I was reading "An Unsocial Socialist" last week, written in 1883 by George Bernard Shaw. It mentioned Free Trade:
"Socialism or Smash. Socialism if the race has at last evolved
the faculty of coordinating the functions of a society too
crowded and complex to be worked any longer on the old haphazard
private-property system. Unless we reorganize our society
socialistically--humanly a most arduous and magnificent
enterprise, economically a most simple and sound one--Free Trade
by itself will ruin England, and I will tell you exactly how.
When my father made his fortune we had the start of all other
nations in the organization of our industry and in our access to
iron and coal. Other nations bought our products for less than
they must have spent to raise them at home, and yet for so much
more than they cost us, that profits rolled in Atlantic waves
upon our capitalists. When the workers, by their trades-unions,
demanded a share of the luck in the form of advanced wages, it
paid better to give them the little they dared to ask than to
stop gold-gathering to fight and crush them. But now our
customers have set up in their own countries improved copies of
our industrial organization, and have discovered places where
iron and coal are even handier than they are by this time in
England. They produce for themselves, or buy elsewhere, what they
formerly bought from us. Our profits are vanishing, our machinery
is standing idle, our workmen are locked out. It pays now to stop
the mills and fight and crush the unions when the men strike, no
longer for an advance, but against a reduction. Now that these
unions are beaten, helpless, and drifting to bankruptcy as the
proportion of unemployed men in their ranks becomes greater, they
are being petted and made much of by our class; an infallible
sign that they are making no further progress in their duty of
destroying us. The small capitalists are left stranded by the
ebb; the big ones will follow the tide across the water, and
rebuild their factories where steam power, water power, labor
power, and transport are now cheaper than in England, where they
used to be cheapest. The workers will emigrate in pursuit of the
factory, but they will multiply faster than they emigrate, and be
told that their own exorbitant demand for wages is driving
capital abroad, and must continue to do so whilst there is a
Chinaman or a Hindoo unemployed to underbid them. As the British
factories are shut up, they will be replaced by villas; the
manufacturing districts will become fashionable resorts for
capitalists living on the interest of foreign investments; the
farms and sheep runs will be cleared for deer forests. All
products that can in the nature of things be manufactured
elsewhere than where they are consumed will be imported in
payment of deer-forest rents from foreign sportsmen, or of
dividends due to shareholders resident in England, but holding
shares in companies abroad, and these imports will not be paid
for by ex ports, because rent and interest are not paid for at
all--a fact which the Free Traders do not yet see, or at any rate
do not mention, although it is the key to the whole mystery of
their opponents. The cry for Protection will become wild, but no
one will dare resort to a demonstrably absurd measure that must
raise prices before it raises wages, and that has everywhere
failed to benefit the worker. There will be no employment for
anyone except in doing things that must be done on the spot, such
as unpacking and distributing the imports, ministering to the
proprietors as domestic servants, or by acting, preaching,
paving, lighting, housebuilding, and the rest; and some of these,
as the capitalist comes to regard ostentation as vulgar, and to
enjoy a simpler life, will employ fewer and fewer people. A vast
proletariat, beginning with a nucleus of those formerly employed
in export trades, with their multiplying progeny, will be out of
employment permanently. They will demand access to the land and
machinery to produce for themselves. They will be refused. They
will break a few windows and be dispersed with a warning to their
leaders. They will burn a few houses and murder a policeman or
two, and then an example will be made of the warned. They will
revolt, and be shot down with
machine-guns--emigrated--exterminated anyhow and everyhow; for
the proprietary classes have no idea of any other means of
dealing with the full claims of labor. You yourself, though you
would give fifty pounds to Jansenius's emigration fund readily
enough, would call for the police, the military, and the Riot
Act, if the people came to Brandon Beeches and bade you turn out
and work for your living with the rest. Well, the superfluous
proletariat destroyed, there will remain a population of
capitalists living on gratuitous imports and served by a
disaffected retinue. One day the gratuitous imports will stop in
consequence of the occurrence abroad of revolution and
repudiation, fall in the rate of interest, purchase of industries
by governments for lump sums, not reinvestable, or what not. Our
capitalist community is then thrown on the remains of the last
dividend, which it consumes long before it can rehabilitate its
extinct machinery of production in order to support itself with
its own hands. Horses, dogs, cats, rats, blackberries, mushrooms,
and cannibalism only postpone--"
Read it for yourself at
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/unsoc10.txt (search for "free trade" to get to this section).
Note: this work is in the public domain
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