respect to “their own” governments. We’re unconditionally opposed to the rulers of the United States imposing barriers of any kind under any pretext on imported goods. And we’re opposed to Washington imposing an embargo on the export of goods to Cuba, Iraq, north Korea, Iran—or any imperialist country either, for that matter!

We do everything possible to expose the “free trade” demagogy of finance capital. The rulers’ trade policy, from start to finish, is a national policy. It aims to advance the national interests of the exploiting class, including balancing the conflicting profit needs of capitalist sectors that are vulnerable to competition on the world market to quite different degrees. Under the banner of free trade, the U.S. government uses so-called antidumping clauses, “environmental” and “labor standards” restrictions, “human rights” demagogy, and other measures to carry out brutal and aggressive trade wars not only against its imperialist rivals but with special ferocity against the semicolonial countries. By the World Bank’s own conservative figures, for example, trade barriers by the industrially advanced countries cost what the bank labels the world’s fifty least-developed countries some $2.5 billion in export income annually. Almost half of that is accounted for by U.S. barriers alone—and a high percentage of that is basic agricultural products.

All the talk from the White House, Congress, and in the big-business press about the “complexities” and breakdowns of international negotiations to advance “free trade” is a self-serving smoke screen. The U.S. rulers need do only one thing: declare that all goods coming into the United States are free of tariffs and nontariff barriers of any kind. That’s what the Socialist Workers Party demands in the United States, and what our comrades demand of the governments in Canada, France, Sweden, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

That is not what communists demand in most countries in the world today, however. The workings of the world capitalist market bring about an enormous, an unconscionable, transfer to the imperialist countries of the wealth produced by the workers and peasants of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and most of Asia and the Pacific. That extortion is guaranteed not primarily by “unfair” terms of trade imposed from the outside on the world market. It is guaranteed above all by the differential value of labor power and the gap in productivity of labor between the imperialist countries on the one hand, and those oppressed and exploited by imperialism on the other—a differential that not only underlies unequal exchange but relentlessly reproduces and increases it.

Imperialism warps the economic structures of the semicolonial world. The “comparative advantage” of oppressed nations in the world capitalist market is largely restricted to producing and exporting agricultural produce and raw materials, as well as in recent decades serving as an “export platform” for light manufactures or other industrial goods often made in imperialist-owned factories. Even with regard to these goods, countries in the semicolonial world get slapped down any time they try to horn in on markets sought by the titans of agriculture and industry in North America, Europe, or Japan.

Meanwhile, big business in the United States and in the other imperialist powers exports heavy industrial goods, technology, machine tools, other manufactures, and agricultural produce—and large amounts of capital as well. Today the capital exported to semicolonial countries in particular takes the form not only of buying up agricultural land, factories, retail and wholesale businesses, insurance companies, banks, and mineral rights. It also takes the form of loans that ensnare these countries in a vortex of debt slavery to imperialist banks and governments, often through the intermediary of “international” financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.