Slavery and slavery

      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 expansionand 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 onlyinterested 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 neverthelessexploited 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.     

Introducing The Socialist Party


The Socialist Party is like no other political party in Britain. It is made
up of people who have joined together because we want to get rid of
the profit system and establish real socialism. 

Our aim is to persuade others to become  socialist and act for themselves,
organising democratically and without leaders, to bring about the kind of
society that we are advocating in this journal. 
We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. 

We are not a reformist party with a programme of
policies to patch up capitalism.

We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. 
We publish pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and 
various other informative material.

We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies, meetings 
and demos; run educational conferences; host internet discussion forums,
make films presenting our ideas, and contest elections when practical. 
Socialist literature is available in Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, Esperanto,
French, German,Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish as well 
as English.

The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able
to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to draw
on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement which 
you will be able to bring us.

The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and
there are no followers. So, if you are going to join we want you to be
sure that you agree fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied
that you understand the case for socialism.

Top