Karl Marx Was a Global Free Trader

April 11, 2025 by Cliff Kincaid

By: Cliff Kincaid

In the rhetorical battle between Peter Navarro and Elon Musk, I choose Navarro. The influential Trump adviser produced the great film, Death By China: How America Lost Its Manufacturing Base, back in 2012, when Musk was making cars in China and currying favor with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Musk is a smart man, but he is a Johnny-come-lately regarding the communist threat. He came to acknowledge the threat of Cultural Marxism when one of his own children was captured by the trans movement. He came from South Africa but only realized it had gone communist after he was out of the country and saw it implementing communist policies at home and abroad.

By contrast, Navarro emerged in Trump’s first and second terms as a spokesman for the established fact that Red China was looting our economy to achieve world domination. Navarro, formerly a professor of economics and public policy at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, understood the national security implications when Elon Musk was supporting Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Like typical communists, the CCP lied, cheated, and stole from our people and their businesses. Just recently, they stole my medical records from the Frederick Health medical group. They also infiltrated our nuclear weapons labs so they can use our technology to build their own weapons pointed at us.

Yet, on the national business channels, we see a steady stream of stooges of the financial elite attacking President Trump for fighting back.

I long for the day when the great Lou Dobbs was on Fox Business and writing such books as The Trump Century (2020), a defense of his pro-American economic policies. He passed away last year and is not here to see President Trump, in his second term, taking on the CCP.

I am old enough to remember when CNN was a respectable network and had Lou Dobbs as an anchor, where he tackled such issues as a proposed globalist “North American Union,” integrating Mexico and Canada with the United States, with me as a guest. Lou sounded the alarm about bad trade deals such as NAFTA and the prospect of regional and world government. He was a breath of fresh air in a corrupt corporate media culture.

This is a war for our national survival, and Navarro is on the right side of history. Having been proven right and going to prison because of his loyalty to Trump, Navarro has Trump’s ear on trade, resulting in the 104 percent tariffs on the communist giant now going into effect. Trump is making good on his promise to make China pay for stealing our jobs and technology and inflicting the deadly China virus on America and the world.

Musk should stick to DOGE. He has no expertise on the China threat.

Most of the talking heads on the business channels and financial shows never describe China as “communist” in any way and act horrified that America has a president who wants to save America from the CCP. On CNBC, for example, host Scott Wapner calls the tariffs a “self-inflicted crisis” by President Trump, ignoring how so-called “free trade” has been a communist Chinese weapon for decades.

Wapner and his associates seem not to understand that when they advocate “global free trade,” they are taking the side of Karl Marx, the father of communism and a global free trader. This is an untold story.

So-called “free trade” is supposed to be “free,” and freedom is associated with capitalism. What many do not realize is that Marx believed that total communist control at the global level was supposed to be achieved through stages of economic development, with global capitalism and global free trade being necessary for socialism and then communism to emerge as triumphant.

The role of the Marxists is to accelerate this process of development, through the exploitation of class and now sexual and other differences. Such a role helps explain the conflict and turmoil we see across the globe, including in the U.S.

If you are perplexed by big corporations making deals with China, it makes sense to Marxists. These are prime examples of what the Marxists call the highest stage of capitalism. It means old-fashioned capitalism is finished and is being replaced by monopoly capitalism and the power of what is called “finance capital,” the hedge funds and big banks, and the top 10 percent of Americans who own 88 percent of the stock market.

When the global capitalists looked at China, they didn’t see an adversary; they saw a market and cheap labor.

In effect, major engines of corporate capitalism have become prime movers of the historical process of moving a country from capitalism into socialism.

Marx declared his support for free trade while giving a lecture on England’s corn laws, a set of tariffs and restrictions on the import and export of grain in Great Britain. Marx explained that “The system of free trade is destructive. It dissolves the old nationality and drives towards extreme antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In a word, the system of free trade hastens social revolution.” He called free trade a “revolutionary” force in human history.

In 2022, Trump recognized that communism didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and said in a speech, “…we will fight the onslaught of radicalism, socialism, and indeed it all leads to communism once and for all.” That is the plan.

As I note in The Sword of Revolution and The Communist Apocalypse, the Marxists see the U.S. as a society based on slavery, which has since become the leading capitalist nation and must therefore be “transformed” into socialism on the road to communism. Looking at this through Marxist eyes, the U.S. developed beyond an economic system based on slavery to be in the current stage between capitalism and socialism, which is called the highest stage of capitalism.

What has changed over time, as the World Revolution continues gobbling up country after country, is that China has become the leader of the world communist movement, replacing the Soviet Union/Russia. Eventually, according to the Marxist theory of history, America will become a communist state and then be integrated into the China-dominated New World Order.

Trump and his top aide, Peter Navarro, are standing in the way of this development. They deserve our thanks and praise.