Chapter III: Racism and Cultural Difference as the Motive for African Slavery
3. Historical Background
3.1 Conclusion
The Anthropology of slavery and slave trade presented in this book, evidently do not exhaust the case, and still less the search for a theoretical conceptualisation. However, in the historical framework of its reproductive force, a society is not based on production alone but also on the conditions of production. On the basis of present-day research into slavery, it is pertinent to state the followings: in the historical framework of its productive force, a society is not based on production alone but also on the reproduction of conditions of production, because the organisation of the relations of production is the mode of production and the organisation of the relations of reproduction is the mode of reproduction. Consequently, the juridical, political, ideological and cultural super structures are seen to be instruments of the mode of reproduction and a society is therefore, made up of the organic organisation of its modes of production and reproduction, whose specificity characterises the social system, which underpins it: the domestic community, slavery, serfdom, capitalism e.t.c.405
Every society receives productive forces, which are made up of accumulated intellectual knowledge and material properties, as well as the political, social and ideological capacity to put down to work for its own guidance and also relative to other societies. Thus, these productive forces determine the limits and the nature of the society’s relations without all that is external to it, both the natural environment and foreign societies.
The essential and restrictive relations of production, which are determined, are indispensable to the material maintenance of the member of the society and the system of production. And from the same framework of determination, social rules governing the relations of production geared toward the constant reconstitution of the relations of production and the human beings, which are inserted into them have been explained. 406 Though, the social conditions of production are situated within a framework, which is historically determined by the level of productive force, however, social organisation must be made to conform to them through appropriate actions. Although, history offers a framework for determination: that the relations of production it makes are limited in form and content, but only functions through organised action by members of the society to create institutions, which establish and constantly renew the relations of production, for example, institutions such as kinship or wars of capture. These institutions are located at
405 Meillousoux, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery, 1991, p. 325.
406 ibid.
the pinnacle of power relations: the existence implies a political choice, which is liable to affect the productive forces and therefore, to shift the point at which they become determinant. Through this intervention, society escapes absolute materialist determinism. It is in this respect that the society enjoys a degree of freedom.
In domestic societies, the productive forces functions within the limits of self-sustenance as it applies to a population in which the relations of production are governed by kinship and kinship, which organises the social framework of procreation (marriage) and the devolution of progeny (filiation), frequently generates relations of production in conformity with the historical conditions in which they have to operate in order to be efficient. The main characteristics of the domestic relation of production, built around food cultivation (life-long relations, relations of anteriority and the intergenerational distribution of the product) can adapt to patrilineal or avuncular filiation. Slave reproduction can also originate in war or in races as stated earlier.
Under capitalism, the methods of reproduction imposed on the working class distinguished an integrated relatively stabilised proletariat from one which is migrant and temporary: “the first is backed up by institutions of social security and the other by administrative and police apparatus, which organises shifts of populations between the domestic and the wage economy”.407 Generally speaking, the relations of production and the relations of reproduction are congruent, since they apply jointly to the whole population.
But this does not apply for slave owning societies where the mode of production is not directly determined by productive forces alone but is also determined relative to those of other societies whose demographic increase it can frequently and regularly plunder. Slave exploitation is organically grounded on foreign method of production, the domestic mode of production, which produces the men and women whom the slave mode of production transforms into slaves. Subsequently, the domestic mode of production and the slave mode of production are not homogeneous: they do not fit term for term into a single category mode of production.408 It is generally agreed that slave society is a class society and therefore, the dominant class also operates the institutions, which reproduce the society at large.
In aristocratic society, the dominant class wage slave wars, which form the means of reproduction of the slave class and consequently of slave-owning society as a whole.
407 Meillousoux, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery, 1991, p. 327.
408 ibid.
Towards this aim, they build up military and political alliances, which contribute to social reproduction. The looting of other societies is the basis of the elementary class relationship between masters and slaves. The aristocracy, which is organised around war and power, sometimes reproduces itself in cooperative forms – like the band but more often through the model of dynastic kinship backed up by the ideological and segregative notion of consanguinity. While the merchant class relations of reproduction centre around the transmission and reconstitution of patrimony, the slave class, the institution of war and that of the market, set up by the dominant classes are the framework which govern its reproduction and in a historical context, evaluates kinship. 409
Patrimonial kinship on the one hand capture and purchase on the other hand: these forms of social reproduction were mutually exclusive and therefore, sanctions the class relations through agamy, which prevented the emergence between these classes of relations capable of generating kinship. However, when individuals of low classes were incorporated into relations of production, they were constituted not as a class but as a social corps with its own specific methods of reproduction and its own specific relation to the dominant class. Historically, societies do not exactly repeat themselves because the mode of reproduction gives way to the model of contradiction, which transforms it dialectically, in conformity with the principles of historical materialism.410
To be able to distinguish the method of reproduction of slavery from that of serfdom, it was essential, to take into account both the demographic conditions of the emergence of new generations of the economic conditions of their growth up to the productive age. The study of population laws presupposes an anthropological examination of the social divisions between sexes and which results also from the social recognition of the woman’s reproductive function and the cultural position she occupies in this position. The study of slavery and the social definition of woman in turn orders the rule of kinship, since it is through her that the relations of kinship are established.411 For the progenitors of kinship slavery, it is instructive in that it is antinomic to kinship, it has not as such held the attention, either of the structuralist or of the functionalist, except to be situated in the universal scheme of a kinship, which is implicitly consanguine – that is essentially aristocratic.412
409 Meillousoux, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery, 1991, p. 328.
410 ibid. p. 329.
411 ibid.
412 ibid. pp. 329-330.
The thesis of procreation cannot be said to be “natural” beginning point for the elementary social relation of motherhood, and still less of fatherhood. This relationship can only come to pass through active material exchanges between adults and children. But between slaves, these parental relationships depended only on the masters’ goodwill or his birth the pivotal point of social reproduction. As a matter of fact, the reproduction of a society is not realised with the birth of a new generation but only with its coming to economic maturity.
Though there may be high fertility of the women, the proportion of children who reached maturity will depend in the final analysis on the active individual labour productivity in food production. Demographic potentials were subordinated to productive capacity.413 Slavery and slave trade represent one of the first form of liberation of labour, that is: these women and men, torn from the native communities where they could work only with in the framework of the indissoluble and restricting ties of kinship, were transformed into a labour force supplied to all those who had the means to appropriate it for themselves.
Consequently, a hugh shift of labour power took place along with its concentration and its reorganisation according to different norms of production.414
From the various examinations of slavery, one can say that slavery led to a drop in food production and thus in population and the immobilisation of potential capitals in slave trade restricted the growth in labour productivity. Slavery provoked transfers of the surplus products but also its reduction, slavery was not only a means of exploitation but also of over-exploitation. However, one can also infer that it created and stimulated large scale trade, the specialisation of tasks and the diversification of production and therefore, the rise of merchant class.415 The increase in production was destructive rather than productive through the intensification of wars of capture and the accumulation of numbers of slaves because there was no incentive to increase the labour productivity of the exploited. The coexistence and combination of aristocratic and merchant societies and of their respective slavery favoured an economy stretched between subsistence and luxury, in which productive investments were mostly limited to the instruments of war. Like all exploitative systems, slavery led to the alienation, not only of the exploited but also of the exploiters, it led to a negation of humanity of men and women, to contempt of them and to hatred. It is the causation to racism, to arbitrariness, to cruelty and to purifying murder, which are the characteristic weapons of the bitterest class struggle.
413 Meillousoux, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery, 1991, pp. 330-331.
414 ibid. p.331.
415 ibid. p.332.
It is likely that the alienation of the various actors involved in slavery has communicated itself even to us, borne by the unquestioned and uninterrupted culture of the exploiters, that is still imperceptible to us and present as humanist societies today, which were built on the plunder of man. 416
416 Meillaousuox, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery, 1991, pp. 332-333.