On the Question of Free Trade
Discours sur la question du libre-échange
Marx’s speech to the Democratic Association of Brussels in January 1848, after the repeal of the English Corn Laws: free trade benefits capital, not workers, yet Marx supports it because it hastens the social revolution. Engels’s 1888 introduction applies the argument to the American tariff debate.
- Edition
- Translated by Florence Kelley (Lee and Shepard, Boston, 1888), with Engels’s introduction; reprinted by the New York Labor News Company, 1902
- Source
- Wikisource
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Quiz
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Contents
- Engels’s Introduction (1888) 45 min 23
Engels introduces the American edition of the speech. Britain built its industry behind protection and then, once dominant, embraced free trade to make the world its agricultural hinterland. Marx favoured free trade only because it speeds capitalist development toward crisis and revolution. Engels argues that protection helped America industrialise but has now done its work and is breeding trusts, as it bred cartels in Germany after the 1879 tariff. Britain’s industrial monopoly is ending. For socialists the choice between free trade and protection matters little: either way capitalism produces the working class that will one day replace it.
- Speech on the Question of Free Trade 37 min 31
Marx’s speech of January 1848 to the Democratic Association of Brussels. The English manufacturers campaigned to repeal the Corn Laws in the name of cheap bread for workers, but cheap food means lower wages and higher profits, as Ricardo admitted and the workers understood. Free trade will make the economists’ law of the minimum wage operate in full; the growth of capital brings machinery, competition among workers and crises, and the free traders’ promises of compensation for displaced workers, like their talk of “natural” international specialisation, are hollow. Free trade is the freedom of capital. Yet Marx supports it, because it breaks down national barriers, sharpens the antagonism of bourgeoisie and proletariat, and so hastens the social revolution.