25.04.2001

Child slaves

A press release from the AFP news agency last week briefly focused the world's attention on the existence of child slavery in west Africa. It reported that when the Nigerian-registered ship Etireno docked in Benin police detained the captain and crew on suspicion of trafficking in children destined to become slave workers on cocoa plantations. In a thin news week, the story got a lot of coverage in the British press, with reports of up to 250 children being transported. When only 23 were found, there was speculation that others may have been thrown overboard.

Descriptions of children being forced to work as slaves to produce chocolate naturally arouse strong feelings. Comfortable and well-off consumers in developed countries like Britain read about the poverty created by capitalism in other parts of the world and how it leads to such repellent phenomena as child slavery, but feel powerless to do anything to put it right. They give money to charities and may try to purchase 'ethically', but they see problems getting worse rather than better.

For their part, chocolate manufacturers responded to the reports by insisting that they do not buy beans produced using slave labour. No doubt we will soon see 'No child labour was involved in the production of this bar' printed on chocolate wrappers - a new twist to the 'Not tested on animals' displayed on shampoo bottles. Such disclaimers are intended to sell the atomised consumer a clear conscience along with the commodity.

Although it has only now come to public attention, slavery is endemic in west Africa, including child slavery. According to Unicef between 10,000 and 15,000 children from Mali, Benin, Togo and the Central African Republic work up to 18 hour a day for no pay on cocoa bean plantations in the Ivory Coast, often being given inadequate food and suffering severe ill-treatment. Other children are sold as domestic slaves in Gabon, where oil production has made the privileged few very rich. Unicef estimates about 200,000 children are sold into slavery every year in west and central Africa.

Poverty is the root cause of the slave trade. Countries where slaves originate include those with the lowest per capita GDP, such as Mali, Benin and Burkina Faso. Where families are living at or below subsistence, a culture has evolved where children move in with better-off relatives or family friends to work as household domestics. It is this tradition that slave traders have taken advantage of. Parents in west Africa, like parents everywhere, strive to provide the best life they can for their children, and destitute families hope that a child they sell will get the chance of a secure future. Where subsistence survival cannot be guaranteed, selling a child for into slavery for £10 is often a rational choice. It is either that or let the child slowly starve. However some children are traded through a series of intermediaries for larger and larger sums, and are eventually handed over to plantation owners for about £300.

Slavery is commonly thought of as an unmitigated evil. Yet when slavery emerged in prehistoric cultures it was, compared to what was before, in many ways a progressive phenomenon - advances in culture and technique meant it was worth keeping war captives alive as slaves rather than summarily butchering them. Domestic slaves were in general well treated too.

But, in the present day, capitalist world slavery exists as an anomaly on the margins of the system. Only in the absence of elementary political democracy and rights (e.g., Saudi Arabia and its poorest migrants) and in order to perform simple and repetitive manual work on the very lowest levels of profitability (e.g., Ivory Coast cocoa plantations), is it useful or viable to force people to work through violence or the threat of starvation.

For the system in general it is preferable to give workers some incentive to work well by paying wages and imposing discipline through the threat of dismissal for sub-standard work or refusal to obey orders. Indeed the system needs a motivated, diligent, mobile, transferable workforce so as to maintain dynamism. Slave labour tends to be prone to rebellion and sullen. It takes its revenge on the means of production themselves. Marx quotes in Capital volume one an account of work on slave plantations in the southern United States in 1862, where it was a universal principle "only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements such as are difficult to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness".

For most industries in capitalistically underdeveloped countries, wage labour relations are far more profitable, with sweated labour, often children, being employed in bad conditions for low wages. Transnationals - where they directly operate and employ workers - provide much better paid conditions, albeit far below those in countries with democratic and trade union rights.

Liberals get upset about this too, and may refuse to buy items produced under 'third world' conditions (Gap and Nike). But communists have a different attitude. We demand full trade union rights, international trade union links and organisation along with a fight for extreme democracy on a global scale: e.g., abolition of immigration controls and cancelling usurious 'third world' debt.

Marxism is not moralistic, but it is deeply moral. Marxists agree that consumers should be concerned as to the conditions under which commodities are produced, and who benefits from the labour of the producers. We are totally opposed to chattel slavery. But we do not agree that it is enough simply to replace it with wage slavery, which bourgeois thought - George Monbiot included - regards as the natural condition for the mass of humanity. There is nothing natural about the separation of the worker from the means of production and means of sustenance. Part and parcel of this is the 'reserve army of labour' - unemployment and semi-unemployment in the most underdeveloped parts of the world - which condemns large sections of the population to destitution and causes many to resort to such desperate measures as the sale of their own children.

What should be criticised is not only the pernicious practice of slavery, but also the anarchy of the world market which reduces large swathes of the planet to absolute poverty.

Neither is it enough to bemoan the contrast between the conditions of wage slaves in capitalistically backward countries and the relative affluence of the capitalistically advanced west. We want to end all wage slavery and to raise the vision of humanity towards a world which supersedes all exploitation.

Mary Godwin