Capitalism & Salvery
...given at Communist University ’97 by Robin Blackburn, author of 'The making of New World slavery'
The title of this article is, of course, an echo of the famous book of the same name by Eric Williams, published in 1944.
There are not many books written 50 years ago that are still in print and still being vigourously debated - especially those written under a Marxist influence. Williams was a leader of the Trinidad national liberation struggle. Unfortunately, in his later life he became a rather reactionary prime minister, but that is another story. I take up and reconsider the themes of Capitalism and slavery in my own work.
There has been a tendency to deny the connection between capitalism and slavery on the part of bourgeois historians: that is why Williams’ book really stuck in their gullet - and they have been chewing over it ever since it was published. There have been attempts to debunk him, and I try in the long final chapter of my own book to show that the process of primitive accumulation did decisively depend upon exchanges with the slave plantations.
For me, and I think for most Marxists, the connection between capitalism and slavery is somewhat more surprising - and more problematic - than is assumed by Williams. He was, as I have said, influenced by Marx, but he was not really a Marxist: rather a nationalist in his formation and outlook. Though he did some wonderful research and writes eloquently, he never actually asked, ‘Where does capitalism come from in the first place?’ This is, of course, a question of prime importance for Marxists right from Volume 1 of Capital, through to the 1940s and ’50s with the debates around the ‘transition to capitalism’.
Many contended that the origins of this remarkable mode of production lie in the pre-colonial epoch; that Britain was already on the road to capitalism at the time of the plantation revolution in...
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