Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Somali Eco Disaster Bred Pirates

Piracy is the earliest form of primitive captialist accumulation. It was a major force historically in the transition from fuedalism to capitalism, and in the expansion of the European colonization of Africa with the slave trade and then with the colonization of America. Today it thrives in Asia and now the Horn of Africa.


Those offering solutions to piracy advoacte armed force, perhaps hiring the privateers like has been done in the past but in this case one wag has suggested that Blackwater the mercenary corporation involved in scandals in Iraq should deal with the Somali pirates. He also suggested that the pirates of Somalia are connected to Iran.


This is as spurious an assertion as those being made that the pirates are connected to the Islamist movement currently savaging Somalia. They are not. Rather their seaside towns have been assualted by the Islamists seeking to gain control of the pirates booty. Especially the Ukrainian ship which contains tank and heavy weapons.


Battling the Somali Pirates: The Return of the Islamists


However, General William Ward noted on Wednesday that despite piracy being a growing issue of global concern, there was no actual proof that the group responsible for the Somali troubles was linked with Islamic terrorism.


A columnist for the Wall Street Journal has suggested we bring back hanging em from the yardarms. Which was a rare occurance in the 18th ceentury and rarely worked. It certainly did not end priacy in the Caribbean and the Carolina's. That was ended by a privateer being hired by the British mercantilists government to hunt them down.


As I wrote in the Opionion Forum at the WSJ in repy to his column; "Your assertion that pirates were hung because they posed a danger when captured is true but not for the reason given, it was because they were free men, while the saliors aboard most ships at the time were pressed men, indentured, and the priates were seen as subversive, capable of undermining the ships owners and captains authority, enough so that having pirates aborad would lead to mutiny. The hanging of pirates did not end piracy, au contraire to your article, rather it was a concerted effort of the British government to end priacy on the American coast and in the Caribean using ex pirates to break up their hold in the Bahamas and North Carolina. Few pirates were hung, most retired. "


It is because I have been reading about pirates , slavery and submarieslately, as you can see in my Shelfari bookshelf to the left. The Republic of Pirates discusses the history of the short lived pirate republic in the Bahama's how it disrupted British, Spanish and French slave trade in the region and the America and how it was defeated. Eric Willaims Salvery and Capitalism is an important ground breaking work explaining how the use of slaves and a slave economy was key to the growth of primitive accumulation of capital for English capitalists, moving them from a mercantilist economy to a full blown capitalist economy and an Imperial empire. Finally the book on submarines explains that at least one 18th Century American advocate for submarine warfare; Robert Fulton promoted it as a way of guarnteeing free trade and free markets using of the submarine to attack exiting navy blockades of ports. Shades of Hagbard Celine.

The irony is that the Horn of Africa was the original source of the historical 18th Century Pirates, in that case the pirates used Madagascar as their base. The pirates whom lived off raiding the slave ships of the European Imperialist nations. Like their Somali counterparts Muslim pirates led Thomas Jefferson to engage in America's first imperialist navel action against the Barbary Coast Pirates.

As Christopher Hitchens writes;

Some of this activity was hostage trading and ransom farming rather than the more labor-intensive horror of the Atlantic trade and the Middle Passage, but it exerted a huge effect on the imagination of the time—and probably on no one more than on Thomas Jefferson. Peering at the paragraph denouncing the American slave trade in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, later excised, I noticed for the first time that it sarcastically condemned “the Christian King of Great Britain” for engaging in “this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers.” The allusion to Barbary practice seemed inescapable. One immediate effect of the American Revolution, however, was to strengthen the hand of those very same North African potentates: roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. The infant United States had therefore to decide not just upon a question of national honor but upon whether it would stand or fall by free navigation of the seas.
One of the historians of the Barbary conflict, Frank Lambert, argues that the imperative of free trade drove America much more than did any quarrel with Islam or “tyranny,” let alone “terrorism.” He resists any comparison with today’s tormenting confrontations. “The Barbary Wars were primarily about trade, not theology,” he writes. “Rather than being holy wars, they were an extension of America’s War of Independence.”

Piracy arose because of the slave trade on one hand, and because Imperial navies around the world used pressed men, indentured servents. Piracy was the rebellion of the common man against his exploitation, they seized the ships, created a contract form of employment sharing the wealth between them, and ended up creating capitalist democracy on the high seas as Buckminister Fuller wrote in his book Operating Manul For Spaceship Earth

But back to the topic at hand Somali pirates. They are fishermen. Not terrorists. The piracy is the result of the anarchy and free market that is Somalia. But even more so it is the result of the poisioning of the coastal waters by giant shipping companies, poor environmental regulations, lack of UN policing, whereby dumping of toxic waste has devastated the fishing stocks. Fishing stocks that were overfished not by Somali's but by European trawlers. So overfishing and toxic dumping led to the Somali fishermen to take up piracy. In true pirate tradition they are more interested in the booty than harming the hostages. Whom they have exchanged for ransom. And they even have a Canadian connection.


With the world waiting and watching, one of the pirates calling himself Daybed spoke to the BBC via telephone from the Sirius Star. He says the pirates are not negotiating with the supertanker's owners, instead they're dealing with intermediaries and he insists they "cannot be trusted.

"DAYBED (translated): We're fully aware of the consequences, but the world has to realise the problems we're facing here at home. There's been no peace for 18 years, there's no life here. The last resource Somali's have is the sea, but foreign fishing trawlers have come here to plunder our fish. How can they allow the Somali people to die, it's not possible. This is what drove us to piracy, we have to do anything we can to survive. The lack of government causes problems, if we solve the problem with the government, everything would be solved.

Ex-Somali Army Colonel Mohamed Nureh Abdulle lives in Harardhere - the town closest to where the hijacked Saudi oil tanker, Sirius Star is moored. He tells the BBC, via phone from his home, that the town's residents are more concerned about the apparent dumping of toxic waste than piracy.
You know, our problem is not piracy. It is illegal dumping.
These problems have been going for sometime and the world knows about it. The Americans have been here in the region for a long time now - they know about the pollution.
Instead, no, the world is only talking about the pirates and the money involved.


Meanwhile, there has been something else going on and it has been going on for years. There are many dumpings made in our sea, so much rubbish.
It is dumped in our seas and it washes up on our coastline and spreads into our area.


Our community used to rely on fishing. But now no-one fishes. You see, a lot of foreign ships were coming and they were fishing heavily - their big nets would wipe out everything, even the fishermen's equipment. They could not compete.


THE PIRATE CAPITAL By David Pratt

IT was almost dusk and the sun was sinking on the horizon. A few hundred yards offshore, the freighter that had earlier dropped anchor was swarming with local Somali men. The ship's crew, however, were nowhere to be seen.
Some of the Somalis carried Kalashnikovs and stood guard, while others, like worker ants, busied themselves loading the ship's cargo on to barges that were then hauled to the beach by relays of sweating men pulling on ropes.
Noticing my curiosity, one of the staff at the tumbledown guesthouse in the port town of Merka where I was staying decided to offer an explanation as to what I was witnessing.
"Our coastguards," he said with a mischievous grin. "Some of them used to be fishermen, but today, with the war and no law or government, they have a more profitable catch," nodding towards the rusting hulk sitting offshore.
Until that moment, nothing I'd seen had struck me as being out of the ordinary. At Merka and other port towns along Somalia's coastline, ships often came close inshore to unload. As for the gunmen, Somalia was awash with weapons and arms smugglers. A few years ago, when I first went to the capital, Mogadishu, and visited its infamous "sky shooters" weapons market in the Bakara district, an AK-47 assault rifle cost a mere $150. Mortars, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns - all were readily available here.
As the ultimate "failed state", Somalia has been exposed to more than its fair share of man's evil ways. It has been neglected for years by the international community and let down by its fellow African nations. It is wracked with Islamic terrorism, suffering a largely ignored humanitarian crisis and is home to widespread organised crime, including the piracy that I witnessed in Merka that day that has now become a multi-million dollar business.
With their biggest hijacking yet last week, of an oil tanker, Somalia's pirates have suddenly drawn world attention to an ancient trade whose only recognisable modern-day practitioners until recently were Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl in the Pirates of the Caribbean Hollywood movie series.
There are now serious concerns over the fate of crew members taken hostage by the Somali pirates. There is considerable disquiet, too, on behalf of shipping companies over the huge losses incurred. But pressing as these questions are, there are others regarding Somalia itself that need addressing.
For a start, why is it that piracy has flourished here? Who are these ocean-going bandits and how has their trade affected the local communities? More significantly perhaps, to what extent if any, is this vast money-making criminal activity bound up with Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Shabab that daily tighten their grip on Somalia?


In this impoverished country long devoid of solid institutions or individuals worth looking up to, the pirates and in some cases even the insurgents have even become heroes with virtually celebrity status.
In pirate communities, the trophies gleaned from their trade sit brashly juxtaposed against the poverty. In pirate boom towns such as Harardhere, Eyl and Bosaso on Somalia's northern coast, along the breakaway Somali statelet of Puntland, sprawling new-build stone houses nestle next to shacks made of sticks and discarded plastic bags.
Like western urban drug barons, pirates cruise in luxury cars through unimaginable squalor. However, in these humid coastal dens, where life expectancy is just 46 years and a quarter of children die before they reach five, not everyone sees the pirates in a negative light.
"The pirates depend on us, and we benefit from them," said Sahra Sheik Dahir, a shop owner in Harardhere, the nearest village to where the hijacked Saudi Arabian supertanker Sirius Star is now anchored.
In these pirate-controlled areas of northern Somalia, people's hopes of a better future are firmly pinned on the prevailing maritime gangsterism.
"There are more shops and business is booming because of the piracy," said Sugule Dahir, who runs a clothing shop in Eyl. "Internet cafes and telephone shops have opened, and people are just happier than before."
In Harardhere, residents are said to have celebrated as the Sirius Star dropped anchor last week.
Businessmen gathered cigarettes, food and soft drinks, setting up kiosks for the pirates who come to shore to resupply almost daily.
"They always take things without paying and we put them into the book of debts," said Dahir. "When they get the ransom money, they pay us a lot."
Among the big men who run the pirate syndicates are an army of negotiators, spokesmen and accountants. The pirates take no chances with the cash, giving "clerks" the task of making sure the banknotes are not counterfeit, using machines like those housed in foreign exchange bureaux worldwide.
Ask Somalia's pirates why they turned to this lucrative trade and they will give a one-word answer: "Survival." They will tell of how, following the collapse of the government in 1991, their fishing grounds were opened to illegal harvesting by foreign fishing vessels from all corners of the world, and how the dumping of toxic waste destroyed so much of their livelihood. To some extent this is true, but some analysts argue it merely serves as a moral cover for their criminal activities.
More worrying perhaps is that the piracy trade might help fund and arm Islamic terrorists in the region.
Recent United Nations reports on arms smuggling in the Horn of Africa, suggest that groups like al-Shabab may have begun to use piracy as a means of bringing in arms or generating cash for weapons. But so far the evidence is sparse, and the pirates' commercial largesse seems directed mainly at those within their clan, families and friends.
Iqbal Jhazbhay, a Somali expert at the University of South Africa in Tshwane, said: "There may be some loose elements among the Islamist groups that have tie-ups with the pirates, because the movement is fractured into six or seven different groups, and each may have its own problems getting funding."
Somalia's recent history is in great part the tale of grave miscalculations made by foreigners in a very foreign land. Here the margins between death and survival are the narrowest imaginable. Given such unforgiving odds, is it really surprising that piracy is considered a sure bet to a better life?
"Regardless of how the money is coming in, legally or illegally, I can say it has started a life in our town," said Shamso Moalim, 36, a mother of five from Harardhere. "Our children are not worrying about food now, and they go to Islamic schools in the morning and play soccer in the afternoon. They are happy
."

SEE;
Somalia

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Monday, February 18, 2008

America Founded On Slaves And Servants

As part of Black History month let us go back to the original colonization of North America which was based upon the use of indentured servants from Europe who became rebellious and were replaced with slaves from Africa.

The history of North America, is the historical legacy of slavery. It is the dark side of American Exceptionalism.

Freemen who were black as well as European indentured servants would not win their rights until well into the 19th Century.

The myth of American freedom is that it was only freedom for those who could afford to pay for it. That is those who were forced to labour for others and paid their way out of bondage.



Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia (1705).


[
Robert Beverley was a Virginia planter who wrote a favorable account of the slave society that had developed in Virginia by the beginning of the eighteenth century.]


Of the Servants and Slaves in Virginia

50. Their Servants, they distinguish by the Names of Slaves for Life, and Servants for a time.

Slaves are the Negroes, and their Posterity, following the condition of the Mother, according to the Maxim, partus sequitur ventrem [status follows the womb]. They are call'd Slaves, in respect of the time of their Servitude, because it is for Life.

Servants, are those which serve only for a few years, according to the time of their Indenture, or the Custom of the Country. The Custom of the Country takes place upon such as have no Indentures. The Law in this case is, that if such Servants be under Nineteen years of Age, they must be brought into Court, to have their Age adjudged; and from the Age they are judg'd to be of, they must serve until they reach four and twenty: But if they be adjudged upwards of Nineteen, they are then only to be Servants for the term of five Years.

51. The Male-Servants, and Slaves of both Sexes, are employed together in Tilling and Manuring the Ground, in Sowing and Planting Tobacco, Corn, &c. Some Distinction indeed is made between them in their Cloaths, and Food; but the Work of both, is no other than what the Overseers, the Freemen, and the Planters themselves do.

Sufficient Distinction is also made between the Female-Servants, and Slaves; for a White Woman is rarely or never put to work in the Ground, if she be good for any thing else: And to Discourage all Planters from using any Women so, their Law imposes the heaviest Taxes upon Female Servants working in the Ground, while it suffers all other white Women to be absolutely exempted: Whereas on the other hand, it is a common thing to work a Woman Slave out of Doors; nor does the Law make any Distinction in her Taxes, whether her Work be Abroad, or at Home.

52. Because I have heard how strangely cruel, and severe, the Service of this Country is represented in some parts of England; I can't forbear affirming, that the work of their Servants, and Slaves, is no other than what every common Freeman do's. Neither is any Servant requir'd to do more in a Day, than his Overseer. And I can assure you with a great deal of Truth, that generally their Slaves are not worked near so hard, nor so many Hours in a Day, as the Husbandmen, and Day-Labourers in England. An Overseer is a Man, that having served his time, has acquired the Skill and Character of an experienced Planter, and is therefore intrusted with the Direction of the Servants and Slaves.

But to compleat this account of Servants, I shall give you a short Relation of the care their Laws take, that they be used as tenderly as possible.

By the Laws of their Country.

1. All Servants whatsoever, have their Complaints heard without Fee, or Reward; but if the Master be found Faulty, the charge of the. Complaint is cast upon him, otherwise the business is done ex Officio.

2. Any Justice of Peace may receive the Complaint of a Servant, and order every thing relating thereto, till the next County-Court, where it will be finally determin'd.

3. All Masters are under the Correction, and Censure of the County-Courts, to provide for their Servant-, good and wholsme Diet, Clothing, and Lodging.

4. They are always to appear, upon the first Notice given of the Complaint of their Servants, otherwise to forfeit the Service of them, until they do appear.

5. All Servants Complaints are to be receiv'd at any time in Court, without Process, and shall not be delay'd for want of Form; but the Merits of the Complaint must be immediately inquir'd into by the Justices; and if the Master cause any delay therein, the Court may remove such Servants, if they see Cause, until the Master will come to Tryal.

6. If a Master shall at any time disobey an Order of Court, made upon any Complaint of a Servant; the Court is impower'd to remove such Servant forthwith to another Master, who will be kinder; Giving to the former Master the produce only, (after Fees deducted) of what such Servants shall be sold for by Publick Outcry.

7. If a Master should be so cruel, as to use his Servant ill, that is fallen Sick, or Lame in his Service, and thereby render'd unfit for Labour, be must be remov'd by the Church-Wardens out of the way of such Cruelty, and boarded in some good Planter's House, till the time of his Freedom, the charge of which must be laid before the next County-Court, which has power to levy the same from time to time, upon the Goods and Chattels of the Master; After which, the charge of such Boarding is to come upon the Parish in General.

8. All hired Servants are entitled to these Priviledges.

9. No Master of a Servant, can make a new Bargain for Service, or other Matter with his Servant, without the privity and consent of a Justice of Peace, to prevent the Master's Over-reaching, or scareing such Servant into an unreasonable Complyance.

10. The property of all Money and Goods sent over thither to Servants, or carry'd in with them; is reserv'd to themselves, and remain intirely at their disposal.

11. Each Servant at his Freedom, receives of his Master fifteen Bushels of Corn, (which is sufficient for a whole year) and two new Suits of Cloaths, both Linnen and Woollen; and then becomes as free in all respects, and as much entituled to the Liberties, and Priviledges of the Country, as any other of the Inhabitants or Natives are.

12. Each Servant has then also a Right to take up fifty Acres of Land, where he can find any unpatented: But that is no great Privilege, for any one may have as good a right for a piece of Eight.

This is what the Laws prescribe in favour of Servants, by which you may find that the Cruelties and Severities imputed to that Country, are an unjust reflection. For no People more abhor the thoughts of such Usage, than Virginians, nor take more precaution to prevent it.


Source: Robert Beverley,
The History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705). Some spelling has been modernized.

ECONOMIC HISTORY
OF
VIRGINIA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

AN INQUIRY INTO THE MATERIAL CONDITION OF
THE PEOPLE, BASED UPON ORIGINAL AND
CONTEMPORANEOUS RECORDS

BY

PHILIP ALEXANDER BRUCE

Author of “The Plantation Negro as a Freeman,” and Corresponding Secretary of the Virginia Historical Society

In Two Volumes

New York
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND LONDON

1896

All rights reserved

The term “servant” has been misinterpreted in modern times in the light of the menial signification which the expression has gradually acquired.[3] The members of this class in Virginia in the seventeenth century included all who had bound themselves under the provisions of an agreement, embodied in a formal legal document, or, in the absence of an indenture, according to the universal custom of the country, which had the force and sanctity of law, to continue for a prescribed time in another’s employment. The term was applied not only to those who had contracted to work as agricultural laborers, or as artisans and mechanics, but also to those who were seeking to obtain, under articles of apprenticeship, a knowledge of one of the learned professions. In 1626, Richard Townsend, in a suit of law against Dr. John Pott on the ground that Dr. Pott had not instructed him in the apothecary’s art according to the conditions of his indenture, described himself as the servant of that physician, who was so distinguished in the early history of Virginia.[4] Nor did the term necessarily imply an humble social origin. Adam Thoroughgood, a man of wealth and influence in the Colony towards the middle of the seventeenth century, and who was referred to as “gentleman” in the patents he sued out,[5] a designation to which he was entitled not only on account of his general character and position, but by his social connections in England, came to Virginia as an apprentice or servant. In making his will in 1666, Sir Robert Peake, a well-known citizen of London, devised three hundred pounds sterling to George Lyddall, his cousin, at that time in Virginia, to whom he alludes as his “sometime servant.”[6]

The larger proportion of the servants in Virginia in the seventeenth century who were imported into the Colony after being guilty of offences against the law in England, were simply men who had taken part in various rebellious movements. This class of population, so far from always belonging to a low station in their native country, frequently represented the most useful and respectable elements in the kingdom from which they came; it was no crime for Irishmen to defend their soil against the tyrannical intrusion of Cromwell, or for disaffected Englishmen and Scotchmen to rise up against the harsh and cruel measures of Charles II and James II. It was the men who loved their homes and were devoted to their church that led these movements, and their followers, in spite of ignorance and poverty, shared their courage, their steadfastness, and their patriotism.

The fact that so few conspiracies were hatched among the laborers bound by articles of indenture is to be attributed not only to the fair treatment which, as a rule, they received from their masters, but also to the comparative brevity of the time for which all whose ages exceeded nineteen, among whom alone a plot was likely to be formed, were required to serve. It was entirely natural that the older members of this class should have been disposed to endure much that was harsh or repugnant to their wishes in the expectation of the early ending of their terms, rather than plunge into secret schemes that exposed them to the risk of certain death in the event of detection. There seems to have been a seditious feeling in York in 1661, and its display was considered to be sufficiently serious to justify the authorities in warning the magistrates and heads of families in that county to punish all discourse among those in their employment tending to a popular tumult.[56] The conspiracy of 1663, to which reference has been made already, had a religious and political object in view. Only a few servants appear to have been included among those implicated in it. The Cromwellian soldiers, reduced to the condition of common laborers, doubtless smarted with the sense of degradation, but beyond all this, there was a hope that the status of the English Protectorate might by their bravery and resolution be restored in the Colony.[57] The discovery of this plot led to the passage of severe laws in repression of the sinister meetings of servants. They were forbidden to come together in considerable numbers on Sunday, a day on which they had been allowed entire rest, and the same rule was also probably applicable to all recognized holidays. By the custom prevailing in the Colony, the laborers were granted not only the Sabbath and the usual holidays observed in England, but also the greater part of every Saturday.[58] Apart from the hours of night, there were many occasions when they were wholly at leisure, and if there had existed any disposition to conspiracy among them, the opportunity would not have been lacking. In the period of great depression following the collapse of the Rebellion of 1676, there was imminent danger of an open insurrection on the part of the servants, but if it had occurred, the motive would have been not merely impatience of the landowners’ authority but apprehension of famine. The feeling died out when relief had been obtained.

Among so large a body of laborers, it is not remarkable that there should have been many instances of resistance to masters. One of the earliest petitions presented to the General Assembly in 1619, the first legislature convening in the Colony, was that of Captain Powell, who desired to have his servant punished for falling into grossly insubordinate conduct. The petitioner was empowered to place this servant in the pillory for a period of four days, to nail his ears to the post, and to give him a public whipping on each day included in his sentence.[59] The severe punishment inflicted in this case does not appear to have been repeated in later times. The person who was found guilty of offering resistance either to his master, or to the overseer who was appointed to supervise him, was compelled to continue in the same employment two years beyond the expiration of the term for which he was bound either by indenture or the custom of the country.[60] If the spirit of insubordination which he exhibited rendered him dangerous, he could, upon complaint, be committed to jail, a bond being given by his owner that the charge would be pressed to a trial. During the imprisonment, the master was required to support the servant, five pounds of tobacco being paid to the sheriff to cover the expense of each twenty-four hours of detention.[61]

At each county seat there was a whipping-post, and this mode of punishment was frequently used as a substitute for the jail. The servant condemned to the lash was delivered to the sheriff to be publicly chastised as a warning to all who were similarly disposed, and afterwards returned to the plantation to which he or she might be attached. The master had a right to whip a delinquent with his own hands if unwilling to put himself to the inconvenience of sending him to a magistrate for that purpose.[62] When the servant had shown on any occasion the desire to inflict injury on any one not his employer, the latter might be ordered, in the discretion of the court, to furnish a bond that his servant would keep the peace.[63] Should a servant be guilty of murder or an attempt to kill, six men were summoned from the neighborhood where he lived whose names were put at the head of the panel. By the jury thus formed he was tried, and if convicted, was sentenced to be imprisoned or hanged, according to the circumstances of his crime.[64] Aggravated cases of robbery were doubtless punished with severity, but small offences like hog-stealing, especially when the person who suffered was the master, exposed the offender as a rule only to the pains of a public or private whipping.[65] In some cases, in addition to public chastisement, he was compelled by order of court to continue in the same employment for a term of two years after the expiration of the time upon which he had agreed.[66] It not infrequently happened that in condonation for the most serious forms of robbery, a servant bound himself upon the conclusion of the period covered by his indenture to enter into a second indenture by which he agreed to serve a second period.[67] Whoever induced a man of this class to dispose of his master’s property by stealth, more particularly when the tempter became the beneficiary of the theft, was compelled to suffer imprisonment for a month and to restore four times the value of the articles which had been carried off.[68]

In the Assembly of 1619, a law was passed that provided that the servant should receive a whipping for every oath he uttered, and should afterwards confess his guilt in the parish church when the congregation had convened for religious services. There is no record of this statute having been repealed.[69] The regulation imposing a fine of tobacco upon all freemen who had been heard to swear was steadily enforced, and there is no reason why there should have been any relaxation of the special punishment inflicted for the same offence upon those in their employment.


CHAPTER XI

SYSTEM OF LABOR: THE SLAVE

One of the most serious drawbacks to the employment of indented laborers was the inevitable frequency of change attending this form of service. In a few years, as soon as the time for which the servant had been bound under the articles of his contract or by the custom of the country had come to an end, his place had to be supplied by another person of the same class. Whenever a planter brought in a laborer at his own expense, or purchased his term from the local or foreign merchant who had transported him to the Colony, the planter was compelled to bear in mind the day when he would no longer have a right to claim the benefit of his servant’s energies because his control over him had expired by limitation. He might introduce a hundred willing laborers, who might prove invaluable to him during the time covered by their covenants, but in a few years, when experience had made them efficient, and their bodies had become thoroughly enured to the change of climate, they recovered their freedom, and, if they felt the inclination to do so, as the great majority naturally did, were at liberty to abandon his estate and begin the cultivation of tobacco on their own account, or follow the trades in which they had been educated. Unless the planter had been careful to make provision against their departure by the importation of other laborers, he was left in a helpless position without men to tend or reap his crops or to widen the area of his new grounds. It was not simply the desire to become an owner of a great extent of land that prompted the Virginian in the seventeenth century to bring in successive bands of persons whose transportation entitled him to a proportionate number of head rights. Perhaps in a majority of cases, his object was to obtain laborers whom he might substitute for those whose terms were on the point of expiring. It was this constantly recurring necessity, which must have been the source of much anxiety and annoyance as well as heavy pecuniary outlay, that led the planters to prefer youths to adults among the imported English agricultural servants, for while their physical strength might have been less, yet the periods for which they were bound extended over a longer time.

It can be readily seen that from this economic point of view, the slave was a far more desirable form of property than the white servant. His term was for life, not for a few years. There was no solicitude as to how his place was to be filled, for he belonged to his Master as long as he lived, and when he died he generally left behind him a family of children who were old enough to furnish valuable aid in the tobacco fields. In physical strength he was the equal of the white laborer of the same age, and in power of endurance he was the superior. Whilst some of the negroes imported into the Colony, more especially those snatched directly from a state of freedom in Africa, were doubtless in some measure difficult to manage, the slaves as a rule were docile and tractable, and, when natives of Virginia, not disposed to rebel against the condition of life in which they found themselves. Not only were they more easily controlled than the white servants, but they also throve on plainer fare and were satisfied with humbler lodgings. Nor were they subject to seasoning, a cause of serious loss in the instance of the white laborers. Moreover, they could not demand the grain and clothing which the custom of the country had prescribed in favor of the white servants at the close of their terms, and which constituted an important drain upon the resources of the planters. It is true that the master was required to provide for his slave in old age when he could make no return because incapable of further effort, but the expense which this entailed was insignificant.

It would appear for these reasons that even in the seventeenth century, the labor of slaves after the heavy outlay in securing it had been met, was cheaper than the labor of indented white servants,[1] although the latter class of persons stood upon the same footing as the former as long as their terms continued. This was the opinion of men who had resided in the Colony for many years, and enjoyed the fullest opportunity of observing the operation of the local system of agriculture. The wastefulness of slave labor, which has always been considered to be the most serious drawback attached to it as compared with free labor, was of smaller importance in that age than when the whole area of Virginia had been divided into separate plantations, and the extent of the untouched soil had become limited to a degree demanding more skilful and more careful methods in the cultivation of the ground. In the seventeenth century, there was no element of wealth so abundant as the new lands covered by the fertile mould which had been accumulating on their surface for many thousand years. The planter availed himself of their productiveness in reckless haste, soon reducing the rich loam to barrenness, but in doing so he was pursuing a more profitable course and a more economical plan than if he had endeavored to restore the original quality of the soil. If it had been possible to obtain domestic or imported manures at a small expense, it would still have been cheaper in the end, the volume of the annual crop being considered, to extend the clearings and to leave nature to bring back the abandoned fields to their primæval excellence. The Virginian planter of the seventeenth century was apparently the greatest of agricultural spendthrifts, but in reality he was only adapting himself to surrounding conditions, which were the reverse of those prevailing in the mother country, where art had to be called in to preserve the ground from the destructive effect of long-continued tillage. Introduced into the Colony where the first principle of agriculture was to abuse because the virgin lands were unlimited in quantity, the institution of slavery was not lessened in value from an industrial point of view by the fact that it did not promote economical methods in the use of the soil.



SEE:

Black History Month Posts

MLK Day

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

The Era Of The Common Man



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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

History Of Slave Ships


Atlantic Historian (history of the sea and colonization) Marcus Rediker, who authored the 'must read ' The Many Headed Hydra, has a new book out on Slave Ships since this is the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the end of Slavery.

For capitalism to expand, forced conscripted labour would be replaced with a new form of exploitation; wage slavery. Which itself was evolving from both indentured servitude and slavery during this period.

Rediker takes a libertarian socialist view of the Atlantic trade and its importance in the creation of global capitalism continuing the social/labour history tradition developed by E.P. Thompson in creating approachable and readable works.




Over more than three centuries, more than 12 million Africans were loaded on ships, bound for the Americas to be slaves.

Aboard the slaver, or Guineaman, as the vessels were also known, the kidnapped Africans frequently had to travel in living quarters as cramped as coffins, and suffered savage beatings, outright torture and death to quell uprisings and forced dancing to keep them fit.

While the plantation system and other aspects of slavery have been widely studied, the history of the slave ship itself is largely unknown, says historian Marcus Rediker, author of "The Slave Ship — A Human History."

"What I'm basically interested in is how captains, ship captains, officers, sailors and the slave interacted with the slave ship. What was the actual reality? Of course, it was quite horrifying," said Rediker, a University of Pittsburgh history professor. "In many respects, the development of the Americas through slavery and the plantation system is unthinkable without the slave ship."

For a couple hundred years, most people thought they knew what happened during the Atlantic crossing, Rediker says. Abolitionists had produced evidence of life aboard slave ships, but many scholars were suspicious of what they'd gathered, thinking it propaganda.

Perhaps the most significant reason for lack of scholarship, he says, is an assumption that "history happens on land, that the landed masses of the world are the real places and that the seas in between are a kind of void."

Marcus Rediker escapes the 'the violence of abstraction' in this history of slave ships that richly mines the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves.

But, as promised, this account of life aboard the "vast machines" is not told with charts and tables. The slave ship, as a floating factory, prison and weapon, was recognized by all as a world-altering technology. Rediker's sources include parliamentary hearings, abolitionist pamphlets and the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves. Chained below decks aboard what some imagined were "houses with wings," Africans were already, according to Rediker, forging new communities.

The slave ship ranged in size and design from 11-ton sloops, capable of carrying 30 slaves, to 566-ton behemoths, capable of carrying 700 to 800 slaves. Such variety belies the slow pace of innovation within the trade. In spite of its centrality to European ventures abroad, the great minds of the Enlightenment added to the slave ship -- over the course of 100 years -- copper-sheathed hulls (to protect against shipworm), ventilation and netting to catch those who tried to jump overboard. Liberté, égalité and fraternité came separately.

Much of Rediker's book also concerns the lives of sailors, the trade's "white slaves." Many were compelled to sea by debt, others by trickery. Half were cut down within months by West Africa's endemic parasites. Those who survived disease had to endure the cruelty of captains driven mad by profit. Some escaped, only to be caught and sold by African traders. Others became pirates. But all were lucky compared with the chronically ill, penniless sailors who, cheated of wages and their passage home, littered 18th-century ports from Kingston to Charleston.

Rediker looks not at that bigger picture but at the slave ship itself, as a microeconomy where the captain was chief executive, jailer, accountant, paymaster and disciplinarian, exercising these roles by maintaining, from his spacious captain's cabin in a very unspacious ship, the mystique of what later military leaders would call command isolation. Slave ships are, after all, a far larger part of our history than we like to think. Our normal picture of an 18th-century sailing vessel is of one filled with hopeful immigrants. But before 1807, ships carried well over three times as many enslaved Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans.

Not only was the business a booming one, it was, until pesky abolitionists started making a fuss in the 1780s, considered highly respectable, as central to the Atlantic economy as is something like oil today. "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is," wrote James Houston, who worked for a firm of 18th-century slave merchants. "It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves." John Newton, who later wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace," spent part of his youth as a slave-ship captain and believed that because of the long periods of time at sea, there was no calling that afforded "greater advantages to an awakened mind, for promoting the life of God in the soul."

Slave ships were death ships for crew and captives
Monday, October 01, 2007

The typical slave ship began its life as a merchant vessel, and was refitted later for its grim purpose.

The primary remodeling, which often occurred on the outward leg of the voyage, was to build walls below decks to separate men and women, and then build horizontal platforms halfway between the first and second decks on which to stack the slaves.

The height between the first and second deck usually was only about 5 feet before the remodeling, said Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh history professor and author of "The Slave Ship: A Human History." Once the platforms were built, headroom was about 21/2 feet.

"This produced crowding of a kind that is almost incomprehensible," he said. "One of the things that struck almost everybody about a slave ship was the stench of it.

"It was said in Charleston, S.C., that when the wind was blowing off the water a certain way you could smell a slave ship before you could see it. It was a function of sickness, vomit, diarrhea, death and also the way the human body perspires in the condition of fear."

And while it is true that some slave ship seamen joined the crew because they were sadistic or wanted sexual access to African women, many of them were victimized almost as badly as the slaves, Dr. Rediker said.

"One of the great mysteries I wanted to explore was how sailors were recruited to slave ships when they knew the conditions were going to be horrible and the death rates were going to be high."

He discovered that in many cases, ship captains would get sailors to run up debts in taverns, and then would pay off the tavern owners with some of the sailor's advance wages in return for the sailor being handed over to work on the crew.

Slave ship captains also would offer sailors advance wages worth $800 to $1,200 in today's money or to pay part of the sailors' salaries to their wives once a week.

Once they were onboard, many crewmen were treated almost as brutally as the slaves. For a huge variety of infractions, they were whipped, chained, denied food, stabbed and even shot.

In fact, the death rate among slave ship crews was almost as high as among the slaves, Dr. Rediker said, and hit 5 percent even on the healthiest of voyages.


The slave trade was required to create vast accumulations of capital. And it is directly tide to British expansion and so called Free Trade.

People in Norfolk are about to have their eyes opened to the county's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

If you think of the trade in enslaved Africans using British ships, Liverpool, Bristol and London spring to mind. But project historian Richard Maguire is about to shock Norfolk people with the deep links he has unearthed concerning the role the county played in the trade - and its abolition.

His research culminates in an exhibition at the Norfolk Record Office at County Hall from Monday.

He said: “The original idea was to look at something that was never looked at before - Norfolk's connections to transatlantic slavery.

“People have always tended to assume that the slave trade was exclusive to Liverpool, Bristol and London. But research we have done at the Record Office has revealed there to be a goldmine of information relating to Norfolk. Norfolk was connected at all levels of the trade - slave ships left King's Lynn for Africa, county people owned slaves and invested in plantations and traded slaves from here. But on the other hand Norfolk people from the 1780s onwards were equally involved in calling for the end of the slave trade.

“We are trying to give people an understanding of part of the history that nobody knew about before.”

The exhibition also reveals black people have lived in Norfolk since the 17th century. Documents on show reveal that a black man lived in King's Lynn in 1673, a black woman Rachel was baptised in Diss in 1799, and Elizabeth Buxton, from Stradsett, left £10 to her black servant in her will of 1729. Other documents reveal the inhumane treatment slaves received from owners, and a list of the enslaved people on the Hanson Plantation, Barbados, owned by Sir John Berney of Kirby Bedon Hall, lists black people as stock alongside cattle.

And in a related story a freedom ship may be at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

A fantastic story is unfolding along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Indiana.

It involves a 150 year old shipwreck, a Porter County Historian, fugitive slaves and The Underground Railroad.

Legend has it a wooden schooner would stop on the shore in Indiana to pick up fugitive slaves and take them to Chicago where they would hide on ships bound for freedom in Canada.

After the 1850 Compromise was passed it became dangerous to help escaped slaves even in free states like Illinois and Indiana.

According to the law you could be prosecuted, fined and even thrown in jail. The mysterious ship met with a tragic fate.

Now a team of researchers is racing against time and the elements to solve this mystery and prove this was the legendary ship used to smuggle fugitive slaves to freedom.
Again the idea of piracy and privateers arising from the Atlantic Slave trade to become the basis of capitalism in the new world plays an important role later in the industrial revolution created by the American Civil war.

Just as it is important today in the creation of what Phillip Bobbitt calls the New Market State. Which we see in the rise of gang (pirate) controlled countries like Somalia and Jamaica.

Piracy was the origin of capitalism as it evolved within the declining feudal economies of Europe.

The history of capital is not merely the history of wealth accumulated by a few families who hand it down, it is the history of the worlds wealth created by slavery, indentured servitude, serfdom and its transition through the creation of labour saving machinery to replace the degradation of humans to become the degradation of work.

See:

Abolishing Slavery In Canada

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Jamestown; the beginning of Globalization

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Black Like Me

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism;William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics



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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

In searching for a pithy definition of Fete Accompli I came across this in Wikipedia.

Like Stephen Harper here is another Tory politician Quebecers liked; Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

But unlike Harper his motto was; if elected I will not serve. Which meant they liked him a lot.


While active with the New Zealand Company, Edward Gibbon had maintained his interest in Canadian affairs. He was involved with the North American Colonial Association of Ireland, NACAI. At his instigation, the NACAI were trying to purchase a large estate just outside Montreal where they wanted to establish another Colonial settlement. Edward Gibbon pushed the scheme with his usual energy; apparently, the government did not object in principle but they strenuously objected to Edward Gibbon having any part of it.

But trusted or not by the politicians, Edward Gibbon was involved in the scheme. The NACAI sent him back to Canada as their representative; he arrived in Montreal in January of 1842 and stayed in Canada for about a year. At this stage , Canada was still coming to terms with the union of Upper and Lower Canada. There were serious differences between the French and English Canadians with the English Canadians holding the political clout. Edward Gibbon skillfully manipulated these differences; it was fairly easy for him to get the support of the French Canadians. By the end of that year he had got himself elected to the Canadian Parliament. It is perhaps typical of Edward Gibbon that, having been elected, he immediately returned to Britain and never took up his seat.

He went back to Canada in 1843 and spent some months there. However when he heard of his brother Arthur's death at the Wairau Affray, he immediately quit Canada and never returned. This appears to be the end of his involvement with Canadian affairs except that he was paid about twenty thousand pounds by the NACAI for his work in Canada. As always with Edward Gibbon, principles and profit seemed to go neatly together.


Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a scoundrel and a cad, a free land advocate, a realitor , opposed to the British Mercantile State Monopoly, and thus he was not trusted by them.
Despite being in business with them in forming colonies as their real estate agent.

Competing schemes of colonial emigration with different implications for equality were promoted to create more consumers of British manufactured goods and producers of food. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plans were designed to recreate in British North America the inequalities associated with labour’s divorce from capital as necessary for social and economic development, but others sought the same end by means of the greater social equality that came from reuniting labour with capital. The poor and dispossessed in Britain who produced and consumed little could be transformed into agrarian property-holders in colonial societies dominated by such petty producers. A degree of inequality would persist, but the resulting colonial societies were far more egalitarian and therefore socially and politically democratic than Britain itself. In such a social context, nineteenth-century liberalism—its celebration of independence and equation of individual economic success with virtue—seemed especially plausible to contemporaries.


Herr Doctor Professor Karl Marx outlines the origin of American Libertarianism, that shocked Wakefield; its exceptionalism as a free soil political economy, not a capitalist one. America was a truly free market economy as long as land was held as a public trust for private use.

As a commercial colonizer Wakefield was shocked his experiment had failed. It had not created a capitalist colony bound to the Mother Country, rather it had given free men, free land. But then again he was an idle speculator, a salesman of colonies for his masters.

And so in desperation as Marx points out Wakefield offers his masters a solution to end the free labour republic, taxation, expropriation of the land by the State and then selling it back to free men at such a high cost they have to become wage slaves instead of independent landowning producers.

This then is the secret of the political economy of Capitalism. That it must destroy the real free market by imposition of Statist taxation for capital accumulation. America as a colonial experiment had evolved into a Republic of Free Labour and Free Soil, something that most American Libertarians acknowledge as their exceptionalism. But this was too much for Old World capitalism and it needed a State that would tax property and then sell it off to the highest bidder. That as Marx says and they would concur;

that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.


While vulgar liberaltarians leave out the capitalist and simply decry the State and Taxation as the villains genuine American descendants of the libertarian independent producers would embrace instead the ideal of the cooperative commonwealth as a way of challenging the State and its taxation of their 'public property'.

It is ironic that Marx who is assaulted as a statist by the right would embrace the libertarian ideal that the truly independent producer is also the owner of his own property, that is land. But as Marx says the secret to this form of private property is its communal ownership as public property of the producers.


It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonization.” First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.

“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of laborers for hire.” So long, therefore, as the laborer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage-laborers, essential to these, is wanting.

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labor very dear, as respects the laborer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labor at any price.”

As in the colonies the separation of the laborer from the conditions of labor and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, not the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labor in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?

But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country, because many laborers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labor-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labor falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-laborer as wage-laborer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage-laborers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labor-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-laborer remain indecently low. The wage-laborer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage-labor, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labor is always not only small but uncertain.” “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the laborer be large, the laborer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” The laborers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labor. It avails him nothing, is he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be laborers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labor-market.” Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient laborers — for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilized countries the laborer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”

What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth. The parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundation of combined labor. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment, for the working-class constitutes its living appurtennce, always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” laborers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labor which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retraining the labor of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”

After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labor with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural laborer is miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labor employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the laborer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.” But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.

How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also — the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labor by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage-labor market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonization.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labor must be constant and regular, because, first, as no laborer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant laborers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more laborers; secondly, because every laborer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labor to the colony.” The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the laborers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.” This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage-labor market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more laborers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labor-market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.

However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.




See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

War and the Market State




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