On Modern Slavery in Decolonial Marxism and late Victorian Liberalism

In her fascinating book, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019, Princeton), Adom Getachew notes that during twentieth century imperialism a number of decolonial thinkers — mostly English speakers in the British Empire and Americas — conceptualized empire as (racialized) enslavement (pp. 79-87). This is a notion of modern empire as despotic and arbitrary in character (p. 83).

One reason this is notable is that treating empire as enslavement is meant to capture some of the wrongs (and rightlessness) of colonized peoples. And so lurking in these thinkers’ analysis of the nature of empire as enslavement is also an analysis of what is known as ‘modern slavery.’ In Getachew’s book this theme is introduced through Du Bois’ analysis of the ‘new slavery’ in (1920) Darkwater.

Something like ‘modern slavery’ is important to her overall argument because she wants to contrast it with the (more traditional) notion of slavery as the “ownership and sale of persons” that figures in the 1926 Convention on Slavery (p. 81; see also chapter 2.) The first article of this Convention reads, “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” As Getachew notes such slavery did exist in the first half of the twentieth century, but usually in places deemed backwards (and racially inferior) and outside the empire (p. 52-61).

It is tempting, at first, to treat imperialism as enslavement as an illuminating metaphor. But when one reflects on it, one quickly realizes that some of the paradigmatic cases of modern imperialism — e.g., the Belgian King in Congo — involve despotic treatment of the individuals ruled over that can be naturally compared to chattel slavery. As it happens, I have been reflecting on the nature of modern slavery since Diana Popescu (Nottingham) invited me to participate in a workshop on the topic later this Summer. And so what follows is, in part, a preliminary note to begin to tell the complex origins story of ‘modern slavery’ inspired by my reading of Getachew. However, to the best of my knowledge Getachew never uses the phrase, ‘modern slavery’ so it should be clear that my current interest is very much orthogonal to hers.

In what follows, modern slavery involves forms of labor where the ‘slave’ is neither owned, nor property (so not covered under the 1926 convention). In her analysis, Getachew picks up on at least three characterizations of modern slavery. These are shaped by the “Marxist orientation” (p. 83) of the authors (Du Bois, Williams, Nkrumah, Padmore) involved. As Getachew notes Marxist authors tend to be uneasy about a clean distinction between free (wage slavery) and unfree labor, so it’s fine if you read what follows as a matter of degree. The three characteristics are:

1. Modern slavery is industrialized forced labor (Getachew, p. 81). As Du Bois notes, “Today instead of removing laborers from Africa to distant slavery, industry built on a new slavery approaches Africa to deprive the natives of their land, to force them to toil, and to reap all the profit for the white world.” (Getachew, p. 82)

2. It is exploitative and dominating creates conditions of dependence. As Nkrumah notes, when describing the Portuguese in Angola, “the system of forced labour, which still operates, is perhaps the worst blot on the Portuguese record in Africa. It amounts to a form of slavery. Men are treated not as men, but as chattels, to be pushed around from place to place at the whim of the local Ghefe do Posto, or district officer.” (Africa Must Unite (1963), p. 12; Getachew, p. 83)*

3. It is dehumanizing. This is something Getachew doesn’t mention, but we see it appear in her sources repeatedly, note “men are treated not as men.”

Now, it is pretty clear that these three features can be conjoined in a single conceptualization of modern slavery, but that’s not required. In this framework, modern slavery is a kind of excessive intensification of the ordinary harms of capitalism.

Today’s digressive contribution to the history of this account of modern slavery is that earlier, explicitly anti-imperialist self-described liberals also understood modern slavery in this fashion. This can be seen in a collection, Liberalism and the Empire: three essays (1900) in three parts written (individually) by Francis W. Hirst, Gilbert Murray, and J. L. Hammond. This collection (recall here and here) is clearly building on, and in the same intellectual orbit as J.A. Hobson’s (1900) War in South Africa and it anticipates many of the themes of Hobson’s (1902) Imperialism: A Study.

The classicist’s Gilbert Murray’s middle essay, “The exploitation of inferior races in ancient and modern times: an Imperial labor question, with a historical parallel,” includes the following analysis:

The answer, of course, is that Aristotle was not afraid of the word 'slave,' and used it far more lightly and freely than we care to do. His own admirable definition of the term as 'a live tool' seems to cover exactly the same ground as our word 'exploit.' In so far as a person is 'exploited' — that is, in so far as he is used for another's interest without any regard for his own — he is, according to Aristotle, a slave. The ancients would certainly have regarded not only the enforced labour of the Matabele, but the ordinary indentured labour of ['Africans’] in Kimberley, Kanakas in Queens-land, and coolies in India, Demerara, Fiji, and the like, as slave labour. (p. 134) [Cf. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1161b and Politics 1253b).

Throughout his argument — especially notable because Murray is himself clearly a ‘scientific’ racist who distinguishes between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior races’ — the dehumanizing and exploitative nature of modern forced industrialized labor is emphasized. In fact, Murray treats the system as genocidal in character with whole peoples disappearing, dying from despair, malnutrition, and bad treatment (pp. 148-149). Some other time more on this.

Now, it’s pretty clear that Murray and the people in his circle are familiar with socialist and Marxist-inflected writings. So, I don’t want to suggest that these liberals are writing in a vacuum. More subtly, Marx and these liberals both draw on their own readings of Aristotle.

Of course, Murray’s treatment of exploitation — the use of another while disregarding their interests — is not itself Marxist in character. She (the Marxist) might emphasize unequal exchange of labor between the working class and the bourgeoisie which extracts a surplus value from the former that ends up degrading the working class (for a nice contemporary summary see Zwolinksi in the SEP here; I am also very fond of Wolff 1999). So, what I am suggesting is that late nineteenth century imperialism helped generate a Marxist Decolonial and a liberal account of exploitation and modern slavery that have a family resemblance to each other, while not being identical.

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*Getachew may be working with a different edition, for in her the quote has been shortened (without ellipses).