Slavery

The following article, by black socialist CLR James (writing as GF Eckstein), was first published in the US Trotskyist paper Militant, on 14 Feburary 1949. One part of the 1948 election platform of the Socialist Workers Party [US] read as follows: “In 1860 William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens, personified the forces which waged merciless war against the slaveowners’ attempt to perpetuate their ‘outmoded system, halt the expansion of our economy and destroy the liberties of our people.” But in 1948 the Republican...

Sacha Ismail is wrong, I think, against Eric Lee ( Solidarity 274). Sacha doesn’t like Eric’s basic point — that the US slaves were liberated “from above” by a white man, using a “white state”. Of course liberation would have been better coming from the action of the slaves themselves, rising in armed revolt and winning their own freedom, arms in hand. Abolition won this way — and the self-confidence and self-organisation gained — would have made the racist counter-revolution of the 1870s onwards much harder to carry through. But it didn’t happen that way. Slavery was abolished by Sherman’s...

I’m interested by Eric Lee’s idea that Quentin Tarantino’s takes on Nazism and American slavery (Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained) promote the idea of self-emancipation, unlike Steven Spielberg’s (Schindler’s List and Lincoln). But I don’t agree that “the reality is that it wasn’t Black slaves who brought down slavery” but “a mostly (though not entirely) white army led by a white man”. Of course I am not denying the role of the US army in the US Civil War. Nonetheless, American slaves played a central role, perhaps the central role, in their own emancipation. Just before the Civil War...

“The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves” – that's a phrase which will be familiar to most Marxists and originates in the Rules of the International Workingmen's Association which Marx drafted. A century later, Max Shachtman wrote that “When speaking of socialism and socialist revolution we seek 'no condescending saviours' as our great battle hymn, the International, so ably says. We do not believe that well-wishing reforms – and there are well-wishing reformers – will solve the problems of society, let alone bring socialism. … We believe that task...

Quentin Tarantino’s last film, Inglorious Basterds, walked a precarious line. Set in World War Two Europe, it dealt with very serious matters — the genocide of the Jews — but in Tarantino’s inimitable way: at least as much about movies as about history, very violent, very funny. It could have been a distasteful monstrosity. But to my mind it was a brilliant tour de force, with a delirious and unexpected climax that in fact was very thought-provoking. Django Unchained sets out to pull off the same trick but this time about slavery in America. Does it succeed? Django (Jamie Foxx) is a black...

Just off Albert Square in Manchester stands a statue of Abraham Lincoln, the inscription expressing gratitude to the Lancashire cotton workers for their support of the Northern Union forces against the Southern Confederate slaveholders in the American Civil War of 1861-65. The background was told in Radio 4’s Manchester and Liverpool: Britain's American Civil War , presented by TV historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt. Liverpool and Manchester both had links with the antebellum American South. Manchester and the surrounding Lancashire textile towns imported 80% of their raw cotton from the...

Robin Blackburn, author of ‘The overthrow of Colonial Slavery’ (VERSO, 1988) talked to Martin Thomas Q. About the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, you wrote: “Britain's rulers were being asked to decide the abolition question at an extraordinary time... Britain’s oligarchy had a world to win if they could pull through — and a kingdom to lose if they could not”. So it was not just a matter of gradual moral improvement making Britain eventually see the wisdom of abolishing an ancient evil. Moreover, it was in large part not an ancient evil but a comparatively new one. The Atlantic...