What did Marx and Engels think on protectionism and free trade? (long)
With America's ruling class at war with itself over two increasingly stark positions on trade, we can turn to the 19th century debates on this same issue
This is a rather long article … I may try to abridge this and publish it later this week if I can find the time!
On April Second, the day after April Fool’s, America’s President walked onto a podium with a giant placard. On this placard was a list of countries with their upcoming tariffs. These tariffs were framed as “reciprocal” ones levied against countries that had tariffs on goods from the United States. Yet it almost immediately came out that some of the countries listed were barely inhabited (or even uninhabited) islands. Nor were the tariffs attributed to each country on US goods remotely accurate — rather, the administration calculated the “tariffs” each country had on the United States from its trade deficit.
Trump’s tariffs have been given a number of conflicting pretexts. A couple of months earlier, he had presented tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods. He explained these tariffs one moment as a response to fentanyl smuggling, and in the next moment as a move to transition production back to the United States. Likewise, he justified his April tariffs both as a method to bring production back to the United States, and as an attempt to bring in more revenue (and maybe even replace the income tax).
These tariffs have spawned a remarkable political debate. Much of the business class is deeply troubled, as they see these tariffs as a direct attack on their profitability. Many middle class and working class Americans likewise see these tariffs as a serious inflationary risk, as the goods we depend on could shoot up by nearly 50% or more (such as the goods that come in from Vietnam which is now facing a tariff of 46%). Yet some working-class Americans from parts of the country that have been ravaged by four decades of de-industrialization see Trump’s tariff threat as a potential savior from the ravages of free trade. Even Shawn Fain, the otherwise liberal leader of the United Autoworkers Union, has given some support to them.
The problems with how these tariffs were calculated have been discussed in detail. Since it was calculated from the trade deficit, tiny Lesotho was hit with a 50% tariff since they are too poor to import goods from the United States. Trump justified this by arguing that countries like Lesotho were ripping off American workers. Lesotho’s impoverished textile workers might be confused as to how this is the case (perhaps the American government would do better to look at the American multinationals who own the factories there).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on tariffs
Like so many things, whenever there is a serious economic debate, especially one that has been framed in class terms, I turn to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on similar issues in their own epoch. Marx and Engels lived in a time where the debate between free trade and protectionism was one of the defining controversies. When they moved to England in the late 1840s, England had recently abandoned its controversial corn tariff (the Corn Laws) and moved further towards free trade. Meanwhile, America, Germany, and France were adopting protectionist policies to help catch up to England’s rapidly growing industry.
As Marx and Engels saw the issue, it is primarily a question of development of the means of production. The more advanced and industrial an economy is, the more it benefits from free trade because it can obtain the resources it needs from across the globe while finding markets for the surplus from its vast industrial machine. England desperately needed cotton for its massive textile industry, and it needed a market for its jackets, trousers, and shirts. Conversely, developing economies hoping to build a textile industry of their own needed barriers on imports of English textiles lest their budding businesses get crushed by their British rivals. Marx and Engels documented these positions and their rationales, and gave their thoughts as to how the nascent working class movement ought to approach these policies.
Marx on the Corn Laws
We can begin with a speech which Marx delivered in 1848 on the English Corn Laws. The Corn Laws were tariffs on grain imports from other countries. They had been advocated by the followers of Thomas Malthus in England, who were concerned with English food sovereignty. The central concern of the Malthusian school was overpopulation, and cheap food imports would reduce domestic food production, increase the local population, and make the country dependent on food imports to stave off famine. Lord forbid England ever lost its navy in a war and faced a blockade! Yet the Malthusian justification was secondary to the material interests of the aristocratic rural landlords who dominated English conservative politics. For these rural landlords, high food prices meant that farms were more profitable and they could charge more in rent from the farmers. Even land that was less fertile could turn a profit, as these farms that would otherwise be unprofitable with foreign competition could turn a profit.
Against the corn laws, an alliance of workers and capitalists organized a movement for free trade. This movement was inspired by the Ricardian school of economics. David Ricardo, the preeminent English economist of the 19th century, complemented Adam Smith’s theory of market exchange with the notion of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage held that every nation produced certain goods more efficiently than others, and each region and nation would profit most when being able to produce what they specialize in and trade with others. Tariffs, according to the Ricardian school, undermined the efficiency of the economy by protecting less efficient industries in the countries with tariffs. Without the corn tariffs, the English consumer could buy cheaper grain from countries that made it more efficiently.
The industrial capitalists in England argued that the corn laws only profited the snobby old English aristocrats with their fancy titles and ridiculous estate houses. The only cost of eliminating the corn laws was reducing the rent the aristocrats received, and that was no real loss. With the corn laws gone, England’s burgeoning urban working class could buy cheap grain from France, America, Holland, and other food exporters. The English workers recognized that, and organized behind the efforts to reduce these duties. Yet the English workers were cynical about their industrialist allies. These were the same factory owners who had resisted working-class demands to reduce the legal limit of the working day to ten hours. These workers were no fools — as Marx explains, these capitalists did not have their best interests at heart:
Besides, how could the workingman understand the sudden philanthropy of the manufacturers, the very men still busy fighting against the Ten Hours' Bill, which was to reduce the working day of the mill hands from 12 hours to 10?
To give you an idea of the philanthropy of these manufacturers I would remind you, gentlemen, of the factory regulations in force in all the mills.
Every manufacturer has for his own private use a regular penal code in which fines are laid down for every voluntary or involuntary offence. For instance, the worker pays so much if he has the misfortune to sit down on a chair; if he whispers, or speaks, or laughs; if he arrives a few moments too late; if any part of the machine breaks, or he does not turn out work of the quality desired, etc., etc. The fines are always greater than the damage really done by the worker. And to give the worker every opportunity for incurring fines, the factory clock is set forward, and he is given bad raw material to make into good pieces of stuff. An overseer not sufficiently skillful in multiplying cases of infractions or rules is discharged.
As Marx makes pains to argue (and as many of the workers fighting for free trade knew full well), once bread was cheaper the industrialists could endeavor to reduce the wages of the workers. The capitalists wanted to pay the working class as little as possible, and cheaper food meant that they could survive off of less. This, in turn, meant more profits for the industrialists:
The English workers have very well understood the significance of the struggle between the landlords and the industrial capitalists. They know very well that the price of bread was to be reduced in order to reduce wages, and that industrial profit would rise by as much as rent fell.
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And do not believe, gentlemen, that is is a matter of indifference to the worker whether he receives only four francs on account of corn being cheaper, when he had been receiving five francs before.
So why, then, had the workers allied with the industrialists if they knew that cheap bread just meant lower wages? For one thing, it allowed the workers to play divide and rule against the ruling class! Eventually the landed aristocrats, resentful of the upstart industrial capitalists, would side with the workers to push for regulations on the length of the working day:
The English workers have made the English free-traders realize that they are not the dupes of their illusions or of their lies; and if, in spite of this, the workers made common cause with them against the landlords, it was for the purpose of destroying the last remnants of feudalism and in order to have only one enemy left to deal with. The workers have not miscalculated, for the landlords, in order to revenge themselves upon the manufacturers, made common cause with the workers to carry the Ten Hours' Bill, which the latter had been vainly demanding for 30 years, and which was passed immediately after the repeal of the Corn Laws.
Oops! So out of the deal, the workers got cheaper food and a reduction to the working day, and even if the industrialists opportunistically cut wages once food was cheaper at least the workers had a bit more free time to be with their family, educate themselves, and organize (or at least sleep a bit longer and rest their weary bones).
Yet the most important impact of free trade, Marx argues, is increasing the speed at which industry develops. This should be no surprise, as we saw it was the industrial capitalists of England who supported free trade not the rural landowners. Industry became more profitable, which just increased the flood of capital into industry.
The chaotic, anarchic growth enabled by free trade had both good and bad effects for the workers. With free trade, the material that drives industry floods in more cheaply. The greater profits drove the development of new technologies in England that reduced the price of consumer goods. Growing industry means more demand for labor, and more demand for labor means higher wages:
The whole line of argument amounts to this: Free trade increases productive forces. If industry keeps growing, if wealth, if the productive power, if, in a word, productive capital increases, the demand for labor,the price of labor, and consequently the rate of wages, rise also.
The most favorable condition for the worker is the growth of capital. This must be admitted. If capital remains stationary, industry will not merely remain stationary but will decline, and in this case the worker will be the first victim. He goes to the wall before the capitalist. And in the case where capital keeps growing, in the circumstance which we have said are the best for the worker, what will be his lot? He will go to the wall just the same.
Yet it also had harmful effects for workers. Industrial machinery made their skills less relevant and reduced their bargaining power, allowing capitalists to reduce their wages. It forced them to increasingly compete with their own wives and children, who were able to work many of the jobs that once only men could do:
This competition becomes fiercer as the division of labor enables a single worker to do the work of three. Machinery accomplishes the same result on a much larger scale. The growth of productive capital, which forces the industrial capitalists to work with constantly increasing means, ruins the small industrialist and throws them into the proletariat. Then, the rate of interest falling in proportion as capital accumulates, the small rentiers, who can no longer live on their dividends, are forced to go into industry and thus swell the number of proletarians.
More neutrally, the intensified competition of free trade led increasingly to the centralization of capital into fewer and fewer firms, as the most competitive industries bought out the less competitive ones and monopolized their trades:
Finally, the more productive capital increases, the more it is compelled to produce for a market whose requirements it does not know, the more production precedes consumption, the more supply tries to force demand, and consumption crises increase in frequency and in intensity. But every crisis in turn hastens the centralization of capital and adds to the proletariat.
What is Marx’s verdict on free trade? For one thing, free trade is freedom for capital, not for labor:
To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action.
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Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.
After all, free trade is not freedom of movement - capital is free to travel between England, America, France, and England, but not the worker. It creates opportunities for workers to get cheaper goods, but does even more to heighten their exploitation as it disproportionately empowers the industrial capitalists that employ them. Yet Marx makes clear that free trade should still be supported by the working class:
Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection.
One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.
By increasing the rapidity of industrial development, free trade increased the growth of the capitalist market economy and created new political opportunities for the working class to collectively better their position:
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
Thus, Marx supported free trade in industrial England, at least, as a method to empower the working class in the long term even if in the short term it also empowered their main antagonist, the industrial capitalists who employed them.
Engels on Free Trade
Unfortunately, Marx’s analysis remains largely centered on England in the mid 19th century. The debates over free trade and protectionism would expand to France, Germany, America, Russia, and other countries over the course of the 1800s. Here, we can look to the preface Engels wrote to a pamphlet that consisted of Marx’s earlier 1848 speech. Engels broadens the discussion by applying the principles Marx outlined to these other cases, as well as later developments in England itself.
Engels summarized Marx’s support for free trade as follows:
To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created – for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.
Yet economic history kept moving. As Marx was delivering his speech, a gold rush was occurring in California which dumped gold onto the market, which would be followed by another similar rush in Australia. This gold would create more money circulating around the market, facilitating more trade. Railroads and steamships reduced logistics costs, making trade physically easier as well.
Unfortunately for England, the English industrialists faced protectionism in their main trading partners. Though their opium war had opened up China, the largest market in the world, to unfettered trade, France, Germany, Russia, and America all imposed tariffs on English goods. They needed to do so because their industries were still small and simply could not compete with the industrial might of Victorian England.
These protective tariffs allowed the growth of industry in these other countries, and where free trade helped England to grow, for these less developed countries it was protectionism that ensured their industrialization:
Protection being a means of artificially manufacturing manufacturers, may, therefore, appear useful not only to an incompletely developed capitalist class still struggling with feudalism; it may also give a life to the rising capitalist class of a country which, like America, has never known feudalism, but which has arrived at that stage of development where the passage from agriculture to manufactures becomes a necessity. America, placed in that situation, decided in favor of protection.
Yet protectionism in this respect functioned as a ladder that quickly turned into a fetter, as the more a country industrialized the more it needed free trade to grow its other industries:
Protection is at best an endless screw, and you never know when you have done with it. By protecting one industry, you directly or indirectly hurt all others, and have therefore to protect them too. By so doing you again damage the industry that you first protected, and have to compensate it; but this compensation reacts, as before, on all other trades, and entitles them to redress, and so on ad infinitum.
This, in turn, generates political squabbles as intrigues, as industries lobby to get themselves protected and to reduce tariffs on the goods they need. American factories will lobby to remove tariffs on coal, for instance, while the coal miners in America lobby to increase tariffs on coal while reducing tariffs on pickaxes. Engels argues that this exacerbates all the dirty dealing and intrigue which characterizes the legislatures of a capitalist society (a process which is presumably occurring right now in America, as various industries are calling the White House to reduce tariffs wherever it fits the needs of their own sectors).
Protectionism allows an industry to keep growing free from competition until it has met the demands of its own national market. Once an industry has met the demand of its own domestic market, it requires free trade to continue growing:
The moment a branch of national industry has completely conquered the home market, that moment exportation becomes a necessity to it. Under capitalistic conditions, an industry either expands or wanes. A trade cannot remain stationary; stoppage of expansion is incipient ruin; the progress of mechanical and chemical invention, by constantly superseding human labor and ever more rapidly increasing and concentrating capital, creates in every stagnant industry a glut both of workers and of capital, a glut which finds no vent everywhere, because the same process is taking place in all other industries.
Engels details how this process played out in different countries:
(1) Germany - Engels recounts how Germany developed rapidly under the protective duties implemented by their imperial government. Yet in the late 1860s, events conspired to motivate them to increase tariffs at the point they ought to be decreasing it. An influx of American corn was reducing the profitability of German farmers, thereby reducing the rents paid to aristocratic landowners. German industrialists likewise faced increased competition from English industrialists hoping to offload excess production cheaply into the continent. Therefore, the German ruling class imposed high tariffs which simply ground German consumers into deeper poverty. This high protectionism caused waste in the German economy, while also driving emigration to places like America.
(2) France - Engels recounts how France, likewise, was suffering under excess industrial protectionism. Where England specialized in cheap consumer goods, France specialized in luxuries. French craftsmanship in luxury goods could not be beaten, but as Engels explains the foreign nuveau riche was tempted to just buy cheaper imitations from England and Germany. In light of this, many inefficient French industries chugged along without any real competition and thus any incentive to implement innovative and efficient forms of automation. Only free trade could awaken French industry from this slumber and instigate further industrial development.
(3) Russia - the Russian case is a particularly interesting one, as the Russians demanded high tariffs that could only be paid in gold. The Russian government saw tariffs both as a means to raise government revenue, but also as a way to protect the tiny Russian industrial base (as Russia was still largely underdeveloped). Yet the tariffs in this respect served contrary purposes, as any industrialization would therefore reduce the revenue which the Russian state depended on. As Engels explains, “on the very day on which that tariff fulfills its protective mission by totally excluding foreign goods, on that day the Russian government is bankrupt.” Ultimately, the Russians sought to create an autarkic economy totally independent from global trade, a view which Engels was intensely dismissive of:
And yet that same government amuses its subjects by dangling before their eyes the prospect of making Russia, by means of this tariff, an entirely self-supplying country, requiring from the foreigner neither food, nor raw material, nor manufactured articles, nor works of art. The people who believe in this vision of a Russian Empire, secluded and isolated from the rest of the world, are on a level with the patriotic Prussian lieutenant who went into a shop and asked for a globe, not a terrestrial or a celestial one, but a globe of Prussia.
(4) America - the American case is also interesting, as tariffs allowed large trusts like Standard Oil to emerge free from competition from English oil. These tariffs complemented the natural advantages of America’s geology and ecology. Yet other tariffs protected sugar monopolies that only hurt the American consumer by denying them competitive pricing of consumer goods.
As Engels argues, these four cases show the role protection plays in enabling local industrialization, but they also hurt the consumer just as much as England’s corn laws did. This is because the protections were no longer benefiting nascent industries that could not compete with English industry, but large monopolistic trusts. Engels points to how even the famed English textile mills were increasingly tempted by trade protections, although a slim majority continued to support free trade. This wasn’t because they needed the protections, only because it would allow them to rip off the consumers even more easily. As Engels explains, the English industrialists conveniently used the pretext of reciprocal tariffs against the American, French, German, and Russian markets that tariffed their goods:
It is to stave off this impending fate that Protection, scarcely disguised under the veil of "fair trade" and retaliatory tariffs, is now invoked with such fervor by the sons of the very men who, 40 years ago, knew no salvation but in Free Trade. And when English manufacturers begin to find that Free Trade is ruining them, and ask the government to protect them against their foreign competitors, then, surely, the moment has come for these competitors to retaliate by throwing overboard a protective system henceforth useless, to fight the fading industrial monopoly of England with its own weapon: Free Trade.
Engels concludes his preface by returning to the fact that “you may easily introduce Protection, but you cannot get rid of it again so easily”. As he explains:
The legislature, by adopting the protective plan, has created vast interests, for which it is responsible. And not every one of these interests – the various branches of industry – is equally ready, at a given moment, to face open competition. Some will be lagging behind, while others have no longer need of protective nursing. This difference of position will give rise to the usual lobby-plotting, and is in itself a sure guarantee that the protected industries, if Free Trade is resolved upon, will be let down very easy indeed as was the silk manufacture in England after 1846. That is unavoidable under present circumstances, and will have to be submitted to by the Free Trade party so long as the change is resolved upon in principle.
Engels argues that free trade is ultimately more progressive in enabling the more rapid development of a market economy beyond a certain level of production. On the other hand, protectionism still creates opportunities for socialists because it “is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers.” Either way, the economic policy creates opportunities in the long term for the working class to organize, improve their conditions, and eventually replace the capitalist system with one of their own design. The difference is that free trade speeds up this process by increasing the rate of development and the overall dynamism of a capitalist economy.
What ought we take from all of this?
What we can learn from Marx and Engels on this depends, first, on whether or not one agrees with their end-goal. As they argue, if one is looking at it from the end-goal of socialism, free trade is generally good because it accelerates the kind of industrial development required to transition from capitalism to socialism. Yet protectionism may be necessary for under-developed economies. They also think socialism can come about whether or not we have protectionism in the short term. Thus, Marx comes out for free trade but only tentatively, and Engels goes even farther by stating that socialists need not care one way or the other.
On the other hand, if one is a liberal, clearly their arguments for free trade are decisive. If your goal is to develop an efficient and free economy, then free trade should be implemented to allow for the smoothest possible movement of capital and goods. In this way, Marx and Engels would agree with free traders that free trade is healthier for capitalism.
Those who want protections to reverse deindustrialization of the US economy might appeal to their arguments about the positive role of protectionism for developing economies. Yet there are important differences between an economy that isn’t yet industrialized and an economy that is de-industrialized. The developing economy needs capital to finance its industry, and it needs to protect this industry from foreign competition that would squash it like a bug. Thus, it needs to protect its industries to give them the space to develop. Yet a modern Western economy already has tons of capital in the form of financial assets even if they have less industrial capital. To rebuild their industry, they just need to push that investment into industry. The problem with tariffs is that the industrial machinery they need for their factories will also be tariffed. If you want to build a car factory in Ohio, you will need to buy robots, steel, and cement from China to get this factory of the ground. The tariffs will only make that more expensive!
It is important to keep one caveat in mind — the kinds of protections Marx and Engels were criticizing were quite different from the sky-high tariffs imposed on America’s trading partners. With tariffs up to 50% or higher on many economies, the economic constraints imposed by these tariffs are much more extreme. In addition, goods cross borders much more than they did a century and a half ago, as many have highlighted how many times some car parts cross into and out of the United States. In addition, developing states lack much in the way of consumer markets, meaning that their citizens won’t be losing much due to tariffs. America is different in that it already has a large consumer economy, and many of its people work in retail, logistics, and the services that make that consumer economy hum.
There are also differences between our current economic system and the America of the 1800ss. Today, the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world, meaning countries like China and India use dollars to trade between one another. Additionally, their debt is often valued in dollars, meaning that to pay off their debts they need dollars. This dynamic is in no small part responsible for the kinds of trade deficits the US sees. Trade deficits with the United States are important for countries like China to have the dollars they need to buy from other economies, and to pay off their own debt. It is this demand for dollars that keeps the dollar so strong, and what makes it so easy for the US to import goods by simply printing more money.
It is fair to say the global economic order the US created prior to Trump’s tariffs was unsustainable. Americans are increasingly drowning in debt, and the deindustrialization of the United States has undermined the economic prospects of a majority of American citizens. Yet Trump is not interested in eliminating the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency - on the contrary, he has threatened countries that want to move away from the dollar. This is one of the fundamental incoherences and contradictions of his trade policy.
Moreover, Engels’s warnings on Russia serve as a stark reminder that the US is being deeply foolish in trying both to (a) industrialize through tariffs and (b) raise revenue through tariffs. If the country industrializes, it will get less tax revenue for tariffs, but if it is getting more money from tariffs it is only because they have failed to re-industrialize. Thus, the question of reserve currency and the question of re-industrialization expose Trump’s tariffs as fundamentally contradictory in their purpose! It is remarkable that Donald Trump has not noticed this glaring contradiction in his rhetoric and his economic arguments.
Marx and Engels were obsessed with uncovering and attacking these internal contradictions. Thus, if they were alive today they would remark at these aforementioned contradictions: the US wants to use tariffs to raise revenue while pushing re-industrialization; the US wants to maintain its reserve currency status while eliminating its trade deficit; and the US is tariffing the very industrial goods it needs to re-industrialize. No doubt, they would highlight these internal contradictions and warn that Trump’s tariffs will inevitably fail at some of the tasks the administration has given them, even if it is successful at some of these tasks.
This means they would probably react with a mix of bemusement and irritation that some Marxists are supporting these tariffs as a path to re-industrialization, or trying to argue that Trump really has some super secret rationale that justifies them. They would surely say that tariffs can be good for re-industrialization, but that doesn’t mean all are, and that these Marxists are simply abstracting from the particulars of the situation to justify their existing preferences. Marx and Engels were, first and foremost, critics of the economy which means they are interested in its contradictions instead of projecting some kind of sanity that might well not be present.
Yet they would also criticize the free-traders for allowing the US economy to lose its industry in the first place. Had the American system not pushed free trade on the globe quite so aggressively, the United States would not have lost its industrial base. The industrialization of the third world was a good thing, but that need not come at the expense of the de-industrialization of the West. It was foolish to let the Rust Belt rust into nothing, and they would have warned that such foolish policies could lead to the emergence of an American version of French Emperor Bonaparte III.
Ultimately, Marx and Engels would look upon both factions of America’s economic elite with scorn. Both factions have wasted the wealth and power of the most prosperous republic in world history — free traders by facilitating the loss of American industry, and protectionists by slapping on incoherent sky-high tariffs after the damage had already been done. Neither factions have the interests of America’s working class at heart or the interests of the working class of the rest of the globe.
Finally, they would have advised American workers to look to build alliances with workers in other countries, instead of depending either on free-traders and protectionists for emancipation. The miners in Bolivia, factory workers in China, farmers in Mexico, and textile workers in Lesotho are not the enemies of America’s working class. On the contrary, they make the clothes on our backs, the avocados on our toast, and the computers we use to access the internet. Their final advice would be to expand the horizons of our politics, away from the stale debates of their own time and towards new possibilities of global solidarity.