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Darwin,
Lincoln
and the survival of the slave-masters
(
12 February 2009
)
February
12is the bicentenary of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham
Lincoln. Their personal convictions towards slavery were pretty much the
same. The name of the former is entangled with Social Darwinism as a
doctrine about survival of the fittest. This distortion of ‘fitness’
sustains a pseudo-scientific basis to justify the naturalness for the
division of human society into masters and slaves, whether
chattel-slaves of the plantation South or wage-slaves of the capitalist
factories. By contrast, the conventional ignorance about
Lincoln
is of the Great Emancipator.
Darwin
’s hostility to chattel slavery shines through the
concluding pages of the Voyage of the ‘Beagle’. After a page
cataloguing atrocities, he dissected some of the arguments proposed in
defence of slavery:
It
is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if
self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less
likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage
masters. … It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing
the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen; if the misery of our
poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions,
great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well
might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing
that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease … It
makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we
Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of
liberty, have been and are so guilty …
Darwin
then consoled himself with the reflection ‘that we
at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to
expiate our sin’.
True,
only the British government had taxed its people to compensate
slave-owners for the loss of their property in human beings after the
freeing of slaves throughout the Empire from August 1834. The expiation
did not extend the compensating the slaves from whom masses of surplus
value had been expropriated to underpin the triumph of wage-slavery. The
expansion of capital went on being buttressed by indenture as an
alternative system of slavery and by peonage as debt slavery. The
Britain
that freed its chattel slaves in 1834 supported the slave-owning South
to defend
Lancashire
cotton millers who were busy exploiting their wage-slaves.
That
Darwin
did not confront these facts is no more surprising than that his
biographers do not ask where the money came from the support his
lifetime of research and writing. He never had a paying job. On the Beagle,
he was a ‘volunteer’ gentleman, not the official botanist. He had
abandoned his studies in medicine where he might have earned a
competence hastening patients to their graves. Had he been ordained as a
clergyman, he would have joined Parson Malthus as a ‘gluttonous
drone’, to quote Marx.
Darwin
earned next to nothing from his writings. In marrying his cousin, he
consolidated their portion of the Wedgwood fortune, accumulated by the
exploitation of wage slaves in the pottery works. In a class society,
every act of civilisation is paid for by acts of barbarism.
Abraham
Lincoln’s reputation as a liberator distorts the historical record. He
looked forward to gradual and total abolition, with compensation, but
did not go to war to free the slaves. He entered the Civil War in April
1861 to maintain the
United States
as a single nation-market-state, as he wrote in August 1862:
My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union … If I could
save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could
save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that
… I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official
duty and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish
that all men everywhere could be free.
As
head of the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, one of
Lincoln
’s official objectives was to hold onto the
Mississippi
Valley
as a trade route for the mid-western States; a parallel aim was for the
mill-owners of
New England
to retain dominance over their suppliers in the cotton-growing South. On
New Year’s Day 1862,
Lincoln
accepted military necessity by signing a Proclamation to emancipate the
slaves in order to defeat the Confederacy’s war for independence.
Obama
has adopted the
Lincoln
logo to attach himself to the descendants of slaves. He mimicked
Lincoln
’s whistle-stop train from
Illinois
for his inauguration. He points to
Lincoln
’s example when giving cabinet posts to war criminals among both the
Republicans and the Democrats. The parallels are even stronger between
Lincoln
’s ‘official duty’ to save the
Union
and Obama’s rescue of Wall Street. |