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From the Socialist Standard of July 1919;
The enclosure of the common lands in France, Germany, and England gave rise to a multitude of starving outcasts, some of whom turned their eyes toward the New World in the hope of finding an amelioration of their lot. These provided ready material for the kidnapper and emigration agent, who enticed them across the Atlantic and then sold them into a species of slavery (indentured service) even worse than the slavery of the blacks.
The records of the American white slave traffic exhibit an almost unbelievable barbarity. This traffic is fully discussed by James O’Neal in “The Workers in American History,” where the worst evils of Negro slavery are shown to be paralleled if not surpassed by the system of indentured service.
Of course, the followers of the “meek and lowly one” had to have a finger in the pie, and we read that—
The famous Whitfield, and the two Wesleys, visited America at this period (1743) and urged the expediency of allowing slavery. (Ludlow, p. 38.)
In his “Story of the Negro” Booker T. Washington points out that the white man sold his own people in America years before the first black slaver sailed into Jamestown, Virginia (1619).
In other words like we always said, the owning class is multinational, multiracial, multiethnic, multilinguistic, multireligious. So is the working class.
Therefore the working should organise on a class and not on any other basis; in fact should oppose any attempts either by the owning class or by elements within the working class to split them by “race”, “ethnicity”, nationality, language, religion, gender, etc.
Yes Frederick Douglass seems a good bloke.
The more you look into this the murkier it becomes. I didn’t know this for example:
I suppose it must be true.
Even if there had been Irish chattel slaves I don’t see how that would justify the enslavement of Africans. But then I wouldn’t expect white supremacists to use logical arguments..
I should add that that report in the Irish American paper is not that reliable when it comes to history. The Monmouth revolt in 1685 was a Protestant uprising in the west of England against the catholic king James II. Those sentenced to transportation to the West Indies would not have been Irish catholics but English anti-catholics. James got his come uppance three years later when he was dethroned and replaced by William of Orange in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688.
I think this is partly a question of what is meant by slavery: is it just chattel slavery (where the slave is the property of the slave owner) or does it include other forms of legally enforced forced labour?
It would be better if the historians talked of the “myth of Irish chattel slaves” rather than the “myth of Irish slaves.” Otherwise they are suggesting that those Irish people transported against their will to the West Indies to be sold to plantation owners to work for them for a number of years were not in some real sense slaves. They would certainly be classified as slaves under definitions of modern slavery.
For the record (and without vouching for its accuracy), here is what James Connolly wrote in his The Re-Conquest of Ireland (1915):
”In addition to this transplanting to Connacht, gangs of soldiery were despatched throughout Ireland to kidnap young boys and girls of tender years to be sold into slavery in the West Indies. Sir William Petty, ancestor of the Lansdowne family and a greedy and unscrupulous land-thief, declared that in some Irish accounts the number so sold into slavery was estimated at one hundred thousand.
This ancestor of Lord Lansdowne, the founder of the noble Lansdowne family, Sir William Petty, landed in Ireland in 1652 with a total capital of all his fortune of £500. But he came over in the wake of Cromwell’s army, and got himself appointed ‘Physician to the Army of Ireland’. In 1662 he was made one of a Court of Commissioners of Irish Estates, and also Surveyor-General for Ireland. As the native Irish were then being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes, the latter fact gave this worthy ancestor of a worthy lord excellent opportunities to ‘invest’ his £500 to good purpose.
How this hunting of the Irish was going on whilst Sir William Petty was founding the noble Lansdowne family may be gauged from the fact that over 100,000 men, women and children were transported to the West Indies, there to be sold into slavery upon the tobacco plantations.”
There are still some descendants of the Irish indentured slave labourers living In Barbados:
Interesting article especially the bit towards the end about Irish indentured labourers being involved in slave revolts but just because the claim that there were some Irish slaves in the West Indies in the mid 1600s has been exploited by white suprematists does not mean that this is therefore a myth.
Gerry Adams is criticised for saying that some people from Ireland were sold into slavery in the West Indies. James Connolly made a similar claim. Refuting this is not a question of political correctness but of historical fact.
I don’t think anyone denies that under Cromwell thousands of defeated Irish soldiers were deported to the West Indies and sold to plantation owners to work for them. It has even be claimed that these were transported there in chains in same ships that were used in the African slave trade.
The argument seems to be that they weren’t sold as chattel slaves but as indentured labourers. But the fact remains that they were sold.
For instance, Liam Hogan, one of those who exposes the “Irish slaves myth” writes :
”While the majority of Irish people who became indentured servants in the colonies did so willingly (why they felt they had to so is, of course, another question), a not insignificant number were forcibly deported and sold into indentured servitude. This peaked just after the brutalCromwellian conquest of Irelandwhen there were orders given in multiple counties to round up and deport those who, it was claimed, could not support themselves.
Indentured servitude was more insidious than simply a case of labor exploitation. A four- to seven-year indenture to serve out, bond servants lives’ and movements were subject to control and dominance by their masters’ even outside of work hours, with punitive restrictions placed on marriage, locomotion, and pregnancy.“
https://psmag.com/.amp/social-justice/the-irish-were-not-slaves
Even if these involuntary indentured labourers were not legally the property of those who bought them their labour was and their working conditions were the same as chattel slaves, often working alongside them. If they escaped they too could be rounded up and returned and punished. The difference was that while for a chattel slave this exploitation of their labour was for life for an involuntary indentured labourer this was for a period only, up to seven years. I don’t think it unreasonable to describe their situation as being temporary slaves; or that some Irish people were sold into this temporary slavery.
In any event, I don’t see the fact that there might have been a few thousand white chattel slaves for a while in anyway (which there doesn’t seem to have been) mitigates the horrors of the African slave trade and of the lifelong chattel slavery of Africans which replaced indentured labour … until, that is, after the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies slave labour was replaced by indentured labourers imported from India (it is estimated that between 1838 and 1917 some half a million were shipped in to work on the plantations).
One of the reasons being given for the increased demand for gold is doubts over the dollar’s future as the world’s main reserve currency (what states hold their reserves in to settle international payments).
Other states think that the US authorities may be going to taking advantage of this position to inflate the US currency at their expense. Also that the US has been abusing its position to oblige other states to support sanctions on regimes the US wants to overthrow (Iran, Venezuela and Syria) by threatening to prosecute and fine any firms that use dollars for other transactions if they trade with these regimes.
If the US dollar collapses as the world’s reserve currency then only gold could take its place. I wouldn’t have thought this is going to happen soon but it could be a longer term tendency.
There is this classic: Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams.
”Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944.”
I agree, James, with Alan. This is not a good idea. It is unfair and illogical to blame someone for what their ancestors did.
But, since part of the primitive accumulation of capital that set capitalism going cane from the profits of the slave trade, in standing candidates against any party or candidate that supports capitalism we are doing our bit to topple a system that benefited from modern chattel slavery.
Moderator, is there any way if changing the misleading title of this thread? A question mark instead of an exclamation mark would do.
In 1910 the Socialist Labor Party of America published a speech by Jules Guesde, head of an opposition faction within the reformist “socialist party” In France, in which he argued that there was nothing socialist as such in cooperatives and that their only use to the socialist movement was to provide funds for it. At least he showed a higher understanding than Wolff.
Just got round to reading these last two articles. The second one is actually not too bad. The first gives a good enough definition of capitalism as being based on the employer/employee relationship (the wages system) but then confuses things by at one point calling the old USSR, China, etc state capitalist and at another socialist.
As to be expected, he advances his solution that worker coops are the way forward, at one point even describing them as “communist”. They do abolish the employer/employee relationship for those involved but they are not communist because they are envisaged as still producing for sale on a market; whereas communism (socialism) implies that the democratically-run productive units would not be producing for the market, precisely because what they produced would belong to the whole community (“communism”) and be there to be distributed in non-market ways, either free distribution, free use or taking for free.
This is not bad considering they’re way-out Trots:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/29/musk-j29.html
”All of this boils down to the fact that the profit and wealth of the capitalist is not the result of his own labor, but the labor of others, the workers. “The surplus value,” Marx explained in his earlier work, Value, Price and Profit, “or that part of the total value of a commodity in which the surplus labor or unpaid labor is realized, I call Profit.”
Or, in the somewhat oversimplified version laid out by Musk: “Gib me dat for free.”
Perhaps because they didn’t think they could get away with giving him a Jewish accent. Or to associate the BLM with ‘Marxists’ ie Cahmunists?
Actually that’s quite a good summary of Das Kapital in a nutshell. It’s what capitalists say to the workers when they take the surplus value that workers produce over and above the value of their wages.
In fact we could produce a t-shirt with the same meme but instead of “hungry Santa” saying “as the capitalist said to the worker”.
