[ Article from 95 years ago - more relevant today than ever ... !]
Does slavery still exist ?
Silesian Labour Newspaper of the KPD from 1928 No. 66
by Hans Demetz
I
Germany's entry into the Mandate Commission of the League of Nations gives the imperialist colonial politicians and their followers a scent of morning air. The prices of colonial assets rose sharply and new companies were founded to exploit African treasures. Certain informed circles were already rumouring the transfer of some Portuguese colonies to Germany, reminiscent of the haggling between England and Germany over the Portuguese lands in Africa at the beginning of the Boer War. In addition, the attacks by German colonial friends, headed by former governors, against the colonial administrations of England, France and Belgium intensified and were met by equally furious counter-attacks in the English and French press, dripping with moral indignation at the German colonial atrocities. In the course of this dispute, many things came to light that one would have preferred to cover with a cloak of secrecy, and which provided a good insight into the theory and practice of modern colonial economy. The English imperialists have always insisted on the progressiveness of their colonial methods. We shall see that in most of the colonies of the English in Africa
the abomination of primitive slavery of forced labour,
the disguised form of slavery, still plays a significant role. The fact that in the years following the World War, large-scale slave hunts in the French Sudan threatened to become a public scandal even forced the League of Nations, the United Exploiters A. G., to address the issue of slavery. And this after the Brussels "Anti-Slavery Act" had already been signed by 17 powers in 1889. The beautifully coloured reports to the Mandate Commission of the League of Nations also revealed conditions that only barely concealed the true face of the modern colonial economy.
II
In order to better understand the significance of these things, the lines of development of capitalist colonisation should be briefly outlined. Capitalism develops in a nutural economic milieu, whether this be the primitive peasant commune with common ownership of land, feudal frontal economy or the like. The natural economy is characterised by production for self-sufficiency, which means that the producer is tied to the most important means of production, the land. Capital, however, needs a market economy, "free" labourers, and is confronted with the barriers of the natural economy. The struggle against feudalism in Europe and against the primitive social formations in non-European countries, the emergence of colonial policy is the consequence of capital's urge to develop. In her "Accumulation of Capital", Rosa Luxemburg lists the following as the economic purposes of capitalism in the struggle with natural societies:
1. to seize directly important sources of productive forces, such as land, game and virgin forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic plant life, such as rubber, etc.
2. to free labour and make it work for capital.
3. to introduce the commodity economy
4. to separate agriculture from trade.
This was the path taken by capitalism in the colonial countries. The trader who exchanged glass beads, discarded clothes, booze and other achievements of civilisation for the labour products of the natives was followed by the missionary. He was followed by the soldier and the administrator, under whose protection the "liberation" of the indigenous people from their land was carried out by means of violence or fraud and corruption. This is how Spain and Portugal in the 17th century, France and Holland in the 18th century, England and Germany in the 19th century created their mighty colonial empires and covered the ground that capitalism covered on its triumphal march through the world with the millions of victims who were hounded to death in honour of the idol of capital, as in North America, in South and Central America, then on plantations like the American Negroes, starved to death by the millions in Africa, massacred as in the Kalahari - and so on. The theft of land and the theft of human beings had taken on grandiose forms in the colonised countries, but were even surpassed by the world war in that 100,000s of Indians, Annomites, Negroes and Indians were sent to the European battlefields for four years.
