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Editorial European reparations for slavery are unlikely under this economic system

THE demand from Caribbean countries that European states whose economic development was fuelled by the super-profits accruing from slavery should discharge this debt reminds us that the source of much of the inherited wealth in our country lies in the trade in human beings.

But the slavery which made. Britain and other developed capitalist countries rich beyond imagining was different from the slavery of the ancient world.

For people in our country alive before this golden cascade of profit turned Britain into the workshop of the world, the rhythms of their existence were dependent on the seasons.

This world was transformed by the Industrial Revolution and as the not-so-slow destruction of our planet proceeds, we should remember that 1830 was the last year in which Britain lived in rough harmony with our environment.

It was slavery and the accumulation of capital — the capture of Africans, their transport across the Atlantic, forced labour and the export to Europe of the products of this labour — that turned Britain into an industrial powerhouse.

It also turned the British into the inhabitants of cities and towns and, in most cases, living miserable lives of exploited labour amid unprecedented pollution — but not as miserable or as exploited as the slaves whose labour created the capital which made this possible.

In the midpoint decade of the 19th century, Karl Marx wrote: “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc.

“Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry.”

Among working people in Britain there has always been a strong sense of solidarity with those oppressed and exploited. We can think of today’s Black Lives Matter movement as a tribute to an earlier generation who refused to allow attempts by the British capitalist class to intervene on the side of the slaver South in the American civil war.

As Marx wrote at the time “…simple justice requires to pay a tribute to the sound attitude of the British working classes, the more so when contrasted with the hypocritical, bullying, cowardly and stupid conduct of the official and well-to-do John Bull.”

In coming to terms with our country’s colonial and slaver past we need a strict accounting. The wealth created and recreated from empire lies not in marble buildings but in the capital assets of our ruling class — much of which is recorded in tax havens on British overseas territories ruled under the crown.

Tearing down the monuments to slave masters is a start, but giving practical effect to any proposal to compensate Britain’s former slave colonies will be difficult with a government that delights in the forced deportation of the descendants of slaves back to these former colonies.

More difficult without a government that would nationalise the banks and control the movement of capital.

Disassembling the present-day structures of imperial power is a complex business.

The Caribbean states are right to target Europe. This is where the wealth finished up and where the continued plunder of the globe is celebrated as a joint enterprise with the US.

The founding figures of a post-war federal Europe saw European unity as the instrument of a collective imperialism unimpeded by narrow national concerns.

That astute observer of our ruling class, Labour’s later deputy leader Denis Healey, derided them: “Their Europeanism is nothing but imperialism with an inferiority complex.”

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