SPGB to contest Election against MPs who have Slave traders ancestors?
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Any mileage in it for the Party?
I’m obviously aware we want to unseat all the capitalists lackeysJust read: Look up the Drax family, who have supplied MPs for Dorset for centuries, and whose wealth is mostly based on slavery and this compensation(£20million paid to slave owners)
Another post: Amazing how, no matter when it is, the government always has money to bail out the rich but none for the poor they created.
This got 300 likes on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1489330154585463/?type=3
yfs
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Are we going to adopt the biblical doctrine the sins of our fathers are passed on through the generations?
We have always held back from attacking the employing class as individuals and concentrated our fire on the system as a whole (of course, there has been many exceptions where our disgust and indignation at particular members of the owning class has been very apparent)
We might adopt a more direct language when we discuss our class enemies … “wage-slave masters” instead of merely the technical term “capitalists”, for instance.
I agree, James, with Alan. This is not a good idea. It is unfair and illogical to blame someone for what their ancestors did.
But, since part of the primitive accumulation of capital that set capitalism going cane from the profits of the slave trade, in standing candidates against any party or candidate that supports capitalism we are doing our bit to topple a system that benefited from modern chattel slavery.
Moderator, is there any way if changing the misleading title of this thread? A question mark instead of an exclamation mark would do.
Are we going to blame the family of Stalin or Hitler for the acts committed by their ancestors? What Alan has written is correct, it is called the original sin, and mankind must pay by the acts committed by Adam and Eve, and we need a redeemer. Many peoples are saying that Karl Marx is a Jew because one of his relatives was a Rabbi
In defence of James’ suggestion, what he is saying is with regards to those MPs whose continuing family fortunes have been made on slavery and slavery comepensation, not those who have ancestors who were slavers.
Surely we would be making the point that the despite the claim that we live in a meritcracy, and that those who have reached the upper echelons of society have done so on their merit. The fact is that the whole system is built on the inheritance of wealth, wealth which was created by land enclosures, slaveery, wage slavery, theft and violence.
It’s like the self made man/woman myth. The self made man Trump, got $30-40 million from his father, Elon Musk’s father owned an emerald mine, and even Mike Ashley started his business off with a £10,000 family loan (£32,500 in 2020) to start his buiness off, way beyond the family resources of the vast majority.
BD, it is true what you say that wealth does pass on through the generations. Not sure who it was but some scholar did research into easily traced surnames and indeed showed that many of todays rich was based on the wealth of the ancestor. The studies on slavery and the Jim Crow aftermath likewise show the opposite – why many African Americans remain poverty-stricken to this day
I had a book by Thomas Johnston, The Noble Families, originally a Red Clydesider, then ILP MP, then Labour Party minister of the crown, who highlighted the origins of many Scottish aristocrats. He then tried to pulp every copy he could lay his hands upon after he climbed the ladder into ‘high society’.
But when it comes to electoral activity which is both expensive in money and members time we have tried to focus on those very few constituencies where we believe we have a foothold in contesting and we forego parachuting in a candidate and campaign volunteers to places we lack a presence
Lots of debate and discussion on social media about the slave trade.
I forgot SOYMB had a piece about Tom Cotton.https://twitter.com/fitchgm/status/1287560935595335680?s=21
https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1287456866239418368?s=21
There is nothing wrong in highlighting it, in total, as Marx does here,
“Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of modern society. [13] If money, according to Augier, [14] “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. [15] The Genesis of Industrial Capitalism.
But, as you know the ends we seek, a truly social equal society, are determined by the means used and this sets us particular challenges in our polemical discourses.
Hi Alan
I can’t disagree with your logic, however I was trying to point out some of the merits of James’ argument.
With regards to the book by Mr Johnston, I would guess in the absence of an e at the end he is not related to you and that he found out during his reasearch that most of the Johnston/Johnstones are from villainous, mischief making, Reiver stock. My sister has done our family tree and I was happy to find out that I come from a long line of social scum.
There is this classic: Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams.
”Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944.”
No relation, BD. Perhaps he was from the Perthshire Johnstons.
But recently on the progressive website Consortium News there were articles from a Caitlin Johnstone and a Diana Johnstone. So perhaps radicalism is in the family blood.
But there is a strong element of Orange Order and Masonic Lodge influence with my uncles, probably arising from the anti-Catholic Irish feeling of the Galloway region, guessing wildly that such existed in the region from Covenanter times.
There was also a prominent CPer called Monty Johnstone who the Party once debated.
I’m afraid that a family tree of my paternal side of the family would not go very far back due to illegitimacy and them being itinerant farm labourers
My father’s nickname at his work was “Tinker” Johnstone if that gives you any clue of the background.
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