ALB
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Why are they calling Kamala Harris an “Afro-American”? She could equally be called an “Asian Indian American” as I notice some are saying she’s both. But they never called Obama both an “Afro-American” and a “White European American”.
What nonsense these “racial” classifications are ! Why not simply say she is a member of the human race.
John O’Neil deals specifically with the reform to capitalism that Wolff proposes;
”Within democratic co-operatives the conflict takes a different form as a conflict of interests amongst members of the institution depending on which of two different roles they play — as policy formulators for the institution or as recipients of wages. It is in such situations that the inaccurate and misleading term ‘self-exploitation’ appears appropriate. The conflict also reveals a way in which, when the workers are paying themselves low wages, this may not be a confusion as Carter claims. It is when workers find themselves forced by market demands to pay themselves low wages that the conflict of interest between workers in their different roles becomes most clearly apparent.”
Sorting through some old papers I came across this article from 1991 by an ex-member who still shared some of our views. It’s about whether the concept of “self-exploitation” makes sense in relation to workers co-operatives. He argues that while the term might not make sense in regard to workers exploiting themselves, it does in relation to the cooperative as a legal institution exploiting those who work in it.
Unfortunately only the abstract is can be read freely on line:
The key passage in his reply to Alan Carter is:
”This conflict of interests between the institutional employer and its employees remains a central feature of workers’ co-operatives within a market economy. […] The interests of the institution in increasing profitability in order to finance the investment programmes necessary for its survival — and, hence, in maximising the surplus product it extracted — conflicted with his interests as a wage-worker, in pay and conditions.”
Yes at the other end of the range, there was mention yesterday in the Party summer school on Technology of “smart fridges” which automatically re-order what you usually use when stocks run down:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_refrigerator
That can be useful in socialism too. In fact I assume that supermarkets already operate with such a stock control app. That shows that socialism can work too without money or price of course judt physical amounts. If stocks run low a “smart distribution centre” will automatically order more.
What are we waiting for ?
In his own words his reformist programme in a nutshell:
“Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear.”
They might vote that but it will be just as hard (or easy) to get them to vote to make the means of production the common property of society under democratic control with production and distribution directly for use and not for sale and profit. Such unrealistic and unworkable reforms to capitalism are a diversion from what needs to be done.
That book by James O’Neal The Workers in American History is online here:
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=VAC1311&brand=ia-books
Chapters 2 and 3 on white slavery and the white slave trade are real eye-openers and give the lie to those Irish historians who argue that indentured labour was relatively benign and did not amount to slavery.
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.
