Marx uses slavery as an example of this approach. As an economic category, what are its “good” and its “bad” sides. The bad sides are fairly obvious, in terms of its inhumanity and cruelty, though also could be mentioned its inefficiency. Marx concentrates on the “good” side, referring to the direct slavery in the Americas, and not the slavery that still existed in disguised form (and still does) in all societies, and not to wage slavery.
Without slavery, there would have been no large supply of cotton, and with no large supply of cotton no capitalist textile production, in Britain, without which there would have been no industrial revolution, and development of industrial capitalism. Slavery is what gave the colonies value, and spurred on colonialism, which was the basis of the vast increase in world trade, without which capitalist production could not have developed. It created the basis of a world economy.
“Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.” (p 104)
Engels notes that this was true when written in 1847, but obviously did not apply later, when the capitalist production it engendered, itself wrought changes to global material conditions. In 1847, the Northern US states largely produced food for the slave states. Cotton and tobacco was exported to Europe, and Europe exported industrial products and migrants to the US. Its only after the industrial revolution in the North that this changed.
Northern industrial capital required a centralised state, as with the nation states in Europe. The existing arrangement, whereby the individual states retained considerable autonomy conflicted with that requirement, and was the real reason for the Civil War. As Engels notes,
“It was only when the North produced corn and meat for export and also became an industrial country, and when the American cotton monopoly had to face powerful competition, in India, Egypt, Brazil, etc., that the abolition of slavery became possible. And even then this led to the ruin of the South, which did not succeed in replacing the open Negro slavery by the disguised slavery of Indian and Chinese coolies.” (Note *, p 104)
Slavery had always been an important economic category, therefore, Marx says, and bourgeois nations had only disguised it within their own societies, by imposing it openly in their colonies. As I have set out previously, the US Marxist sociologist, Oliver Cromwell Cox, argued that this is the basis of racism. He notes that, in pre-bourgeois society, there is no presumption of equality. Quite the opposite. Society is seen as naturally consisting of different social estates, ranks and castes, and the inequality of those one to another is presumed. A natural order from God to absolute monarch, to princes, through to lower orders, including serfs and slaves is assumed.
So, for example, in the Roman Empire, being black was no obstacle to being a free citizen, and being white no guarantee of not being a slave. Cox refers to the example of Portugal where it was quite common for black slaves, employed in the households of wealthy families to marry the widow when the husband died. It is only the ideology of bourgeois society, and its claims of universal freedom and equality, necessary as the basis both of the bourgeoisie sloughing off the shackles of feudal monopoly and privilege, and liberating itself, but also as the foundation of free trade, and the exchange of equals, that it must find an explanation for its use of slavery, as an open contradiction of those principles. It does so by claiming that “some” people are not equal, are “sub-human”.
So, Marx asks,
“What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.” (p 104)
This is also the approach of petty-bourgeois moral socialism, and of social-democracy. The latter does not seek to abolish capitalism, seeing the contradictory interests of capital and labour as resolvable by negotiation – which flows inevitably from the social function of the professional middle class, as intermediaries between capital and labour, whether as day to day managers, trades union bureaucrats, or civil servants. Social-democracy seeks to retain the “good” side of imperialism/monopoly capitalism, in its advanced development of the productive forces, greater planning and regulation of society (again important with its social function), and so on, but to do away with its “bad” side, manifest in periodic crises, and the consequent misery. It does not even seek to reduce levels of gross inequality, as seen in the comments not only of Peter Mandelson, but also of Chinese Stalinist bureaucrats.
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