Anti-trade?

[SouthProle]

How do you guys respond to accusations of being anti-trade? This is one thing I always face; "Why don't you stop buying your nice clothes if you're so against capitalism?" and "Why are you so against free trade?" are questions I face when I talk about politics to some people in my circle.

Just to stop them dead in their tracks, I usually bring up how Marx and Engels praise capitalism quite a bit in the manifesto, and politely remind them that they've conflated lifestylism with Marxism.

[AnaRchic]

I would explain that trade is necessary for allocation only in conditions of scarcity. The current state of the productive forces and the massive omnipresence of technology allows for the potential of a post-scarcity society. In post-industrial capitalism, scarcity is artificial and is an inevitable result of intrinsic obsolescence and other contradictory dynamics of the system.

A condition of post-scarcity renders money and trade irrelevant and unnecessary. Assuming the rational collective coordination of resources toward the end of satisfying human need and serving human advancement, planned abundance will take the place of planned/intrinsic obsolescence and scarcity. This in turn will facilitate the free and voluntary consumption of goods and services without any mediating value scheme. A gift economy would be profoundly more "free" than any kind of economy based on trade, and would be based on social mores of reciprocity and mutual aid.

Many of the 'libertarian' stripe tend to base their arguments on abstract scenarios completely divorced from historical development. They may argue that opposing trade is a violation of freedom, while failing to recognize that capitalism has never been a system of sovereign individuals with equal bargaining power trading value for value. It emerged, has grown, and sustains itself to this day as a class system, structured as a hierarchy rooted in the control of socially-necessary productive resources by a few, acquired by conquest, slavery, and fraud, and upheld by the centralized repressive force of the state.

Political theory can not be divorced from historical process, any attempt to do so reduces all political thought to the level of frivolous intellectual masturbation. We juxtapose libertarian socialism to capitalism as a consequence of an understanding of capitalism rooted in its actual historical development, further seeing a libertarian socialist order as a potential development of society out of class stratification and into cooperative and voluntary order. My point being, the concept of trade cannot be dealt with as an abstraction separate from concrete historical events and processes.

[argeiphontes]

?This is one thing I always face; "Why don't you stop buying your nice clothes if you're so against capitalism?"


I try to make ethical buying decisions. I prefer to buy from worker-owned or unionized or small businesses, and look for things like Fair Trade and so forth. Drink Fat Tire beer, it's worker-owned. :) I'm not going to lie and say I can afford to always do this.



"Why are you so against free trade?" are questions I face when I talk about politics to some people in my circle.
That's a more complicated question. Lots of 'Free Trade Agreements' just ensure capital mobility, creating an advantage for capital over labor (you're not going to move your family to Mexico to follow your job). They also tack on other capital protections, like the IP protections in the TPP they're negotiating now. They also have a negative effect on local jobs, of course, and can take away local sovereignty. There's nothing in "free trade" to help the average citizen.



Just to stop them dead in their tracks, I usually bring up how Marx and Engels praise capitalism quite a bit in the manifesto, and politely remind them that they've conflated lifestylism with Marxism.Yeah, but there's still no reason not to make "better" choices even if the dent you make is small. Sometimes you can buy from worker-owned businesses, which is ideal. In general though, you're right.