Vol. 71/No. 9      March 5, 2007

BY GEORGE NOVACK  
A primitive power can fasten itself upon a higher one, gain renewed vitality, and even appear for a time superior to its host. But the less developed power leads an essentially parasitic existence and cannot indefinitely sustain itself at the expense of the higher. It lack suitable soil and atmosphere for its growth while the more developed institutions are not only inherently superior but can count upon favorable environment for expansion.

The development of chattel slavery in North America provides an excellent illustration of this dialectic. From the world-historical standpoint, slavery on this continent was an anachronism from its birth. As a mode of production, it belonged to the infancy of class society; it had already virtually vanished from Western Europe. Yet the very demands of Western Europe for staple raw materials, such as sugar, indigo, and tobacco, combined with the scarcity of labor for large-scale agricultural operations, implanted slavery in North America. Colonial slavery grew up as a branch of commercial capitalism. Thus, a mode of production and a form of property that had long passed away emerged afresh from the demands of a higher economic system and became part of it.

This contradiction became accentuated when the rise of capitalist factory industry in England and the United States lifted the cotton-producing states of the deep South to top place in American economic and political life. For decades, the two opposing systems functioned as a team. They then split apart at the time of the American Civil War. The capitalist system, which at one stage of its development fostered slavery’s growth, at another stage created a new combination of forces that overthrew it… .

[C]hattel slavery and capitalism turned out to be neither permanent nor indissoluble; it was conditional, temporary, relative… . If a society marches forward, the advantage, in the long run, goes to the superior structure, which thrives at the expense of the inferior features… .

The question now posed is whether the present … capitalist rulers of the USA can now carry through to fulfillment a national task that it failed to complete in its revolutionary heyday… .

It is our opinion, however, that only the joint struggle of the Blacks and the working masses, against the capitalist rulers will be able to carry through the struggle against the hangovers of slavery. In this way the socialist revolution, combining the struggles of the oppressed nationalities with the anticapitalist movement for workers’ power, will complete what the bourgeois-democratic revolution failed to realize.
 
 
Related articles:
‘N.Y. Divided: Slavery and the Civil War’: another informative exhibit on par with part 1  
 
 
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