Demonstrators gather after marching at the Louisiana Capitol to protest the shooting of Alton Sterling on July 9, 2016…
Posted by Cynthia Cuza on Tuesday, January 21, 2020
DARRYL “WAISTLINE” MITCHELL
“We have no bones to pick about being of a proud people birthed in chains and an absolute peculiarity in capital’s world evolution. Peculiarity is why we are who we are, as descendants of those men and women in chains – slaves. As such we are historically fated to forever remain fused to the axis of social change in our country.
Nor do we pretend that we are not of the proletariat and the industrial proletariat as it evolved in our country and as it has repeatedly attempted to stand on its legs and assert itself as a body politic. Even when our class could not stand up and fight for an equitable share of the social product and political liberties for all, we have stood up. This includes long stretches of time when we seem to have spent more time fighting our class brothers and sisters and not the enemy. Under impossible conditions we never relinquished our class instinct, even when there was no material framework to stabilize class consciousness.”
KARL MARX
“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their values; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
Without slavery, North America, the most progressive of countries would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Abolish slavery and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”
The Poverty of Philosophy
“Whilst the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.”
Capital
