Hello everyone, welcome to Theory Thursday! This is a community led project, the point of these posts is to read about 30 minutes of theory every Thursday. Then we discuss with fellow comrades the contents of the reading. This week’s topic we are covering Fredrick Engels’ The Principles of Communism, parts 1-13.
The reading: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
Discussion
- What was bad about the text?
- What was good about the text?
- Overall, how can we apply this reading to our current conditions?
Next week we will be discussing parts 14-25 of the text. Have a good week comrades, until next time!
I don’t think your analysis of the slave-proletariat comparison is quite what is meant by Engels here. Individual slaves that managed to escape did not have a good time, and in most cases did not make it very far. In the US, there were laws in place that mandated all free citizens to aid in the capture and return of escaped slaves and even if someone wanted to be an innocent bystander, they could be charged as helping the slaves escape. Slave relation were very much class relations - take a look at the Santo Domingo/Haiti revolution for example.
I made a comment on the cross-posted version of this post which includes some discussion of the slave-proletarian comparison which you can check out: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/925271
Good point. I read your reply there, but thought it more relevant to reply here. I was grasping a bit to try and understand that one. It is such a small and early section for such a large, varied and recent development in the larger economy. There were some forms of slaves getting their freedom individually though, and it was even somewhat common for slaves in Saint Domingue to not only get their freedom and become either peasants, craftspeople or even land/slaveowners themselves. And in other colonies with greater numbers of slaves, Maroons also formed parallel societies to that of the coloniser. The USA is a bit of a weird one for slave societies because they had a way higher amount of indentured servants or otherwise white workers compared to most Atlantic colonies, so they could enforce their racist laws with more effect.
I guess what I meant there was that slaves and their associated labour are individual property subjected to the whims of their single owner, while that of the proletarian is collectively dominated by the entire capitalist class of a society with no formal sale of workers between proletarians needed. I’m not sure if Engels meant that as I’ve not read much from him specifically on slavery, that was just my crackpot interpretation and I’ll trust you there.
Edit: posted by accident, fixed now.
Certainly, but I don’t think these played nearly as much of a role as class struggle and legal abolishment of slavery, even if the condition of recently freed slaves was on average hardly better than while they were slaves. In the US especially, they were still barred from owning property and were more or less forced into indentured servitude or similar relationships.
I admit, I don’t have much knowledge on specific circumstances of slaves in colonies other than the US. The US did have lots of white indentures servants, but they were still treated better than black slaves or even free black people. Even with their contradictory talk of liberty while holding slaves, the laws the US enacted in fear of slave uprisings sometimes ended up limiting what the slave owners themselves could do with their slaves. Not only were free black people prevented from organizing in all ways - even talking on the street among free black people was dangerous at times, education of black people, slave or free, was forbidden because it was seen as dangerous - even when slave owners wanted to educate their slaves, they couldn’t. Other laws also affected slave owners limiting what they could do with their slaves and enforcing certain things as mandatory, especially when it came to harsh punishments. Laws forbidding race mixing also prevented slave owners from recognizing any children they had with slaves which they might’ve wanted to recognize and limits were placed on individual slave owners from freeing their slaves. In their panic and fear of slave uprisings, the “liberty loving” slave owners created a society where even their own freedoms were limited.
Yeah, I understand that that was the case with the USA, which is probably the slave country Engels was most acquainted with. But in other southern colonies freed slaves often still managed to get the right to property and sometimes became prominent and even racist themselves. Toussaint himself had been a prominent freedman in Saint Domingue before the revolution, and slave countries often had a separate “race” called “mulatto/mestizo” to designate people with both white and black ascendency. I mentioned the indentured servants there because they and future proletarians and craftspeople made such a big portion of the population as white people, compared to other slave colonies that had upwards of 60% of their population be black and/or slave. If I were to hazard a guess, that would be one of the reasons why the Settler States of Amerika managed to both pass and maintain so many explicitly racist laws, with a explicitly racist police force and constitution without immediately getting consumed in fiery revolution.
Yes, it’s a factor for sure. Another is the fact that the US was from the start designed to be a racial state, and with the genocide of the natives and the stealing of the land, the enslavement of black people, and a constant influx of white settlers from Europe who were allowed to participate in the “white democracy” at least partially, the racial lines were firmly established and persisted even long after the military defeat of the Southern states in the civil war. Similar racial states were also South Africa and Rhodesia, for example, which also managed to keep their racial regimes longer than most other former colonial states.