Direct Slavery & Modernity by Karl Marx

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#16, JUNE-AUGUST/2015

Slavery is an economic category as well as any other. . . . being understood that it is only a question of direct slavery, of the slavery of the blacks in the East, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilization. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.

-excerpted from Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy,(Prometheus Books, 1847, 1995) p.121