"Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat."
-Karl Marx (1847)
All I can say to that is we live in such an age, and despite the contradictions the show goes on. Considering what was done in the name of free trade during the 19th and 20th centuries it is a horryfying thought that this might not be the apogee. We must remember that people of the 19th century surely thought they were living through the triumph of free trade. After all during the late 1870's Britain systematically took advantage of a drought to starve an estimated 50 million people in China and India in order to create a market more suitable for land and resource acquisition. This led to one boisterous Englishmen to proclaim that "Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade.". Free market needs also made it imperative that the entire country of Paraguay be slaughtered for the crime of having no foreign debt and a trade surplus (some estimates say as much as 70% of Paraguay's male population was killed). If one cuts through all the propaganda and deception it is fairly easy to see that all the wars of the past two centuries are free trade wars. After all, who would finance a war that didn't promise a profit?
The wars we see today are no different. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Iran all made the same mistake; they didn't bend over to take their free market medicine when told to. The concept of free trade was something that those cunning Brits thought up after they had industrialized and wanted to ensure that no one would do the same. It was a masterful move that involved the elimination of China and India as the worlds biggest producers, shackled Latin America with endless debt and justified the sanguinary subjugation of all of Africa. This very same tried and true logic is why America can drop cluster bombs on cities and call it freedom. This is the world we live in and the sort of ethics that dominate our lives. I like how Antonio Gramsci put it, "The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters."
