Exhibition Review: Manchester and the world (2026)

Exhibition Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The John Rylands Library in Manchester was founded on the basis of profits made from the cotton industry. It is currently staging an exhibition, ‘Cottonopolis: the Origins of Global Manchester’, on until May. A number of books, letters and samples of cloth are displayed (one of the books being Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England).

The population of Manchester grew massively in the 19th century, to over ninety thousand, this increase being mainly in workers in the cotton industry. There were massive increases in production of calico and fustian, especially in the twenty years from 1790, and cotton cloth became Britain’s most valuable export. Inventions by Arkwright, Compton and others increased productivity enormously, and there was sizeable growth in companies that made machines, as well as in companies that output the cotton cloth. Steam power resulted in mechanical mills, and new ways of printing cloth were also developed. Mass production meant that the British weaving industry was able to out-compete manufacturers in India.

But, of course, weaving was only part of the story, as the raw cotton came from plantations worked on by slave labour, in the Caribbean and the American South. Some of the cloths manufactured were poor quality ‘Africa goods’, produced for sale to slave traders to clothe the slaves. One suggestion made in the displays is that the creation of a captive workforce in the colonies changed ideas about how workers in Britain could be exploited under the same industrial machine.

Nor was it just Manchester that profited from the enormous expansion of the cotton trade. Liverpool became an important port for imports and exports, and new canals were built, partly to transport food, coal and so on to the growing industrial hub in the city and its surroundings.

Not a large exhibition, but an informative and interesting set of displays.

Paul Bennett

There Are Words for It (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around five thousand languages are spoken at the moment, a number likely to be halved by the end of the twenty-first century. This is partly due to the impact of the world’s ‘major’ languages, such as Spanish, Russian and (above all, of course) English. As English becomes a truly global language, the main language of films, popular music and the internet, not only do its words find their way even into languages like German, but it completely displaces many local or minority languages. The decline in numbers is also caused by the growing role of ‘national languages’, those taught in schools and recognised as a country’s main language of communication. TupÆ, for instance, once widely spoken in Brazil, is now down to a few hundred speakers, pushed out by the expansion of Portuguese (though it will live on in words it has given to English, such as jaguar).

Endangered languages like this have existed throughout history, but are now far commoner than previously. The reasons for this are usually seen as straightforwardly political:

“large centralized political units (both the old-fashioned empire and the all-modern nation state) cause the total number of languages in their territory to decline. In so far as the world goes on being apportioned in such units, the total number of languages in the world will go on falling.” (Andrew Dalby: Language in Danger)

This statement is correct as far as it goes, but it plays down the economic factors behind language death. Languages decline and die when the communities of their speakers are disrupted (by conquest, exile, disease, and so on) or when children grow up speaking in daily life a language other than that of their parents. This can happen for various reasons, one being that the ‘new’ language is seen as a means of economic advancement, perhaps just because it has more speakers and can offer better employment prospects or a bigger market. Languages with a few thousand, or even a few million speakers, can hardly ‘compete’ with English, the language of international business.

Even the way a language is written can be affected by political and economic considerations. After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1991, the governments of the new countries of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan decided to switch from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet to write their respective national languages, which are all related to Turkish. This was partly due to anti-Russian nationalism — the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used to write Russian, having been imposed by Stalin in the 1940s. But it is also clearly motivated by a desire to attract tourists and business visitors and to make it easier for people there to learn English. Returning to the Arabic alphabet (which was used in these countries before the Cyrillic) would have been possible, but would not have served the new rulers’ westernising aims.

Besides undermining the status of languages, economic factors can lead to the creation of new languages. In The Power of Babel, John McWhorter traces the origins of Russenorsk, a kind of mixture of Russian and Norwegian, which came into being in the nineteenth century when Russian traders brought timber to Norway every summer to sell. Russenorsk was a very basic kind of language, useful for bartering and various other kinds of social interaction, but not usable for political debate or discussion of any abstract ideas. Languages like this are termed pidgins, and they usually arise when two groups of speakers come together in specific circumstances. Many Native Americans at first spoke Pidgin English when speaking to white people, while maintaining their own languages too. Unlike Russenorsk, which was a genuine mixture, this Pidgin English consisted almost entirely of words from the language of the dominant group — English — since English-speakers rarely had any desire or motivation to learn a local language. This is the usual situation: the language of the conquerors or colonists provides the vocabulary of the pidgin, which the conquered people have to use to talk with their new masters.

Pidgins often die out after a while: the subordinate group may well adopt the language of their conquerors, as happened in North America. Russenorsk ceased to be needed when the Russian Revolution put an end to the timber-trading. But sometimes a pidgin is expanded to become a full-fledged language, not one just used for a few special purposes, but one with its own individual structure and a vocabulary as large as that of any ‘normal’ language. A pidgin which has become a full language like this is called a creole; formation of a creole usually happens when people speaking different native languages and only sharing a pidgin are brought together. McWhorter mentions the case of Sranan, a creole spoken in Surinam, on the northern coast of South America. This was a British-owned slave colony, and slaves from various parts of Africa who were brought there had only Pidgin English in common at first. This eventually expanded to become Sranan, which is widely spoken in Surinam nowadays, alongside Dutch.

In fact the slave trade is the commonest causal factor in the origins of creoles. This appallingly cruel and immensely profitable system of trading in human beings resulted, among other things, in millions of people being uprooted from their homes and families, transported across the world, and set to work in desperate and scarcely-believable conditions. It should come as little surprise to learn that many languages of the West Indies are creoles (Jamaican creole, for instance), as is Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea. As creolised forms of pidgin Englishes, these still have vocabularies that are partly derived from English, but they are absolutely not debased forms of English. The languages of other colonising nations have also given rise to creoles, such as a Portuguese-based creole in the Cape Verde Islands in the North Atlantic, and the French-based creole spoken in Haiti. As McWhorter says, “most creoles have arisen amid conditions of unthinkably stark and ineradicable social injustice.”

One, rather controversial, claim is that the development of agriculture about ten thousand years ago led to the wiping out of many languages, as cultivators expanded their territories and settled down, thus overrunning existing groups of hunter-gatherers, who may well each have spoken their own language. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that capitalism, with its globalisation and its tendency to make everything homogeneous, is now killing off languages like nobody’s business. An examination of the current state and historical development of the world’s languages shows how capitalism leaves its ugly footprints everywhere, even in the way we speak.

Paul Bennett

Material World: Insurance: a branch of the betting industry (2023)

The Material World Column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may seem oddly Monty Python-esque, but insurance agents have become significant players in the Russo/Ukrainian war. In August it was reported that: ‘Insurance companies have notified charterers of ships operating in Russia’s Black Sea ports of an increase in additional payments known as “war risk premiums”’ (tinyurl.com/4p5rwap9). According to the same report, this could take the cost of an insurance premium for one oil tanker to over $1 million. At the same time, Ukraine was negotiating with insurers to cover its grain shipments through the Black Sea: ‘Insurers and a local state-owned bank would share the risk, the Financial Times reported, with the public portion of the risk backed by Ukraine’s state road fund’ (tinyurl.com/muy64jp8).

Insurance is essential for doing business, especially in a war zone, as the capitalists seek to share the risk of doing business there (and other capitalists try to profit from that risk, taking a share of the surplus value generated through the business in exchange for covering it). In fact, the insurance industry is a branch of the gambling industry. You go up to the insurance broker, and say you want to place a bet that your house will burn down this week, and they bet it won’t.

Of course, they’re not insane, so part of the terms of the bet includes the precise circumstances in which they will pay out, and the steps they expect you to take to avoid a fire starting. Unlike a bet on the horses, though, there is a focus on trying to ensure that the bet would cover the entire cost of replacing the house: that is, the focus is on the property as a value expressed in money.

All societies need a surplus in case of emergency or accident, but capitalism is unique in using a universal equivalent in the form of money. Unlike, say, a granary full of grain, an insurance fund can be infinitely subdivided, so the risk of accident can be spread very far, with insurance firms able to sell slivers of their bets to multiple cash holders, so that no one individual or firm is entirely exposed to all of the risk. They make their profits as a cut of surplus value, matching the perceived risk of having to pay out to how much they can demand as a premium (stake) from the person they are insuring. Their business model is for their customers to compare the cost of borrowing to recover losses, or having enough savings on hand to pay for the losses themselves, with the cost of paying for a premium.

As such, insurance functions as an expression of collective capital. The decisions about whether activities can or cannot be insured (and the terms on which they can be insured), structures economic activity in very great detail. It limits the rights of individual property holders to behave entirely as they wish with their wealth. Firms wishing to offer contracts for goods and services routinely ask for insurance cover as part of their terms and conditions, so it becomes very difficult for any substantial capital to operate in business without accepting the terms on which insurance may be purchased.

This is worth bearing in mind for the fantasies of so-called anarcho-capitalists, for whom insurance and charity could free everyone from ‘the state’: they’d soon find themselves confronting the same costs and regulations as the state imposes because they are a part of industrial society and capitalism itself, not mere creations of the state.

An example of this is the key role insurance played in enabling the slave trade. Investors required insurance before they would undertake the highly profitable, but risky, business of capturing and enslaving human beings. They could even get insurance against slave revolt (the analogy was that revolts – and their suppression – was like when animals aboard ship stampede in a storm). One of the most notorious incidents of the slave trade, The Zong Massacre, in which the captain of the slave ship Zong tried to enact an insurance fiddle by murdering his human cargo (on which, running low on water, he was facing a loss) in order to claim that insurance value. The insurers objected, and this led to a series of court cases: which affirmed that it was legal to murder enslaved human cargo, but in this particular instance, the captain of the Zong was at fault for navigational errors.

This is, it’s worth mentioning in passing, a useful example of the notion of base and superstructure which Marx and Engels introduced in their book The German Ideology. The insurance industry is part of the superstructure built on the base of material practices of capitalism, but it remains essential and instrumental in enabling those activities to continue. That insurers would provide the means to enable a despicable trade is no surprise, because they were in the business of taking bets to try and make a profit for their investors, but at the same time, their activity influenced the shape of how that horrific trade was carried out.

The influence of insurers will come to be seen in the coming years in discussions about global warming and the climate emergency. The devastating wildfires on Maui have caused an astronomical cost, as the New York Times reports (tinyurl.com/4p22tsz3), as much as $4-$6 billion in potential claims for destroyed residences. So much that ‘private insurers, already grappling with the costs of climate-related disasters in California and Florida, are also reassessing a home insurance market they had long considered both predictable and profitable, and whether they should charge residents of Hawaii higher rates.’

Aside from raising premiums (or just leaving the market altogether), insurance firms will begin to press politicians to take steps to limit their risks, and just as they demand terms from those they insure to protect their bets, so too will they demand the state step in collectively to protect their interests. This may well manifest as a dispute between insurers (as representatives of finance capital generally) against industrial capitalists who will bridle at their restrictions.

Pik Smeet

Resistance to Empire (2023)

Book Review from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Great Defiance: How the World took on the British Empire. By David Veevers. Penguin, 2023.

This is an account of the rise of the early British Empire that counters the ‘War of the Worlds’ style idea that Britain spread out to conquer the world based on some sort of natural or technical (or even providential) superiority. It puts centre stage the resistance to the rise of the empire, and shows how the British were often thwarted, or their victories curtailed.

For instance, the book begins with Ireland, making the point that the conquest took over a hundred years, and nearly ended up bankrupting the English state. Mostly, the English had to rely on a network of local lords who would ally with the Irish cause as much as support the crown, as their interests depended. The Tudor state thus adopted "an innovative strategy of colonial expansion. Withdrawing the crown’s claims to territories beyond the Pale, Elizabeth stepped aside and opened up the colonisation of Ireland to private enterprise." Backed up by the violence of the British state, using such weapons as induced famine and atrocious slaughter, rebellious Ireland was brought to heel.

This became the operating method of the expanding English colonialism, and indeed, the colonisation of the new world was linked by some of the people who colonised Ireland: the name Walter Raleigh keeps recurring through this book. Veevers deploys the indigenous people’s names for themselves, thus what is now Carolina in the United States was Ossomocomuck and the people were the Algonquian. Likewise, in the Antilles, the people were the Kalinago, and what is now called St Vincent was Hairoun.

In part, the expansion into the Americas was made possible by the conquest of Ireland, providing a substantial market for imported sugar and other goods, and also providing people to export to work in the colonies, in the form of indentured labour (which, as the author emphasises, and contrary to some claims today, is not comparable with the slavery that followed. Indeed, the book deals with the slave trade extensively, and notes how the Dahomey kings tried to take control of the trade in enslaved people from the Bight of Benin. Many Africans were not passive victims but agents, warts and all. And, again, it shows how the pieces of the jigsaw came together, and the tobacco and sugar trades drove the demand and thus the qualitative change in the slave trade to the new world.

The book also covers what happened when the English arrived as supplicants, such as in India or Japan, and found themselves confronted by powerful empires in their own right. The English were able to offer revenue to the emperors in the form of trade as well as military support (especially seaborne). Much of the history of the English presence was shaped by trying to escape taxes.

It’s not easy to come across accounts of how the English (later the British) came to dominate in India. My memory of schoolbooks is there was a blackhole in Calcutta and then Clive won the battle of Plassey (actually, he didn’t, but that’s a longer story). Veevers explains the interactions between the English merchants, the settled Portuguese community and the Mogul nawabs and princes. This book is worth reading for this account alone.

The book ends with the point that the history of the British Empire is as much an act of forgetting and airbrushing the subjectivity and substance of the wide variety of the world’s people. As he points out, in a very real sense, the British unmade the world.

Pik Smeet

The Plundering of Haiti (1945)

From the October 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Haiti was, on the eve of the French Revolution, the richest of all European colonies, for it accounted for no less than two-thirds of the overseas trade of France. Its wealth, drawn from its plantations of sugar, cotton and coffee, was derived from the merciless exploitation of half a million slaves. This island has always reeked of cruelty. The Spaniards exterminated a million natives before they had recourse to the African slave trade. The French were able organisers, but they, too, relied on the lash and reckoned that it paid them to work a negro to death in seven years." 

—H. N. Brailsford, Observer, June 17th, 1945.

Latin America: poverty and pollution (1993)

From the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Latin America has provided many of the striking images of ecological devastation which have fuelled debate on the environment in recent years. Few have been left unmoved by the relentless deforestation of the Amazon Basin or the mercury-polluted moonscapes left by gold prospectors still searching for the mythical Eldorado.

Reactions to the crisis vary. Some view the problems as intractable; the result of overpopulation and a flawed human nature. They retreat into defeatism—mouthing prophesies of the eco-Apocalypse as they go. Others retain their faith in the tired arguments of the reformists; there’s no environmental problem that couldn't be solved with a few more laws, a change of leader, some nature reserves and a little more charity. Socialists, however, reject both reformism and defeatism, recognizing that the roots of environmental destruction lie in the capitalist system and its uncontrollable production for profit, a system incapable of incorporating the rational and democratic decision-making process which will be necessary to ensure an ecologically- sustainable future.

How then has capitalism developed in Latin America, and what have been the consequences for the environment?

Precious metals

Following colonization by European powers in the 15th and 16th centuries Central and South America and the Caribbean were forcibly subjected to the priorities and demands of the fledgling capitalist world market. The new social system imposed on the Americas gradually swept away the technologies, agricultural techniques and cultures of centuries and replaced them with an economic system geared solely to capital accumulation for the few based on the exploitation of the many.

Greed for precious metals led the colonists all over Central and South America. The resultant human misery and environmental degradation was catastrophic. Open-cast mining left wastelands from Mexico to Bolivia, and the timber extracted for mineshafts accelerated deforestation. As the richest seams were exhausted the colonists used mercury from the Peruvian Andes to separate metals from the crushed ore of poorer seams. The waste was just dumped, and poisoned workers and polluted ecosystems bore witness to the new exploitative social system which saw no need to worry about environmental conditions.

The introduction of sugar-cane plantations early in the 16th century, first in the Caribbean and later on the mainland provided the basis for the exploitation of further wealth. However, owing to the genocidal effect of colonization on the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas the ruling class needed a further source of labour.

The African slave trade developed and millions were transported to work on the plantations. The triangular trade routes which flourished between Europe, Africa and the Americas not only strengthened the emerging capitalist class, and left a bitter legacy of racism but led to wholesale deforestation and soil erosion in the plantation areas. The irrigation systems of the plantations also facilitated the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria.

Cash crops

The political map of the continent was reshaped by the nationalist independence movements of the 19th century as local élites freed themselves from the remaining shackles imposed on them from Europe. However, the workers and peasants remained shackled with a class society organized around their exploitation. Environmental problems escalated as new cash-crops such as coffee, bananas and cotton were introduced. By the late 19th century much of the fertile arable land had been taken over by commercial plantations. Cattle ranching and deforestation developed apace.

Those displaced by the plantations and huge estates were forced to find new land on which to grow food. They found it on steep hillsides where rain washed away the topsoil, leading to serious erosion. New land was also found as more and more forest was cleared. The monocultures, deforestation and soil erosion affected the hydrology of many parts of Latin America. Topsoil washed into lakes and rivers causing silting problems and ultimately affecting delicately balanced marine ecosystems. For example, the coastal mangrove swamps of El Salvador were reduced from 300,000 to 6,800 acres and local fish populations dwindled.

As ecologically unsustainable monocultures bled the soil dry and were plagued by pests the owners turned to fertilizers and pesticides to bolster production. Again, it was the workers and the environment who suffered the consequences. Harmful pesticides were, and still are, used with abandon. In many parts of Central America cotton workers are sprayed along with the crop, while their children bathe in and drink polluted water. Mother's milk in parts of Nicaragua reportedly carrries the world’s highest levels of DDT. On the extensive banana plantations on the Atlantic coast of Central America thousands of workers have been sterilized by pesticide poisoning.

Debt crisis

The large-scale borrowing from Western banks made by Latin American governments and private companies during the 1970s and the ensuing debt-crisis have had profound effects on worker and environment alike. With the falling prices of cash-crop and raw material exports such as coffee, bananas, tin etc and the rising prices of essential imports, e.g. machinery and oil. Latin American economies faced serious balance of payments crises. Following the advice of those in power in Western countries many Latin American governments sought to boost their own industrial base in a vain attempt to compete on more equal terms with the more highly developed capitalist economies. Huge amounts were also borrowed to fund the military forces necessary to maintain the status-quo within their borders.

The Western banks were only too keen to lend the “petro-dollars” deposited with them by the oil-producing countries as a result of the OPEC price rises in the early 1970s. The industrial developments financed by the borrowing were often totally inappropriate to local conditions, and incredibly environmentally destructive. For example, huge hydro-electric power schemes in Amazonia necessitated the damming of many rivers flooding vast forested areas occupied by indigenous groups and poor farmers. The dams affected the regional hydrology causing silting problems and the proliferation of floating weeds. Malarial parasites also spread in the artificial lakes.

The Latin American economies borrowed at floating interest rates, so that as interest rates rose in the early 1980s a debt crisis developed when they were unable to keep up with the interest payments. They were also hit by contemporaneous further falls in the prices of their essential exports, and a world slump. Fearing the consequences of large-scale defaulting to the international banking system, the World Bank and the IMF negotiated Structural Adjustment Programmes for those Latin American countries troubled by debt. All the Structural Adjustment Programmes included the slashing of public expenditure, and the boosting of cash-crop exports in order to provide governments with extra revenue for debt repayments.

The benefits to the capitalist class of the IMF and World Bank plans are clear: the stabilization of their economic system. The victims, as ever, are the propertyless majority. The slashing of public expenditure has led to redundancies, wage-cuts, less social services, and less environmental protection. Boosting cash-crop production has led to further deforestation, soil erosion and the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides.

As the region has been progressively immiserated by debt, unemployment and worsening environmental conditions thousands more have flocked to the urban squalour of Latin America’s shanty-towns. The poor sanitation, over-crowding, pollution and disease suffered there is a direct result of a social system which organizes all production around the prospects of profitability for the owning few.

What is the way out of this intolerable state of affairs? As ever reformists offer national solutions, piecemeal reforms and schemes to preserve nature in isolation from humans. What they fail to recognize is that the environmental problems faced are not new or isolated phenomena but intricately linked with the rise to dominance of world capitalism over the last 500 years. It is the uncontrollable nature and ecological unaccountability of capitalist production which must be abolished to rid Latin America and the world of environmental destruction and of working-class poverty. Socialists work to replace a divided world governed by capital with a stateless, moneyless commonwealth under the democratic control of a socialist majority.

Peter Owen

Editorial: Slavery and slavery (2007)

Editorial from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month low-key ceremonies are taking place to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. Slavery continued, with imported slaves replaced by plantation-bred ones, and was not abolished till 1833. It continued for a further 30 or so years in the Southern States of the USA.

By slavery in this context is meant “chattel slavery”, where humans were owned as the legal property of other humans just like any other movable property. It had been widespread in Ancient Greece and Rome where some slaves were used as domestics but the great bulk were put to work in agriculture and mining. As they were themselves the property of their masters so was the product of their labour. In other words, they were exploited by having what they produced taken from them. This was again the situation on the sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations of North and South America and the West Indies from the 16th to the 19th century.

Early capitalism benefited from the slave trade not only because it stimulated world trade generally but also because it contributed to the primitive accumulation of capital that was later invested in industrial production. But chattel slavery was not a suitable form of labour exploitation for capitalism. Which was why, in the end, it was abolished.

Capitalist factory-owners needed a flexible labour force and a reserve of workers they could draw on in times of expansion and who could be discarded in times of slump. They did not want to own their workers, precisely because they wanted, when business took a downturn, to be free of any obligation to maintain them as they would have had to with chattel slaves. They favoured “free” labour. They were only interested in buying their workers’ ability to work for a limited period.

“Free” labour meant more than that the worker was just not a chattel slave. It meant that he or she was also not tied to the land either as a peasant or a serf. It means that the only productive resource they own is their ability to work, their labour-power, which they are “free” to sell to some capitalist employer or other.

But capitalists are not philanthropists. They only buy labour-power if they think they can make a profit from using it. Karl Marx was the first to point out that while the capitalist paid the worker the full value of what the worker sold – that the wage  bargain was a commercial contract in which like any other equal value was exchanged for equal value – the wage worker was nevertheless exploited just as much as the chattel slave was.

The explanation lay in the fact that there is a difference between the value of what the workers sold – their labour-power – and the higher value of what they produced. Having purchased the worker’s labour-power the capitalist employer was just as legally entitled to the product of the exercise of that labour power as the slave-owner had been to the product of his chattel slaves.

The early working class in the first decades of the 19th century didn’t need Marx to tell them what this meant. They realised that they too were slaves robbed of the product of their labour. It it was they who coined the term “wage-slavery”, not to describe the fact that they were paid low wages but that they had to work for wages at all. It was they, too, who raised the slogan “Abolition of the Wages System”.

Chattel slavery was abolished in the British Empire over 170 years ago, but slavery still continued – and continues – in the form of wage slavery. Socialists are modern-day Abolitionists. We want the wage-workers of the world to act to abolish their slavery. To organise to make the means of wealth production – the land, farms, farms, warehouses, means of transport and communication, etc – the common property of the whole of society, so that one group of humans will no longer be dependent on another to live and no group will be able to appropriate the labour of another. A world without slavery in any form.

Marx on Free Trade. (1926)

From the April 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from a previous issue)

But what of that? The class will still exist; nay, more, it will have increased.

But this is not all. The progress of industry creates less and less expensive means of subsistence. Thus spirits have taken the place of beer, cotton that of wool and linen, and potatoes that of bread.

Thus, as means are constantly being found for the maintenance of labour on cheaper and more wretched food, the minimum of wages is constantly sinking. If these wages began by letting the man work to live, they end by forcing him to live the life of a machine. His existence has no other value than that of a simple productive force, and the capitalist treats him accordingly. This law of the commodity labour, of the minimum of wages will be confirmed in proportion as the supposition of the economists, Free Trade, becomes an actual fact. Thus, of two things one: either we must reject all political economy based upon the assumption of Free Trade, or we must admit that under this same Free Trade the whole severity of the economic laws will fall upon the workers.

To sum up, what is Free Trade under the present conditions of society? Freedom of capital. When you have torn down the few national barriers which still restrict the free development of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let the relation of wages-labour to capital exist, no matter how favourable the conditions under which you accomplish the exchange of commodities, there will always be a class which exploits and a class which is exploited. It is really difficult to understand the presumption of the Free Traders who imagine that the more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage-workers. On the contrary. The only result will be that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out more clearly.

Let us assume for a moment that there are no more Corn Laws or national and municipal import duties; that in a word all the accidental circumstances which to-day the working-man may look upon as a cause of his miserable condition have vanished, and we shall have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes his real enemy.

He will see that capital released from all trammels will make him no less a slave than capital trammelled by import duties.

Gentlemen! Do not be deluded by the abstract word Liberty! Whose Liberty? Not the liberty of one individual in relation to another, but liberty of capital to crush the worker.

Why should you desire farther to sanction unlimited competition with this idea of freedom, when the idea of freedom itself is only the product of a social condition based upon Free Competition?

We have shown what sort of fraternity Free Trade begets between the different classes of one and the same nation. The fraternity which Free Trade would establish between the nations of the earth would not be more real, to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie. Every one of the destructive phenomena to which unlimited competition gives rise within any one nation is reproduced in more gigantic proportions in the market of the world. We need not pause any longer upon Free Trade sophisms on this subject, which are worth just as much as the arguments of our prize essayists Messrs Hope, Morse, and Greg.

For instance, we are told that Free Trade would create an international division of labour, and thereby give to each country those branches of production most in harmony with its natural advantages.

You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies.

Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble itself about commerce, had planted neither sugar-cane nor coffee trees there. And it may be that in less than half a century you will find there neither coffee nor sugar, for the East Indies, by means of cheaper production, have already successfully broken down this so-called natural destiny of the West Indies.

And the West Indies, with their natural wealth, are as heavy a burden for England as the weavers of Dacca, who also were destined from the beginning of time to weave by hand.

One other circumstance must not be forgotten, namely that, just as everything has become a monopoly, there are also nowadays some branches of industry which prevail over all others, and secure to the nations which especially foster them the command of the market of the world. Thus in the commerce of the world cotton alone has much greater commercial importance than all the other raw materials used in the manufacture of clothing. It is truly ridiculous for the Free Traders to refer to the few specialties in each branch of industry, throwing them into the balance against the product used in everyday consumption, and produced most cheaply in those countries in which manufacture is most highly developed.

If the Free Traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how in the same country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.

Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticising freedom of commerce we have the least intention of defending Protection.

One may be opposed to constitutionalism without being in favour of absolutism.

Moreover, the Protective system is nothing but a means of establishing manufacture upon a large scale in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the market of the world; and from the moment that dependence upon the market of the world is established, there is more or less dependence upon Free Trade too. Besides this, the Protective system helps to develop free competition within a nation. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute monarchy, as a means for the concentration of its own powers for the realization of Free Trade within the country.

But, generally speaking, the Free Trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and carries antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a word, the system of commercial freedom hastens the Social Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favour of Free Trade.

(conclusion)

Colston verdict – the big picture (2022)

From the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory MPs were spitting feathers last month after four Black Lives Matters activists were acquitted of criminal damage by a jury at Bristol Crown Court after pulling down the statue of a 17th century slave trader and chucking it in the harbour during the BLM protests in 2020.

The verdict will have come as a surprise to some who expected an open and shut case, as the defendants were filmed on CCTV and so were scarcely in a position to deny the deed. Their somewhat tenuous defence was that the presence of the statue was in itself a ‘hate crime’ and that therefore its removal was in line with current legislation. Even more dubiously, they argued that as the statue was public property, and they were members of the public, they had a right to dispose of their own property as they saw fit. It’s hard to imagine any jury being persuaded by either of these arguments, but they were probably more exercised by the prospect of appearing to endorse slavery if they went the other way, so delivered an acquittal verdict anyway.

Unsurprisingly the prosecution case was that it didn’t matter who Colston was, that the law was clear: people couldn’t run around wrecking monuments they didn’t like. This was also the line taken by government ministers and Tory backbenchers, who are always the first to leap nobly to the defence of a set of laws which protect their wealth and privilege.

Transport minister Grant Shapps spoke for many of them, saying ‘we live in a democratic country. If you want to see things changed you can get them changed, you do that through the ballot box, or petitioning your local council, etc. You don’t do it by going out and causing criminal damage’.

The problem with this is that there had already been legal campaigns, for no less than 100 years, to remove this statue, but from 1920 onwards these had resulted in no action because no government had ever bothered to establish a framework for the democratic removal of a public monument, on whatever grounds.

Tory yahoos immediately fulminated that ‘the result of this ruling will be that mobs will seek to tear down statues across the country – it gives a green light for mobs’, and that ‘as a country we need to protect our heritage from mob rule’. Note how quickly ‘the people’ becomes ‘the mob’ in government parlance when they do anything the establishment doesn’t like. It’s democracy when it pleases our masters, it’s ochlocracy when it doesn’t.

Respect for venerable monuments did not stop Shapps from muttering darkly about changing the rules of jury trials to prevent juries delivering verdicts that upset the government. Possibly sensing that red-eyed zombie rage was taking over the Tory camp, arch-Tory Jacob Rees Mogg felt obliged to state that, when it came to great monuments, the British jury system was up there with the best of them, and loose talk about pulling it down just because of one trivial verdict was not hugely constructive. Boris Johnson meanwhile, showing as ever his forensic grasp of historical matters, opined that it was wrong for people ‘to go round seeking retrospectively to change our history’.

The big picture

This echoes the recent furore engulfing the National Trust, whose current policy of daring to mention slavery in connection with the history of landed estates and country piles has provoked allegations of ‘wokeism’ and even death threats against its senior figures. But it seems clear to anyone who has ever visited these estates that slavery has been largely airbrushed out of the pretty picture to spare the blushes of the current owners. All that NT bosses have tried to do is restore the real truth about where the money came from that paid for these country piles in the first place. The argument that this is somehow ‘historical revisionism’ is as transparent as it is hypocritical. Many of Britain’s rich got to be rich through slavery, and consequently many of the monuments, palaces and public buildings of Britain’s cities, and of the former slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool, deserve to be understood in this context. This being so, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that statues of slave owners are a continuing and blatant affront to human decency which should have been removed decades ago. If the state wasn’t going to do it, then individuals would have to instead, and as it turned out, the Bristol jury had no problem with that.

The even bigger picture

But this is not what’s really bothering the frothing Tory MPs. They couldn’t care less about history, gesture politics, or statues. What worries them is that a jury can take such a cavalier attitude to the destruction of property, because property is what makes the rich rich. If the mobile vulgus can take down a statue today, what’s to stop them taking down Buckingham Palace tomorrow? Or taking over the lands of the Duke of Westminster, or any private mansion? Property is a concept that underpins capitalism, and it has acquired a fetishised totemic power in the minds of workers. It demands to be respected, worshiped even, as a sacrosanct and inviolable thing. But like all fetishes, its power is only apparent, not real. Once people stop believing in it, it ceases to exist. It is like a vast bubble of magical nothingness which holds society in its thrall. And, shock horror, the Bristol jury went and stuck a pin in it.

Not that capitalism will implode just because of that. But the rich are terrified of workers losing their awe of private property. Once they do that, they might start asking themselves why there are rich people at all, and why they, the workers, are obliged to be poor and waste their lives as wage slaves in order for those rich people to enjoy luxury and idleness. As socialists often say, the rich are much more class-conscious than workers, at least for now. They know that they owe their wealth to the despoliation of the planet and the utter subjection and exploitation of the overwhelming majority of the population. They also realise that workers, organised collectively, have a real and irresistible power that could sweep them away utterly, while their own power as a tiny minority resides in nothing but fetishised symbols, rituals and customs. In short, they know how weak they really are.

Society now accepts that slavery is an indefensible crime against humanity. The Bristol verdict suggests that workers now take a dim view of public monuments glorifying it, regardless of who the monuments belong to or what laws are in place to preserve them. But many of the arguments against slavery also apply to the practice of wage slavery, which is part of the machinery of capitalism and which condemns billions to relentless misery. We look forward to the moment when workers stop respecting its monuments and institutions too, and start pulling down more than a few statues.

Paddy Shannon

The making of global poverty (2005)

From the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why is the Third World always third? Why are ‘developing countries’ still not developed, when the West is doing so well? Why are so many of them poor, and have they always been that way? Is it just their fault? A look at history reveals a different story, and one which explains the real origins of western prosperity.

It is sometimes called the Third World, though now expressions such as ‘the South’ or ‘the Majority World’ are felt to be more acceptable. Equally, ‘developing countries’ is seen as more accurate than ‘underdeveloped’. Yet whatever label is used, it cannot be denied that much of the Earth’s population endure lives of poverty and squalor, of undernourishment that often crosses into famine, of insecurity and lack of opportunity. Their lives are often brutally short, with life expectancy far below that in wealthier countries (just 37 years in Sierra Leone, for instance, against a global average of 67 years). Each year around 14 million children die in the Third World, mostly from entirely preventable diseases. But such conditions have not always existed, nor has there always been such a chasm between rich and poor parts of the world. For capitalism created, or at least exacerbated, these inequalities, by the way in which it exploited pre-capitalist societies as it was expanding across the globe in search of markets, raw materials and labour.

The slave trade, for instance, was perhaps the worst example — it can only euphemistically be called a ‘trade’. Labour supplies were needed in the new colonies, especially in the Caribbean, but the native inhabitants were not strong or healthy enough to provide this. The solution was to ship labour power from Africa, not as ‘voluntary’ immigrants but as slaves, captured in battle or purchased from local rulers, transported in appalling conditions and forced to work on plantations. British capitalism in particular benefited from the slave trade: its products and profits helped towns like Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol to develop industries such as shipbuilding, cotton processing and sugar refining, for colonies were forced to send their produce to England and forbidden to manufacture anything locally. Banks such as Barclays and Barings were set up with profits from slavery. ‘The West Indian islands’, says Eric Williams, writing of the late eighteenth century in Capitalism and Slavery, ‘became the hub of the British Empire, of immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of England.’ And at the same time Africa was impoverished, as it was usually the youngest and fittest who were abducted, thus depopulating the land and leaving the old or infirm, who could not cultivate the farms adequately. Africa’s population scarcely grew between 1650 and 1900, while Europe’s increased fourfold.

In addition, the Third World was a source of raw materials which fed the ever-growing demands of European capitalism. Africa, for instance, supplied groundnuts, cotton and rubber (nowadays it’s diamonds, timber, oil and rare metals). Profits from all this were repatriated, leading to further development in Europe rather than in Africa. Cotton goods and soft furnishings manufactured in India were enormously popular in seventeenth-century Europe. But the cloth industries in India, Africa and elsewhere were deliberately destroyed, primarily by British capitalism, both to do away with potential rivals and to open up new markets. In one area of the Philippines, for instance, the British vice-consul deliberately forced the replacement of locally-produced textiles with machine-made British ones, and encouraged production of sugar for export. All in all, Third World industry was undermined or at least kept on a low level while western capitalism forged ahead, partly on the basis of its colonial profits. In 1830, China was responsible for 30 percent of world manufacturing output, and India for 17 percent; by 1900, these shares were down to 6 percent and under 2 percent, respectively, while over the same period Europe’s share rose from 34 percent to 63 percent.

The end of the nineteenth century saw widespread droughts and famines, the Late Victorian Holocausts of Mike Davis’ book. Though figures can only be estimates, perhaps fifty million died in China, India and Brazil alone, as food was exported to the West, and local agriculture was disrupted by a mixture of ignorance and intent. In North Africa in the 1870s, peasants were forced to sell their livestock cheap to French dealers in order to stave off starvation in the short term. In other cases new taxes that had to be paid in money were introduced, forcing peasants to become wage-labourers. While the British rulers of India were lavishly celebrating Victoria’s sixty years as queen in 1897, wheat was being exported to Britain or left to rot in railway sidings, and poorhouses were being set up to further punish the destitute. (The Socialist Party’s predecessor organisation, the Social Democratic Federation, was the only grouping that consistently protested against the suffering being inflicted on India’s peasants.)

One of the most notorious events of the Western creation of the Third World was the Scramble for Africa (which can be roughly dated 1876-1912). This took place partly for strategic reasons: Britain needed to control both the Cape of Good Hope and the Suez Canal in order to ensure access to its Indian Empire. In addition, tropical produce was being exported to Europe, and there were many raw materials available cheaply — Germany needed access to cotton, oil, cocoa and rubber, for instance. Revenue could be boosted by taking over the tax and rental income of local ‘chiefs’, and forced labour could only increase profits. King Leopold of Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo, supposedly carried out to do away with the remnants of slavery, was the most extreme example. Edmund Morel, the journalist who exposed the extent of Leopold’s scheming, described what was happening as ‘a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman’. African rulers often gave their lands away in return for old rifles and strings of beads, or unknowingly signed a treaty in English or French that contained different provisions from that in the local language. Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister during much of the Scramble, prided himself that Africa had been carved up with no European power firing a shot against another (and African troops employed by Europeans did much of the actual fighting against other Africans). Salisbury’s policies served the British ruling class well:

  ‘He had certainly made sure that the lion’s share of new colonies and protectorates — fifteen out of thirty — went to Britain. If his preoccupation had always been to give Britain the strategic advantage, it was fortunate for Britain that he also gave it most of Africa’s most profitable territory: the gold-mines of the Transvaal, the teeming markets of the Niger, the tea and coffee of Uganda, the cotton of Egypt and the Sudan.’ (Thomas Pakenham: The Scramble for Africa)

Thus British capitalism benefited at the same time as Africa was impoverished. All in all, it cannot be argued that underdevelopment is due to Third World countries not (yet) enjoying the benefits of capitalism, that they have missed out on development by missing out on capitalism. The truth is that their current condition is a result of the role they played in the development of capitalism. Africa and many parts of Asia and South America, were colonised, formally or informally, for the sake of the European powers, whose ruling classes grew rich on the profits of this exploitation, in addition to the surplus value they extracted from workers ‘at home’.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Virus pandemonium (2020)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Virus pandemonium

The pandemic grinds on, the death toll mounts, and politicians parrot platitudes that ring as hollow as their heads. The clueless UK government continues to pursue its pro-economy, sod-the-facts lockdown relaxation policy despite having made a balls-up of practically everything including transparency, contact tracing, keeping to their own lockdown rules and listening to the scientific consensus. The bombastic chutzpah of Boris Johnson strains credulity given that he has presided over the world’s worst death rate after only bollock-brained Trump in America and Bolsonaro in Brazil. No wonder that the chief editor of The Lancet has called for a public enquiry (New Scientist, 15 June). No wonder too that one virologist commented ‘I worry that policy is being motivated by the need to come up with good news rather than evidence’ (New Scientist, 9 June).

And the British media seem happy to play the government’s game by promoting news stories about virus breakthroughs that look distinctly dubious. The latest of these is dexamethasone, which the BBC claims saves a third of patients on ventilators and a fifth of those on oxygen. The trouble is that the same article goes on to say that it will actually save one in 8 of those on ventilators and one in 25 of those on oxygen (BBC, 16 June). You don’t have to be a mathematician to realise that 1/3 is not 1/8, and 1/5 is not 1/25. But it’s good enough news for the government, because dexamethasone already exists, and it’s cheap, and it works a little bit.

Meanwhile the search for a vaccine also grinds on, with over a hundred currently under investigation. It’s not the lab work that takes the time, it’s the field trials, since the only way to be sure a vaccine works in the long term is to wait a long term. That wait-time is further complicated by the fact that by the time vaccines are ready for trials, the pandemic could be naturally declining anyway, affording vaccinated test subjects little chance of contracting it. This is what happened with Ebola and why so many drug firms lost money.

One idea that’s been mooted, to get round this, is to vaccinate young people and then deliberately give them the coronavirus to see if the vaccine works. The chance of them dying is reckoned at around 1 in 3,000, yet no government has yet expressed a willingness to step over that ethical divide. Despite this, socialists will be warmed by one statistic. Even though the risk of death is small, it’s not nothing, yet 26,000 young people have stepped forward as volunteers (New Scientist, 6 June).

Statues of non-liberty

After months of nothing but virus news, the recent international protests over racism seemed to explode out of nowhere, yet of course they were decades and even centuries in the making. Perhaps nothing underscored the depth of feeling and the determination for change so much as the way in which statues were targeted, from those representing a slave-runner in Bristol and Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, to George Washington and Columbus in the US. In London, Churchill’s statue was boarded up and protected by a police armed response vehicle after Prime Minister Boris Johnson described supposed threats to it as ‘absurd and shameful’, although New Statesman considered this a ‘straw statue’ argument as there were no serious calls for its removal in the first place. ‘We need to tackle the substance of the problem, not the symbols’, he also said, while demonstrating that he had no intention of tackling either, by announcing in a classic Yes Minister ploy the launch of yet another new commission on racial inequalities. When a government intends to sit on its hands and ignore the recommendations of all previous commissions on the subject, it launches a new commission.

Symbols are a big deal to a species that communicates in symbols, and people have been pulling down or defacing statues as long as sculpture has been an art form. Many churches in England have statues with the heads struck off by Cromwell’s soldiers. Many Roman statues of former emperors had their heads removed and replaced with later emperors. Ancient Egyptians destroyed the images of previous unpopular pharaohs. There is a timeless and understandable impulse to purge oneself of the past and its bad memories by vandalising its physical symbols in the present.

The Memento Park in Budapest

In a connected world where information is overloaded and attention spans are short, symbols matter even more. Now they are ‘memes’, image-based morsels, videos or ‘flash-poems’ that use humour and wit to convey at a glance something we never quite realised we also wanted to say. And clever ones can spread like wildfire. There are several online meme databases too, if you feel like catching up. Just compare the zesty ingenuity of the working class to the stodgy pomposity of the ruling elite, and ask yourself who the future really belongs to.

Perhaps that’s why capitalist businesses are increasingly indulging in ‘virtue signalling’ in order to loudly proclaim their supposed ethical bona fides, because they know how easily and how powerfully they can be damaged in today’s febrile social media world. Now Greene King and Lloyds of London have anticipated getting a pasting in the racist debate by apologising for their historic links to the slave trade (BBC, 18 June). It didn’t matter to them when the masses couldn’t talk back. But now every voice is a megaphone and every message multiplies at light-speed, any company with a dark past has a reason to be afraid. And socialists are in on the act too, with flash-mob-style meets on our Discord server to generate news-based memes for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It’s small-scale as yet but it’s what we need to be doing, because if enough good socialist memes get out there, things might start to swing our way. As socialists often say, the rich have to win every day, but the dispossessed only have to win once. And that’s a meme for starters.

The Memento Park in Budapest. Maybe in socialism there would be similar parks and galleries devoted to archiving the artefacts of humanity’s primeval and superstitious past, like a long night of insanity and terror that must not be forgotten on awakening, lest it one day be returned to.

Paddy Shannon

The economics of slavery in the West Indies (1988)

From the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Slavery has existed from the earliest records of human history. The ancient Egyptians used slave labour to build the pyramids from 4,750-3,000 BC; the Romans and ancient Greeks owned slaves and the geographical areas from which slaves were obtained had a history of owning slaves themselves. The West Africans had slaves and the Carib Indians of the West Indies raided Puerto Rica. Hispaniola and Jamaica for slaves. Slavery was such a basic feature of ancient societies that Plato, Plutarch and Aristophanes all retained slavery as part of their utopias, and even Thomas More, in his Utopia, as late as 1516, retained slavery as a punishment for crimes and adultery.

The slave trade of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries differed from earlier periods of slavery in that the number of people enslaved was much greater; the contradiction between the alleged Christian beliefs of the white slavers and the evils of the trade led to pseudo-scientific theories that their black captives were not really human, which, in turn, produced entrenched racist ideas which have persisted into the twentieth century.

The trade in African slaves to provide labour in the Southern states of the USA and the West Indies lasted for approximately 250 years and led to the transportation of an estimated forty million slaves. The Portuguese began trading in slaves at Lagos between 1440 and 1450 and by 1540 ten thousand slaves were being shipped to the West Indies from West Africa each year and. in addition, slaves were sold in South America and Mexico. Although slaves may have been brought to England as a result of the Iberian trade, the first group of African slaves to be brought to England by an English trader came from the Guinea Coast in 1555.

Britain's participation in the slave trade dates from 1564, when Sir John Hawkins made his second expedition to Africa in the flagship Jesus, with Queen Elizabeth's blessing, his first trip, two years before, having been highly successful. Manufactured goods such as textiles, iron, guns and spirits were shipped from Britain to the Guinea Coast and exchanged for other goods and slaves. These were exchanged for raw materials such as sugar and cotton in the New World which, in turn, were transported to England, completing the triangular trade. Jack Grates (The Great White Lie) states:

 Profits derived from the system found their way through reinvestment into other industries and agriculture, and it is not an exaggeration to say that they contributed substantially to the development of the Industrial Revolution on which Britain's nineteenth-century prosperity was based.

Liverpool was the main British port from which the slave ships sailed. In 1730, the port had 15 ships; in 1751, 53; 74 in 1760; in 1770, 96. and 132 by 1792 (Karl Marx. Capital).

The slave trade corrupted the African chiefs who bartered with the white slave traders. The insatiable demand for slaves led to an increase in tribal wars for captives who could be sold to the slavers. And by the middle of the eighteenth century the kidnapping of men and women of working age and in their most active reproductive years, the terrible loss of life resulting from the tribal wars and the spread of disease which accompanies foreign invaders, caused some areas of Africa to become underpopulated.

As the slavers pushed further into the interior of Africa the forced marches to the coast became more of an ordeal. Thirty per cent of the slaves died before they reached the coast to board the slave ships. And sometimes slaves who were rejected as unfit were killed by the black traders (Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, 1788). Conditions on the slave ships were barbaric in the extreme: a captain in the Royal Navy made a famous drawing of the slave ship Brookes in Liverpool docks in 1787, which showed how 450 slaves were packed into the ship, allowing six feet by sixteen inches for every man and five feet by sixteen inches for every woman. This "tight-packing", as it was called. led to considerable loss of life during transportation and in 1788 to the British Parliament regulating the conditions under which slaves could be shipped. Although this made the transportation of slaves more humane, by regulating the trade Parliament had officially sanctioned it. Greed had led to the "tight-packing" of slaves but the higher survival rate of transported slaves after regulation may have been commercially just as successful and, by its claim to be humane, may have set back the campaign to abolish the trade.

William Wilberforce campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade from the formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, in London in May 1787 to the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act on 16 March. 1807. A number of myths surround Wilberforce. He was an MP and a wealthy factory owner who exploited child labour in his Hull factories. Contrary to popular belief he was opposed to the emancipation of the slaves, claiming that they were not fit for freedom.

When Earl Percy wanted to bring in a Bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1807, Wilberforce stated: "I and those who think with me not only abstain from proposing such a Bill, are ready to reject such a proposition when made by others". Wilberforce had a patronising attitude towards the slaves and was intolerant of Mohammedanism and Hinduism, which he wished to replace with Christianity.

The Prime Minister, William Pitt, also claimed to be an abolitionist but trading actually increased during his administration. It is thought that his opposition arose as a result of the sale of slaves by British merchants to foreign colonies, especially France, which although profitable in the short term was damaging to Britain's long-term interests.

After the abolition of the slave trade a million slaves remained in bondage in the West Indies and as slavery continued until 1833 slaves, therefore, had to be replaced. But the illegality of trading pushed up the price of slaves. To prevent illegal trading the British government provided bounty money for the capture of slave ships. As a full ship could command a bounty of £2,500 the naval squadron patrolling the African coast preferred to catch slave vessels at sea because it was more profitable than prevention. To evade the risk of capture the slave captains would put the slaves into specially prepared hiding places, so small that the slaves often died of suffocation or else they would be thrown overboard to drown or be eaten by sharks. The illegal trade was so profitable that if only one in three of the slave ships delivered its human cargo, a profit could be made. The European slave owning countries co-operated with each other to stop the slave trade but the USA refused to take part for a time and it was possible for a ship to avoid capture by running up the American flag.

The abolition of the slave trade provides a classic example of the futility of a reform that leaves the system intact and can sometimes lead to a worsening of conditions rather than an improvement. By the nineteenth century the industrial revolution had superseded chattel-slavery and feudalism in Britain. A new class of labouring poor with nothing to sell except their labour power had emerged in the industrial towns and cities. Slavery was becoming an anachronism. Slave labour was not free: slaves had to be maintained and, unlike the wage-slaves of Britain, they were expensive to buy. In Jamaica, in 1817, male slaves aged 20-40 years were valued at £139 and female slaves at £124 (B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica 1807-1834, Cambridge University Press. 1976).

As the work performed by slaves was usually of poor quality incentives were provided within the slavery system. In the French West Indies slaves had some legal protection against arbitrary punishments being meted out by their owners and. it is claimed, those islands were more profitable. In Jamaica slaves who had learned trades were able to amass fairly large sums of money. The ending of the slave trade led to a higher proportion of unproductive slaves as the owners were forced to breed slaves for themselves.

Further pressure was put on the slave system by a fall in the price of sugar which, by emancipation, was worth only about half of its value at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Reform Bill of 1832 halved the planters' representation in the British Parliament which weakened them politically and the increasing number of slave rebellions culminated in the Jamaican rebellion on 27 December 1831 in which 20,000 slaves took part, killing 14 whites and destroying over £1 million worth of property.

In the face of growing economic and political problems the plantation owners opted for the compensation offered by the British government of 1833 which, in fact recognised the legal right of one person to own another. For the former slaves, emancipation changed their material lives very little; their former owners kept control of the courts and owned the land. As Tolstoy observed fifty years later:

 . . . the essence of all slavery consists in drawing the benefit of another's labour-force by compulsion, and it is quite immaterial whether the drawing of this benefit is founded upon property in the slave or upon property in money which is indispensable to the other man (What Shall We Do Then, 1885).

Chattel-slavery was a particularly vicious form of exploitation, although the condition of the working class under laissez-faire capitalism was also inhumane and squandered workers' lives. For workers all over the world the fight for emancipation against wage-slavery and its replacement with socialism still has to be won.

Carl Pinel

Letters: Why was slavery abolished? (2020)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why was slavery abolished?

Dear Friends

Comments on ‘No slaves! No gods! No masters!’ (Rear View, May 2020)

The organisation now called Anti-Slavery International (ASI) was not, as you state, founded by William Wilberforce in 1839; he had died in 1833; the founder was Thomas Clarkson. The role played by William Wilberforce had been to lead the parliamentary campaign of the ending of the trans-Atlantic slave-trade and the freeing of slaves in the ‘British Empire’, which was achieved by legislation in the year he died. You don’t give evidence for your assertion that the reason for the owning class agreeing to the abolition of slavery was that ‘it was considered an outmoded and inefficient method of labour exploitation’; well – it persisted in capitalist America for several more decades! Surely the long campaigning by Wilberforce, Clarkson and others in stirring public opinion against the treatment of slaves had some impact on the eventual result in Parliament?

Yes, it was and is incredible and appalling that Wilberforce, while campaigning to free slaves in America, could also at home employ child labour and preach to the working class to ‘know their place’. Nevertheless, there must have been many thousands of freed slaves whose lives were, to some extent at least, improved by their no longer being, literally, the property of their owners, to be bought and sold and ill-treated, without impunity, at a whim. This is surely not the case with those of you now call ‘wage slaves’. Anti-Slavery International works still to campaign on behalf of people, here and internationally, who remain, literally, the property of owners. (Would it not be better for you to use some word other than ‘slaves’ to describe those of us who are employed – not owned?)

So, ASI campaigners are your despised ‘reformists’ – but, may they not also be socialists? Why do you insist that it is and either/or situation? Why not both/and? Do you suppose that reformists are in every case going to rest content at the achievement of their particular reform? Or may it not be that such an achievement, if it gives some improvement in the lives of some human beings, is a step – even if only a small one – towards socialism? ‘From each according to their abilities’, we say, – and if Tory William Wilberforce’s persistent and persuasive oratory (as appallingly blinkered as he was in other respects) led to better lives for wretched slaves, then so be it!

Must socialists be ‘absolutists’, refusing involvement in well-meaning reform campaigns, in order to maintain clean-handed ideological purity? Or, even worse, are we allowed to enjoy the relative material comforts brought to many of us by capitalism in our part of the globe, while engaging in merely cerebral ‘holier-than-thou’ argument, as we await a ‘big-bang’ revolution? Ought we not to be living now as if we really believed in socialism as a way of life, contributing willingly, as we can, to our fellow human beings, and taking in return just what we actually need? Would not our actions, however compromised and seemingly pathetic, speak louder than words alone?

Andrew Durrant, 

Norwich

Reply: 

You rightly takes us to task for stating that Anti-Slavery International was founded in 1839 by William Wilberforce, who died in 1833 (see May’s Rear View). To be sure, the group has undergone several name changes since its origin as the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823. Campaigning by Thomas Clarkson, Wilberforce and other abolitionists likely did lead to the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act a decade later, but it should be remembered that William Pitt the Younger, the prime minister as far back as 1783, was not alone in thinking that the trade should be abolished as it was more expensive than using workers. However, you are on shakier ground when you write ‘there must have been many thousands of freed slaves whose lives were, to some extent at least, improved by their no longer being, literally, the property of their owners, to be bought and sold and ill-treated, without [sic] impunity, at a whim.’ In his autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892), the former slave writes: ‘The old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death, which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. They could not, of course, sell their former slaves, but they retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held there is the power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow- man, You shall serve me or starve, is a master and his subject is a slave….Though no longer a slave, he is in a thralldom grievous and intolerable, compelled to work for whatever his employer is pleased to pay him..’ .

You go on to ask if socialists must ‘be absolutists, refusing involvement in well-meaning reform campaigns, in order to maintain clean-handed ideological purity?’ To be clear, socialists oppose reformism, not necessarily individual reforms. Indeed, it would be incorrect to deny that certain reforms won by modern wage slaves have helped to improve general living and working conditions. There are examples of this in such fields as education, housing, child employment, work conditions and social security. Yet as William Morris remarked in a lecture: ‘the palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganized partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organization which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side’ (Art & Socialism, 1884). Reforms, if passed, have in reality done little more than to keep workers and their families functioning and while providing some temporary relief only rarely managed to remove the problem completely — as the 170,000 UK registered charities , of which Anti-Slavery International is one, attest. 

Editors.

Marx or Proudhon?

Dear Editor,

Thank you for your very generous and thoughtful review of my book, Sitopia, How Food Can Save the World. I am delighted that your reviewer liked the book so much and feel that there is much in it with which socialists could agree. I do consider myself a socialist at heart and clearly the metaphor of society being a place in which everyone eats well – and by implication has the means of leading a good and meaningful life – is, I believe, at the heart of socialism. We are clearly agreed that capitalism has proved itself unable to deliver such an outcome – and I accept your point that one cannot lay the blame for totalitarian regimes such as those of modern China and Russia at the feet of Marx – although I found myself very taken with Proudhon’s argument that his optimism in vesting all power in the state had its own inbuilt pitfalls! In any case, I welcome your comments.

With all best wishes,

Carolyn Steel

Reply: 

Thanks, but we have to point out that neither Marx nor us want to vest “all power in the state”. Marx envisaged, as we do, socialism/communism as a classless, stateless, moneyless community based on the common ownership of productive resources. Proudhon did envisage the end of the state as a centralised coercive power centre, but wanted to retain production for sale even if by co-operatives, which we don’t agree with .

Editors.

Islands in the Doldrums (1962)

From the June 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oil and sunshine 

Keeps the Yankees looking fine: 

Oil and sunshine, 

With a glass of local wine

Oil, sunshine, and Yankees. Perhaps the composer of this recently popular calypso was more interested in the local wine, but he summed up the importance of the West Indies in the modern world neatly enough.

Trinidad’s oil is the most important mineral product of the West Indies. Sunshine and a satisfactory rainfall allow crops (the most important being sugarcane) which form the basis of most of the islands’ economy. Lastly, the American Government keeps a stern, albeit paternal eye on the Caribbean as an important “outpost of democracy” and guardian of the eastern approaches to the Panama Canal.

But what are the West Indies? The term is in fact little more than an abstraction. To British people they mean those collections of islands forming the West Indies Federation. The French refer to les Antilles and mean particularly the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique and French Guiana. Then there are the islands of the Dutch West Indies, the ’‘independent” island of Cuba, the American Virgin Islands, the twin “independent” states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the American satellite state of Puerto Rico. And what about the neighbouring mainland countries: British Guiana and British Honduras, Dutch Guiana (Surinam), and the Central American states bordering on the Caribbean? Do not their strategic positions and trading potentials label them as parts of the West Indies?

The truth is that the West Indies are a widespread collection of islands (Jamaica and Trinidad are 1,000 miles apart), possibly associated with countries on the South American mainland, with different cultural backgrounds, with people speaking many different languages, and having different economic affiliations to European and American colonial powers.

Little wonder that a succession of fact-finding committees and international committees of experts, have been sorely tried to propound a solution, within the framework of capitalism, for the ills of this economic, cultural, and political hodge-podge. And, as we shall see, problems there certainly are, especially for that section of the West Indian population which must seek an employer in order to live—the working class.

If the West Indies’ future is uncertain and unpromising, at least their past may be described with some accuracy: a past that exemplifies colonial expansion, capitalist accumulation of wealth, and the subjugation of a working class, with all the romance and colour of a Hollywood movie.

Search for Gold

The recorded history of the West Indies starts with their discovery by Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century. Columbus believed, and claimed, that he had found islands off the coast of Eastern Asia—hence the name West “Indies.”

The islands were already inhabited by tribes of aboriginal Indians, the Arawaks and the Caribs. These unfortunate Indians (the only "original” West Indians, despite Negro nationalist propaganda) were either destroyed or subjugated by the European settlers.

Following Columbus' various expeditions, the then strong Spanish crown founded a Spanish empire in the Caribbean and South America. Cuba and Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) were the bases from which forces sailed for the conquest of Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the lands in South America.

The driving force was the search for gold. More and more Spanish settlers arrived in quest of this, bringing with them the Spanish form, of municipal government (the cabildo), vestiges of which later continued under British rule. They also brought agricultural stock—rice, citrus fruit trees, bananas, and, most important of all, sugar-cane. Local crops were limited, the most important being maize, cassava (bread-stuff), and tobacco.

The search for gold proved fruitless on the whole but in the words of Parry and Sherlock, “The story of sugar is a continuous thread running through the whole history of the West Indies.” Because most of the West Indian islands are hilly and therefore have limited areas of arable land, the only economical crop was found to be one which gave a high yield per acre and a high price; it was mainly

because of these factors that sugar and not cotton became the staple crop. Furthermore, sugar can be grown by unskilled labour and does not exhaust the ground.

The shortage of labour (both skilled and unskilled) to grow, harvest, mill, and process the crop (sugar-cane must be milled and processed soon after harvesting) became a pressing problem for the Spanish land-owners: there were virtually no “free” labourers, very few “forced” labourers, and the Arawaks and Caribs were either extinct or unfitted for life as agricultural labourers. The first batch of Negro slaves from the West Coast of Africa to supply these labour needs were shipped by the Spanish to the West Indies early in the sixteenth century.

The forty-year period of economic and territorial domination of the West Indies by Spain was broken by the outbreak of war with France in 1536, and from that date France, Spain, Holland, and England were in more or less constant conflict over possession of the islands, trade routes, and trading rights. Admirals Drake and Hawkins were the most illustrious of England’s band of official pirates. Unofficial pirates, or buccaneers (the most famous being Captain Morgan), operated with the approval of colonial governors against Spanish settlements and shipping, and were paid by booty.

Islands were captured and re-captured. Barbados was the only island taken by England which never changed hands. Jamaica was taken by the British in the middle of the seventeenth century; this was a great prize, for a contemporary described Jamaica as “lying in the very belly of all commerce.” Trinidad was captured from the Spanish by the French, and by the British from the French in 1797, during the Napoleonic wars. Eventually, mainly because of superior sea power and possession of the only two naval dockyards (Port Royal in Jamaica and English Harbour in Antigua), Britain became the dominant imperialist power in the Caribbean.

The growth of the trade in sugar and the trade in men went hand in hand.

French and English settlers soon discovered that, along with cotton, West Indian tobacco (which was found to be inferior to the Virginian type) were not profitable crops; for reasons already given, and because the demand for it in Europe was growing steadily, sugar became the main crop.

Considerable capital was needed to establish a sugar factory, and a plantation had to be large enough to keep the factory supplied with sugar-cane; it is thus easy to see why the small sugar-cane holdings were soon swallowed up by large estates and why eventually the industry fell into the hands of a few capitalists. Today, for example, all the large estates and ail the factories in Trinidad are owned by Tate and Lyle.

Indentured Labour

There was soon a cry for labour to work the estates and the factories. First of all, indentured (“free") labourers were brought from Europe, with the promise of smallholdings at the end of their contracts (if they lived that long). When virtually all the arable land had been swallowed up by the large estates, the supply of indentured labourers rapidly dwindled. Political prisoners (“Royalists" and Irish) and convicted felons were shipped: these were dubbed “white slaves” by the Negroes and were treated as badly as, if not worse than, the Negro slaves. But these were not enough to satisfy the needs of the profit-hungry sugar owners and so, like the Spanish and Portuguese before them, the French and English planters had to buy slaves, mostly Negroes from the West Coast of Africa.

The slave traders were as anxious to sell their human commodities as the plantation owners were to buy them. By the middle of the seventeenth century a steady stream of slaves was leaving Sierra Leone, the Niger Delta, and the Slave and Ivory Coasts to face disease and death in the overcrowded slave ships, and an uncertain future of back-breaking toil at the hands of the rapacious sugar planters. Barbados had a few hundred Negroes in 1640, but by 1645 there were over 6,000, and in 1685 no less than 46,000.

There were few white sugar owners and overseers to control this rising black tide of resentful, sullen and undisciplined slaves, many of whom came from warlike tribes. Soon isolated uprisings caused severe penalties to be imposed; typical of such repressive acts of legislation was the French Code Noir.

The slave trade was one of the most profitable enterprises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—for the owners of the slave ships. The death-rate among the crews of the “slavers” was usually about the same as among the slaves they carried. Although the Spanish started the slave trade, eventually four countries (Portugal, Holland, England, and France) gained control. There was much competition between the various powers over the monopoly of such a lucrative business and to put a stop to keen Dutch competition Charles II of England granted a charter to the “Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa” in 1663. This slave-trading organisation later became the Royal Africa Company, about which Parry and Sherlock say: “Several members of the royal family were shareholders in this enterprise, which was to supply the English sugar colonies with 3,000 slaves a year at an average price of £17, or one ton of sugar, per slave. The purchase price in Africa at that time was about £3.”

The first European war to be fought over the West Indies began in 1739 between England, Spain, and France. It was frankly called a “war of trade,” and was dubbed “the war of Jenkin’s ear” after an English sea captain who complained to parliament of Spanish hindrance to his trading activities in the Caribbean. From this time the three powers fought intermittently until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, and many islands changed hands. For the English ruling class, this was a golden opportunity to cripple French sugar production by destroying both crops and machines and by capturing slaves. This period of imperialist skirmishing (which included the Seven Years’ War) was influenced, to the disadvantage of the English ruling class, by the American war of Independence, which drew English military and naval reserves from the Caribbean.

Plantation System

Despite wars and rumours of wars, however, for the sugar owners in the West Indian islands, the eighteenth century was probably the period of greatest prosperity. But it was also during this peak period of “plantation economy" that the seeds of future economic problems were sown, problems which teams of economic “experts,” government committees, etc., are attempting to solve to this day. The most important defect in the plantation system was monoculture, the growing of one crop. Other features were slavery, absentee ownership (most plantation owners lived in England and left the running of their estates to bailiffs), and the dependence of the traders on markets in the outside world.

To make matters worse, economic problems in the Caribbean have periodically been accentuated by natural disasters (hurricanes, droughts, and epidemic disease, such as cholera and yellow fever), from which some islands have taken years to recover.

However hard the planters tried, they were powerless to prevent their slaves learning about the world outside the slave compounds. It was thus inevitable that at the turn of the nineteenth century “leaders” emerged from, the ranks of the slaves: men who had heard the rallying cry of the French Revolution. “liberty, .equality, and fraternity,” and preached that this slogan should apply to slaves as well as to the plantation owners.

Slave Labour

Unrest and rebellion spread among the slaves and in 1791 the slave population of the northern plain of Saint-Domingue (later to be renamed Haiti) revolted, systematically firing some fields and houses and murdering the white inhabitants. Out of this bloody rising, during which both sides acted with the utmost savagery, arose the first Negro slave leader to prove himself competent both as a military commander and as a politician—Toussaint "L'ouverture.”

Movements for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade had for some years before the uprisings also been gaining strength in liberal circles in Britain. Various governments declared the slave trade illegal between the years 1808-1820 and slavery was abolished in all the West Indian colonies, except the Spanish, by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The erstwhile slaves soon found that they had exchanged one form of slavery for another. As one historian points out, “the Act which abolished slavery did not emancipate the slaves . . . As a social institution slavery disappeared . . . and it came back as a system of industry, the negroes . . . having to work as slaves for so many hours a week.”

Slavery was also a very mixed blessing for the plantation owners. It is true that the owners were reasonably assured of a constant supply of labourers who could not leave the plantations: following “emancipation” many ex-slaves left for more congenial work or to run smallholdings. But slave-labour was not very productive and the slave owners were bound to feed, clothe, and shelter their slaves. Sugar farming is largely seasonal. but the owners could not dispense with their slaves after the crop was harvested and processed as they now can with their wage-workers.

Michael La Touche

[To be concluded]