by A. L. Gober Jr.
← Back to Origins
It’s already well understood that American chattel slavery was a massive atrocity, on a scale never before or since seen. The dynamics and forces that created it, and the ones it would later unleash, are not yet well understood by the class for whom such understanding is a matter of survival - the Black intellectual.
American slavery can be broadly said to have two distinct phases: international and domestic.
The first, “international” or accumulation phase, where European traders and privateers dumped millions of human beings on the shores of the 13 British colonies in North America (as well as the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and South America) to be trained and bred as cattle, largely existed before the creation of the United States as a nation. This means the economic benefits of the slave trade were, during this time, meant to directly benefit the colonists’ mother country England, not the colonists themselves, whose accumulated wealth was incidental and not a goal of British mercantilism. This period is defined by the white English planters’ struggle to gain an institutional foothold, violently clear the land of Native Americans, and cultivate that land using these African slaves.
This era also marks the birth of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American as a separate ethnicity from the English - often abbreviated as WASP - and the beginning of their own internal contradictions as a people. Primarily it is the contradiction between two tendencies which mirror our own:
This infused the White American independence struggle (led by George Washington) and the White American ethnic culture with a strong sense of anti-intellectualism and anti-statism, on the one hand, and an ethnic solidarity that transcends class divisions, on the other. Today’s white conservatives are more or less unchanged in their ideas about the role of government, preferring as little of it as possible - that is, until ethnic imperatives force them to strengthen the state to repress Blacks. This contradiction is strategically very important to understand, as it will empower our movement to extract concessions from white conservatives in their modern-day conflict with the white neoliberals, who are generally statist, pro-globalization, pro-intellectual White Catholic and Jewish leftists primarily.
This contradiction means that the White Protestant American is defined simultaneously by two modern political trends:
The struggle between these two trends is encapsulated by the Democrat vs. Republican party platforms and the liberal vs. conservative “culture war” that continues to this day. It led to the first civil war, and since the underlying contradiction was never resolved, will one day lead to a second civil war between these two factions of whites.
The second, “domestic” or institutional phase of slavery, where it deepened and specialized into a specifically American means of agricultural exploitation of the South as a region, can be said to have begun with the widespread adoption of the cotton gin$^1$. From Wikipedia:
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy.