It isn't the central tenet of Marism, but Marx did say this, which is enough for us to think about it. wWe hear that freedom of trade is essential to ensuring that goods and services can be distributed to those who need them. But we have seen throughout antiquity that free-trade can be utilized as economic warfare at the detriment of another country, such as with France and Britain. In the 18th century, Adam Smith warned against the "interested sophistry" of industry, seeking to gain an advantage at the cost of the consumers. Friedrich List saw Adam Smith's views on free trade as disingenuous, believing that Smith advocated for freer trade so that British industry could lock out underdeveloped foreign competition. It is interesting that private money lenders and private bankers who seeked to buy kings and countries though easy money printing at a time of rearmament or war were all advocates of free trade, whislt those, like Napolean who wished to ban usury and private money lenders from banking, thusly making himself the banker and those he appointed in order to inhibit foreign interests were against free trade, and believed their country should be as self-sufficient as possible.

“The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.” — Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Marx is in favor, then, of free trade. He simply wants to abolish all private property, but again, the banker elites can use this system to theri advantage, who could target the lower and middle classes.

So, reading communist literature, and I noticed that none of the theorists (at least that I had read) ever talked about or even mentioned the idea of abolishing free trade, marx was an advocate. What they talked about was abolishing the institution of private property and redistributing wealth.

"Free trade" is generally the system of the dominant state in its greatest supremacy and concomitantly of the beginning of its downfall. In 19th century Britain, according to author David Astle this was the case, and it is happening now with the United States. There is no way that America now can engage in free trade and win, because we’re a high-cost economy and we’re not producing.

Author Michael Hudson states in an interview:

There’s no way in which a change in currency values is going to shift production to the United States when we don’t have any factories to produce manufactures. When you look at the structure of world trade, you realize it has nothing to do with tariffs at this point, and nothing to do with currency values. It’s to do with the fact that Wall Street and the corporate employers have jumped ship, they’ve moved abroad, and they’ve hollowed out the United States. And once it’s hollowed out, the only way you can rebuild it is to have public infrastructure, to have public subsidy just like China’s doing and other countries are doing, public health just like other countries are doing, to cut the costs to employers.

But now that America and especially Trump, but also the Democrats want to privatize everything from healthcare to infrastructure, we’re going to be priced out of world markets whether it’s free trade or not.

Finally, note that "free trade", in our current era of it, anyway, is the ideology of finance capital as it seeks to escape the laws and political institutions that allegedly govern it, neoliberalism is that system, whether labor laws or capital controls. The 19th century free-trade liberals and subsequent neoliberals are the traditional defenders of the status quo, denying that anything can be done to alter the course of events, including intervention by governments. Michael Hudson counters this by arguing that all markets are managed - that there has never been a time when government wasn't involved in formulating economic policy. Indeed, governments must intervene, says Hudson, if those individuals and those nations are to be protected from economic and financial practices that exploit the vulnerable and ignorant. His goal is for a more enlightened populace, academe, and legislature which will lead to an enlightened and rationally managed economy.

So, free trade and free markets go hand-in-hand. Industrialized countries, emgmeder the flow of capital and have an advantage in trade, and therefore surplus investment looks for foreign investment. Industrialized countries then, proselytizing free trade, also preach open markets. This means that foreign countries, especially undeveloped countries, should allow foreign investment. Such investment, it is argued, allows for the development of so-called third world countries which otherwise do not have the means to modernize. But foreign investment also means foreign ownership, and when enterprises are foreign owned, profits from these enterprises go abroad. The advantage industrialized countries have in trade is thus exacerbated by foreign ownership in the disadvantaged countries. And the propensity is, of course, for foreign investors to want to invest in raw materials production. What little advantage raw materials producing nations have is thus usurped. Capital continues to flow away from the disadvantaged nations to the advantaged. Backwards conditions persist in the non-industrialized nations.

Today's neoclassical (or theoclassical) economists have either been quite eager to forget the successes of the United States' early protectionism, or have never learned about it in the first place.

Hudson concludes his book with a summary which should be tattooed on the foreheads of all graduate students in economics: "All economies are planned, and all markets are structured. The key to understanding their dynamics is to ask who is doing the planning and structuring, and in whose interest countries will place decision-making. Will it be in the hands of elected officials with a clear empirical knowledge of reality to guide their national economic laws, or in those of academics serving special interests as they turn theories of international trade, lending and debt into a disinformation system?"

And then, what do we see with Russia after the alleged collapse of Sovietism? Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, up to 700 contract killings; Russian-Jewish "gangster capitalists" Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky buy up industry by the pennies in their "free market" (an economic fad) after scooping up trillions of dollars worth of natural resources for pennies on the dollar, destroying the economy of the country, reducing over a hundred million people to abject poverty, with a crash in the birth rate, mass homelessness, hundreds of thousands of suicides, murders, "disappearances" and premature deaths through malnutrition and alcohol poisoning. Much better.

Any ism, any economic system that seeks profit over merit, will surely degrade the countries people. Depriving them of their needs until they end up landless and homeless. International bankers who wish for this free trade, free market scam sugar coat it in the 'good for all' myth, which just isn't true.