On the Question of Free Trade

If labor is considered a commodity like any other aspect of the economic enterprise, a few considerations due result:

Centralized growth of capital involves an increase in productive forces which leads to negative consequences as a result of division of labor by depriving the worker of composite skills and turning one into a merely exploitable, human machine. As productive capital increases, it crowds out external competition and encourages homogenization of method and workforce effort. In the process of becoming prospective, it must tend to predict, and hence encourage, ever-increasing consumption in trying to provoke demand it might supply leading to the frenzied intensity of constant crises crying out to have their individual ‘needs’ immediately fulfilled; basically as a result of competition within a system which has subsumed all meaningful alternatives.

When conducted in certain echelons of overt secrecy far from any public scrutiny, this often leads to a privileging of the interests for a particular group deemed most ably worthy (by themselves) of controlling and expending capital for the good of all who fit within projection’s scope. “To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action.” But when capital has become the driving force behind people’s own intentions to produce, direct—control—it is when the difference between class divisions starts to lose distinction threatening a system’s overturning from within (most often by means of incredible ruptures of discontinuity and inconsistent attempts to regulate or restrain market forces which lead inevitably to radical re-alignments of economic practice).

“So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited.” Which is true, but where Marx screwed up’s three-fold: 1) It’s not so simple as “the capitalist” always exploiting the workers needing to be educated to make this evident 2) Because sometime the spineless little worker drones enjoy being the instrument of free markets raping the country or world, as such are happy to—with eyes widening shut—keep functioning in submission’s role of mere commodities in exchange for luxury condominiums, a Rolex retirement party, lavishly overpriced meals, kinky sex-empty women, debauchery on boathouses and cocaine. 3) Most significantly, the relationship of exploitation arises from reciprocating, retaliatory attempts to profit off of one another’s envy and lack and from alliances formed thereby in which little, alienated, hostile former-people team up with satan’s own economic extremists because they think it won’t matter if just they do ‘it’ only once themselves; then keep.

But I do think he was right on that whole part about reducing the price of commodities also leading to an eventual, overall reduction in the compensation afforded workers in decreasing proportion to the laborer’s overall power to achieve; also with his implicit statement that doing this type of sadistic shit with people’s food supply is going to provoke a motherfucking worldwide counterevolution against capitalist Nazis and your fascist “-isms” because human beings hungry and/or constant under their threat of death are always much more fearsome and (self)controlled than the wraiths trying to profit off our loss.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Question_of_Free_Trade