Remembering Slavery

I don’t quite remember why I bought a copy of Moses Finley’s “Ancient Slavery & Modern Ideology.” I might have seen it on one of DeLong’s syllabi long ago. It’s short and interesting, if mostly over my head. You need a lot of linguistic depth to engage this subject on a professional level. Finley, a British academic, appears to have Greek, Latin, French, and German. Maybe Italian. I write this to self-update my thinking on racism.

Scholarship on ancient slavery was burdened by biases towards defending Christianity (slavery survived long past the dominance of Christian regimes), apologizing for it on the grounds that slavery enabled the rise of the glorious civilizations of the Greeks and Romans (there was something of the latter in Marx, minus the word ‘glorious’), or damning slavery on moral or religious grounds.

There was also defensiveness around the need to rationalize Greek and Roman slavery for those who would glorify their current state of civilization, based on their purported roots in the great classical civilizations. Much like defensiveness today in the U.S. from jingoist critics of the 1619 Project like Sean Wilentz who objected that the project painted too black a picture of the founding (and implicitly the later evolution) of the United States. One pet peeve of the 19th and early 20th Century scholars was an interest in debunking a Marxist notion of stages, from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, and so on. Often bitter debates over abolitionism which heated to boiling in the 19th Century surrounded academic discussions.

Only in fits and starts did scholars consider the question of whether, in practical terms, slavery (relative to free labor) was actually conducive to a nation’s growth and power. The utility question also rages much later with respect to the study of U.S. slavery and continues today in fights over the 1619 Project.

Slavery was suspected to be diseconomic for a variety of reasons. It retarded population growth, since slaves provided sex alternatives to household patriarchs. (It is odd in the current context of general, public, hysterical ignorance to see a basic recognition way back then that more people makes a bigger, richer nation.) Slaves competed with free labor, devaluing and demoralizing the latter. The ownership of slaves corrupted the offspring of the slaveowners, since slaves did work that might otherwise have been their responsibility, reducing them to indolence and moral depravity. The use of slave labor restrained the progress of an increasing division of labor and ensuing commerce among free labor, with negative implications for productivity growth.

The question of the economic efficiency of slavery is a serious one, not illuminated by the natural, felt need to denounce it on humanitarian grounds. It may seem amoral, but it’s still a numbers game. Politics are involved. If slavery is economically inefficient, it contains the seeds of its own demise, which could undercut motivated stories of the resistance of slaves or the power of abolitionist movements.

I was impressed by a point I took from Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism,” that slavery and associated racisms were ubiquitous all the way back to antiquity. This undercuts the 1619 mindset and speaks to a more basic aspect of the human condition than the relatively recent colonization of the Americas. U.S. capitalism was racial from the start, but so to some extent were pre-capitalist formations.

I’ve previously said all slavery was associated with racism, on the assumption that slavery was fed by foreign conquest and appropriation of foreign populations. There isn’t much about race in this book. Finley is at pains to reject the foreign conquest explanation, finding the roots of slavery in the structure of land ownership; larger estates required more agricultural labor. He does describe the attitudes towards “barbarians” — people from the hinterlands, relative to the centers of the Greek and Roman empires — that resemble the racist attitudes that we are familiar with today. I do find it curious to see his references to slaves as “deracinated.” It is clear that slavery itself, if not racism in the modern sense, long predates 1619. For Finley, Greece and Rome are the model slave societies of antiquity.

Finley is also at some pains to outline the diversity of labor captivation, from free labor to all sorts of constrained statuses. There were also complex differences within slavery itself. Manumission of slaves was common and might have been an institution that permitted slavery to persist over long historical periods. Promises of eventual freedom could have facilitated the cooperation of slaves. It is interesting to note that freed slaves and their descendants, lacking racial markers, could melt into the general population, not quite the case for racial slavery in the Americas.

U.S. slavery was clearly racial, unlike earlier slave systems, but it was conditioned by its economic setting. I like to say that if capitalism is racial, Race is capitalistic. Socialism is the natural alternative to both Racism and Capitalism. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.