Labour Monthly
Source: Labour Monthly December 1947, pages 385-386
Note: Wason’s comment on Thomson’s review of “Class Struggles in Ancient Greece” together with Thomson’s rejoinder
Publisher : The Labour Publishing Company Ltd., London.
Transcription/HTML markup: Ted Crawford/D. Walters
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2013). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Published here under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license 2013.
This massive volume on the legal and social history of American labour during the colonial period (1600-1775) is one of those specialist works of which Plekhanov once wrote:-
“Stones cry out if men are silent. The scholar-specialists know nothing of Marx’ theory: yet the results they have achieved shout loudly in its favour.” Mr Morris studies both free and “bound,” or indentured labour (most of the unskilled and semi-skilled belong to the second category) in the thirteen colonies of North America. He speaks of “long years of investigation,” and we can well believe him. For example, from the court records of innumerable counties he has extracted accounts of 20,000 cases: as well as lavishly using contemporary newspapers, diaries, correspondence and printed literature.
The results show the colonial system of triumphant English capitalism emerging, even 2,000 miles away, with the heavy stamp of feudal absolutism still deeply marked on its features. The capitalists, after 1660, shook off Tudor restrictions: but the workers still fell under their lash, and the young capitalist class, in America as in England, took full advantage of this. The author constantly reminds us of the essential link between English and American economic development in the period.
Compulsory labour for the poor and whipping of the unemployed: fixing wages through the justices, themselves men of substantial property, achievement of relative freedom only by the small element of skilled workers whose labour had a high scarcity-value (although most of them, except in Pennsylvania, were still disfranchised well after the Revolution): importation of indentured white labour on a big scale, for a century before negro slaves took its place: the leniency with which murder and torture of the unfree workers — men and women — was treated by the courts: the brutal repression of strikes, combinations and workers’ revolts — Mr. Morris draws a severely documented picture of all these characteristics which can be paralleled only in the scarifying historical chapters of the first volume of Marx’ Capital.
In this mirror the American people, looking upon their remote past, will recognise much that is nearer the present day. From the regime of the capitalist property owners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries descended the methods and the ideology of the nineteenth century slave-owners. And Mr. Morris reveals many traits of the colonial masters that repeat themselves in the twentieth century monarchs of American finance-capital at Detroit and Pittsburg, in California and Chicago, in Korea and China.
—A.R.