Saturday, September 02, 2006

 

Key passages for section 2 (pp.883-893): "Free-trading and protectionism. Bastiat and Carey"

Both... Carey, the Yankee, and Bastiat, the Frenchman... [seek] to demonstrate the harmony of the [bourgeois] relations of production at the points where the classical economists naively described this antagonism...

Carey... belongs to a country where... bourgeois society itself, linking up the productive forces of an old world with the enormous natural terrain of a new one, has developed to hitherto unheard-of dimensions and with unheard-of freedom of movement, has far outstripped all previous work in the conquest of the forces of nature, and where... even the antitheses of bourgeois society itself appear only as vanishing moments. That the relations of production within which this enormous new world has developed so quickly, so surprisingly and so happily should be regarded by Carey as the eternal, normal relations of social production and intercourse, that these should seem to him as hampered and damaged by the inherited barriers of the feudal period, in Europe, especially England... what could be more natural? American relations against English ones: to this his critique of the English theory of landed property, wages, population, class antitheses etc. may be reduced...
In the last analysis, the disturbing effect... upon its [bourgeois society's] natural relations reduces itself for Carey to the influence, to the excesses and interferences of the state in bourgeois society... The question to what extent these state influences, public debt, taxes etc., grow out of the bourgeois relations themselves -- and hence, e.g. in England, in no way appear as results of feudalism, but rather as results of its dissolution and defeat, and in North America itself the power of the central government grows with the centralization of capital -- is one which Carey naturally does not raise...
[Bastiat, by contrast, bases himself on] the lower power of bourgeois society in France, against the French socialists. You believe yourselves to be rebelling against the laws of bourgeois society, in a land where these laws were never allowed to realize themselves! You only know them in the stunted French form, and regard as their inherent form what is merely its French national distortion. Look across, at England. Here, in our own country, the task is to free bourgeois society from the fetters which the state imposes on it. You want to multiply these fetters. First work out the bourgeois relations in their pure form, and then we may talk again...
Carey, however, whose point of departure is the American emancipation of bourgeois society from the state, ends with the call for state intervention, so that the pure development of bourgeois relations is not disturbed by external forces, as in fact happened in America. He is a protectionist, while Bastiat is a freetrader. All over the world, the harmony of economic laws appears as disharmony... What is the source of this strange phenomenon? Carey explains it with the destructive influence of England, with its striving for industrial monopoly, upon the world market... As the commanding power of the world market, England distorts the harmony of economic relations in all the countries of the world... What Russia is, politically, for Urquhart [a contemporary British political figure who attributed all political evils everywhere to interference by Tsarist Russia], England is, economically, for Carey...
[So Carey ends up with] the naive form of suggesting to the United States that they destroy the industrialism propagated by England, so as, by protective tariffs, to develop the same more rapidly themselves.
With Carey the harmony of the bourgeois relations of production ends with the most complete disharmony of these relations on the grandest terrain where they appear, the world market, and in their grandest development, as the relations of producing nations. All the relations which appear harmonious to him within specific national boundaries or, in addition, in the abstract form of general relations of bourgeois society -- e.g. concentration of capital, division of labour, wage labour etc. -- appear as disharmonious to him where they appear in their most developed form -- in their world market form -- as the internal relations which produce English domination on the world market, and which, as destructive influences, are the consequence of this domination. If patriarchal gives way to industrial production within a country, this is harmonious, and the process of dissolution which accompanies this development is conceived in its positive aspect alone. But it becomes disharmonious when large-scale English industry dissolves the patriarchal or petty-bourgeois or other lower stages of production in a foreign country. The concentration of capital within a country and the dissolving effect of this concentration present nothing but positive sides to him. But the monopoly of concentrated English capital and its dissolving effect on the smaller national capitals of other countries is disharmonious. What Carey has not grasped is that these world-market disharmonies are merely the ultimate adequate expressions of the disharmonies which have become fixed as abstract relations within the economic categories or which have a local existence on the smallest scale. No wonder, then, that he in turn forgets the positive content of these processes of dissolution... when he comes to their full appearance, the world market. Hence, where the economic relations confront him in their truth, i.e. in their universal reality, his principled optimism turns into a denunciatory, irritated pessimism.
In Bastiat, none of this. The harmony of these relations is a world beyond, which begins just at the point where the boundaries of France end; which exists in England and America. This is merely the imaginary, ideal form of the un-French, the Anglo-American relations, not the real form such as he confronts it on his own land and soil... Bastiat... presents fantasy history, his abstractions sometimes in the form of arguments, another time in the form of supposed events, which however have never and nowhere happened, just as a theologian treats sin sometimes as the law of human existence, then at other times as the story of the fall from grace.
All economists... when they demonstrate to the worker that he has no legitimate claim to share in the risks of gain, when they wish to pacify him generally about his subordinate role vis-à-vis the capitalist, lay stress on pointing out to him that, in contrast to the capitalist, he possesses a certain fixity of income more or less independent of the great adventures of capital. Just as Don Quixote consoles Sancho Panza with the thought that, although of course he takes all the beatings, at least he is not required to be brave...

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