The Slave Trade and the Primitive Accumulation of Capital
Slavery, the slave trade and the compensation paid to the slave owners by the British state helped kick-start the industrial revolution. "Primitive capital accumulation" Marx called it.
Abolition of slavery came only after three centuries of the slave trade. And when it was ended, the equivalent of £13bn in today's money was given by the British government to indemnify 3,000 slave owning families. Nothing went to victims or their families. Private property - which slaves were - was sacrosanct and had to be compensated for.
Post Brexit imperialism wants to play down slavery. British politicians from Gordon Brown through to David Cameron and Jacob Rees Mogg insist politicians and historians should stop apologising for Britain's imperial past and "celebrate" its achievements.
Socialists have no interest in the future resting place of the statue of Edward Colston. Nor have we an interest, unlike Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, in the class he represented. The real interest of socialists is the issue of racism in the Twenty First century. Racism is class-divisive and has to be opposed. Our socialist opposition to racism is set out in the fourth clause of our 1904 Declaration of Principles: "...the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex".
We say that racism can only end with the rise of a socialist majority and the establishment of socialism. Our opponents deny this. They state that you can get rid of racism but retain capitalism. By retaining the cause of racism - the profit system-racism will not go away; it will fester and explode in times of economic crises and depression. Leave the statue to the curiosity of the fish.
More worrying is Boris Johnson and his vision of British capitalism. On Africa he wrote:
"Africa is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more" (THE SPECTATOR 13 July 2016).
Johnson's imperialist dream is for British capitalism is to be in charge of sections of the world again - economically and politically. On the basis of a post-Brexit Imperialism, led by entrepreneurial "Buccaneers" (BRITANNIA UNCHAINED, ch. 5, Kwarteng, Patel, Raab et al), he believes, like Cecil Rhodes, in the superiority of Anglo Saxon whites. While editor of THE SPECTATOR, then Tory MP Boris Johnson published an article that said "blacks have lower IQs". In another article he claimed Blacks "had lower IQs" Another article from around the same time said that Caribbeans were "multiplying like flies"
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/27-times-tory-party-racism-7904018
Johnson, it should be noted, is a fan of Winston Churchill. Churchill was a war-monger, racist, eugenist, anti working class and an imperialist. Their view of the dominance of "The Anglo-Saxon race" his shared with that other imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. One of Rhodes's primary motivations in politics and business was his professed belief that the Anglo-Saxon race was, to quote his will, "the first race in the world", where, "the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race" (CECIL RHODES, ed, William Thomas, 1902).
In defence of the memorials to his hero Winston Churchill, Johnson has said that "we should not censor the past". We do not want his past. We do not want his history. Our history is not the history of the ruling class. Johnson wants the imperial Past, of Waterloo and the Battle of Trafalgar, as a springboard for the future. His is a history of when Britain was "Great" and ruled the waves. It is not the history of the working class.
Throwing a statue of a slave owner into a Bristol harbour is not censoring the past. If you were not allowed to study Edward Colston the Slave trader who caused the deaths of thousands of slave then that would be censoring history. What their class did to our class should be remembered. However our history is censored. It is censored through the school curriculum by Michael Grove when he was Minister of education. His class want to impose their history on us - a story of British history taught as a series of kings and queens and passive subjects.
If Black history is to be taught in schools, as Black Lives want it to be, why not teach all aspects of capitalism’s origins, the class exploitation - the use of child labour in the factories, the enclosure of the commons and accumulation of capital through piracy, war and plunder? Why not celebrate the establishment of trade unions by workers in the face of opponents like Lord Wilberforce calling combinations - trade unions - "a general disease in our society". In 1794 Wilberforce backed the prosecution of twelve members of the London Corresponding Society for high treason. Their crime was to advocate universal suffrage. And then there is the struggle of the Chartists for the vote, now considered a "niche subject" and unknown to most school children.
In reality capitalism's history will always be partial and selective. It will only be through a growing socialist movement that our history and our struggle will be told.
As Marx said:
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force" (THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY)
We will have to wait until socialist ideas become a "material force of society" and dominate throughout society as the political class struggle intensifies, until such time socialist ideas are the ruling ideas and we have control and determination in making history.
Acknowledging the existence of slavery, its effects and its resultant racism, undermines the idea of British history’s inclusiveness. It punctures the seamless "history of our nation" from 1066 until today.
The history and politics of immigration shatters the myth of a common history and the powerful ideology surrounding the claim that the British Empire was a benign, civilizing influence on world history, something to be proud of, an example of "British exceptionalism".
And it shows who benefitted from the slave trade and to what ends. And it gives a lie to the industrial revolution being politically neutral and the workings of capitalism are for the benefit of everyone. Capitalist history is shown for what it is: a history of class struggle.
Object and Declaration of Principles
Object
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.
Declaration of Principles
THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN HOLDS:
1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (ie land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.
3.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.
7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.