The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Post-Contemporary Interventions) by George Yúdice

Author:George Yúdice [Yúdice, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2004-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

8

Free Trade and Culture

What is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? . . . Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker . . . 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 . . . So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist . . . there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited . . . The free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, that I vote in favor of free trade.

—Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade”

NAFTA has the virtue of making integration visible; it certainly did sharpen the contradictions, as the Old Man might have put it. If capital insists on integrating, those who joust with it have to do the same.

—“The Philanthropy of Financiers”

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