I found an old essay that I thought I would entertain people with

Political Science 3

Essay No. 2
On Equality


GLOBAL FREE TRADE THREATENS EQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES:
CAPITALISM LOOKS TO MARXISM TO CURE ITS WOES AND PREVENT SOCIAL MELTDOWN



a short essay by

Riley E. Knight

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Carl Marx 4.14

In the United States, having a happy working class or middle class has proven essential to the country’s political and economic stability. Historically, when the working class of a country is oppressed, revolution usually is not to far away. Karl Marx, in his Communist Manifesto, details the rise and fall of the bourgeois class and the emergence of the controlling proletariat or working class who provides for stability and the well-being of itself, the working people of the country at the expense of the bourgeois wealth. According to Marx,


The United States, with its long history of capitalism, seeks to avoid the Manifesto’s prophecy by making sure its would-be ruling proletariat are happy, or more accurately, economically sedated. Therefore, the author theorizes that the United States strives to have its working class believe there is equality among its citizens to avoid the downfall that Russia faced that fateful Black October. It does so by creating the illusion that the proletariat controlling class is really in control while the bourgeois still own the means for production and materially all the wealth of the nation. In other words, it looks and feels like communism to appease the proletariat, but without all-that destroyed bourgeois wealth bitter aftertaste – call it – Communism Light.
Let us put this theory to the test. Recent worldwide political and economic events are threatening the equality of the working class in the United States. This threat, in turn, is causing the proletariat to face the potential of extreme poverty and change in class status while the rich end up only just a little less rich.
How did this happen you ask -- The unmitigated global expansion of free trade. Marx described in his Manifesto that “[t]he need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” Marx – C.M. 739 (reader page 56) Moreover, “[t]he bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” Marx pp 739 (reader page 56). The bourgeois will tell you that globalization is good for all and that free trade is the final objective of globalization. Even Karl Marx himself agreed that capitalism, and its sister, global free trade, are a good thing for improving productivity:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

Marx 4.16
Of course this presumes that increased productivity is always a good thing. Recent passage of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), as well as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the floodgates of free trade have swung wide open. This has allowed capitalism to flow: like water from a dam around the word into recesses previously insulated by communist or socialist ideologies similar to that promulgated in the Manifesto.

Even China, the last major bastion of communism, now behaves and functions like a thriving capitalist’s dream. The consequence of free trade flooding upon a communist society like China serves to accelerate the oppression of the working or proletariat class as described in the Manifesto.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers.

Marx – C.M. pp 744 (pp59 of the reader)
According to Marx, the aim of the bourgeois is to pit laborer against laborer. Free trade facilitates this intra-class strife by causing the wages of the working class in China to rise, as it has, while the effective wage of the average American laborer has dramatically fallen, especially when one considers the total net worth of the laborer with their plummeting real-estate value and retirement accounts. This shift in compensation is the direct result of the laborers of each country to compete on the global free trade labor market. Indeed, it is the goal of the capitalist to:
[Resolve] personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Marx – C.M. pp 738 (reader page 56). Trade deficits and the resulting devaluation of the U.S. dollar drives down U.S. labor costs and the standard of living of the average U.S. worker. To compete with China’s cheap labor force, the U.S. worker is being asked to lower his or her expectations for compensation and ultimately standard of living. In the end, every worker in the world will have the same standard of life. Meanwhile, the bourgeois will hide in the shadows enjoying their spoils. Some may even take to space flight as in Virgin Atlantic’s bold move to provide space tours for the wealthy so they may avoid the facing the average miserable earth bound worker.
In the case of the United States, recent events have caused the Federal government to take unprecedented actions. Massive capital infusions in the American banking system in exchange for equity have partially nationalized the countries banking system. Other western style capitalistic countries have outright privatized their banks to avoid financial meltdown.
Interestingly, this is what Marx suggested in the Manifesto when he details a plan for the proletariat to conduct certain transactions to take the wealth of the country back from the bourgeois.
[To] use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Marx – C.M. pp 748 (reader page 61)
In the case of the United States in recent times, the bourgeois on Wall Street act like Marx’s proletariat. Specifically, Marx provides the proletariat seeking to seize control of bourgeois wealth with a “To-Do” list of sorts for overthrowing the bourgeois. In the U.S. now, the government is using Marx’s approach not to protect the proletariat, rather, to protect the wealthy bourgeois. Let us now compare the list to current events:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

Ibid page 749 (reader page 61). The Toxic Assets Rescue Program of 2008 serves to nationalize the true ownership of residential real estate by purchasing and servicing mortgages. Now this may seem like the government is taking the land back from the proletariat “homeowner.” The “homeowner” subject to a mortgage never actually owned the home, the bank did. In the end it is the bourgeois investor in the mortgage who keeps his or her wealth.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

Id. Repeal or non-renewal of the Bush Tax Cuts favoring the wealthy places heavier tax burdens on the rich.
3. Centralisation of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Id. See the TARP, above.
4. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

Id. At least for the transportation part, consider the Automaker Bailout that currently contemplated by Congress and the President.
5. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

Id. Here, it is President-Elect Barack Obama who wants to create millions of jobs rebuilding national infrastructure.
The above-mentioned steps the government is taking serve to further redistribute wealth not the working class, but to the wealthy by saddling every American with an inescapable debt obligation to pay back to society the trillion, and some say trillions, of dollars spent to buoy the U.S. economy. This redistribution amplifies the inequality already existent between the United States’ wealthy and to working classes. The engine of free trade remains wells oiled as much of the U.S. taxpayer funded TARP investment is being used to support foreign-owned U.S. mortgage-backed securities. This exported capital is used to spread capitalism around the globe as Marx predicted (see above.)
The future of free trade is now secured by the U.S. government with its recent and near future actions to provide continued worldwide access to the country’s means for production and labor market controlled by the wealthy elite around the globe. Faced with the threat of losing their homes and sources of income, the average American worker will accept even less in exchange for his or her efforts to keep an economy alive that strongly favors the bourgeois. What the American worker does not realize is that they have now before them the ability to engage in a financial revolution because of the institutionalized nature of capitalism and free trade in the U.S. democratic system. According to Marx, “[i]n stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.” Marx C.M. pp 740 (reader pp 57.) The American worker can engage in revolution by refusing to accept less while working more and fighting a bloodless war by defaulting en mass on their financial obligations to the bourgeois and using their power of the vote to truly regain ownership of the country and the wealth it has the power to possess. Hitting the proverbial reset button on the U.S. economy may be best medicine to cure the inequities that necessarily arise from unbridled capitalism in a global free trade market destined to maximize inequality between the wealthy bourgeois and the working proletariat classes.