ps angela, I found some useful data in support of George's thesis but have misplaced it. Will have to find it. ___________________________________
slave labor does not fit well into Marx's theory of class conflict. Claude Meillassoux, a Marxist anthropologist, has attempted to reconcile this inconsistency. In Antropoloia de la esclavitud (a Spanish translation of the original work in French),(4) Meillassoux points out that Marx divided slavery into two categories. "Patriarchal bondage" was the older of the two forms of slavery he identified. According to Marx, this form of coerced labor derived from accidents of fate such as capture in battle and thus resulted from random misfortune rather than from group identification by characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or economic class.(5) Moreover, patriarchal slaves produced for their own subsistence as well as for their masters (p. 20). Taken in toto, patriarchal slavery was a relatively benevolent and personalized form of coerced labor more like European serfdom than like American slavery. According to Meillassoux, patriarchalism implied social rather than economic criteria for determining power and as such did not lend itself to Marxist theory based on class conflict. Appropriating a person's labor for communal subsistence (including that of the slave) did not constitute a level of exploitation equal to that suffered by African blacks and their descendants in the Americas after European contact (p. 21).
Marx labeled his second category "commercial capitalist slavery." In this system, enslavement resulted from identifying a specific group for enslavement rather than randomly selecting individuals. Slavery was not caused and maintained by chance or misfortune but by economic exigency. Under commercial capitalistic slavery,those in bondage produced a surplus for commercial purposes rather than for mere subsistence, and their station in life consequently derived from their relationship to the means and mode of production for the marketplace (pp. 21-23). Meillassoux considers this definition to approximate black slavery as it developed in the Americas.
Perhaps the most important contribution of Antropologia de la esclavitud is Meillassoux's explanation of events leading to the development and spread of capitalist slavery. He explains that around 900 A.D., three North African sectors -- Moslem aristocrats, military leaders, and merchants -- united to transform African paternalistic slavery into commercial capitalist slavery. North Africans then transferred this practice to the sub-Saharan region. Warfare served as the means for producing slaves, and trade became the vehicle for exchanging them in the labor market (pp. 49, 351, 353-55). Five hundred years later, European contact with the New World led to extreme demographic and economic conditions that encouraged transferring African-based commercial capitalist slavery to Latin America (p. 356).
Meillassoux's explanation, based on interdisciplinary historical and anthropological theory and methodology, offers a reasonable link between Marxist logic and the rise of slavery in Latin America. It also allows for broader application than Klein's "sugar culture" thesis for the rise and maintenance of the institution. At the same time, Meillassoux's approach places both slavery and the Americas within the structural context of the broader Atlantic commercial system. These advantages make Antropologia de la esclavitud a welcome addition to the growing body of literature dealing with the context and dynamics of slavery
>First off, there was a speaker from Mauritania (an West African country)
>speaking about slavery. He was born into slavery in the mid '40's and is
>now a a leader in the movement to eradicate the institution, which is still
>a big problem there. Does anyone know any details/history about this
>situation?
>
>It brought home how little I know about Africa and how little the world
>cares about its plight. I suppose I already knew that, but it has more
>emotional impact when you actually see someone who's been through it. I
>don't think I've EVER read anything on Mauritania, anywhere. It
>practically doesn't exist as far as the West in concerned, and I'm sure you
>could say the same about many other African countries. Anyway, I enjoyed
>his talk.