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This article appears in the January 9, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Marx on Smith, Free Trade

Here is an example of what LaRouche describes as Marx's "emotionally charged outburst[s] of praise for the hoaxster Adam Smith." It is from an 1847 speech prepared for a conference on "Free Trade" in Brussels (reported by Friedrich Engels). The full text of Engels' article is at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/09/30.htm.

These laws, which A. Smith, Say, and Ricardo have developed, the laws under which wealth is produced and distributed—these laws grow more true, more exact, then cease to be mere abstractions, in the same measure in which Free Trade is carried out.... If you wish to read in the book of the future, open Smith, Say, Ricardo. There you will find described, as clearly as possible, the condition which awaits the working man under the reign of perfect Free Trade.... Either you must disavow the whole of political economy as it exists at present, or you must allow that under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that 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 a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians.

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