History Of Slave Ships

Atlantic Historian (history of the sea and colonization) Marcus Rediker, who authored the 'must read ' The Many Headed Hydra, has a new book out on Slave Ships since this is the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the end of Slavery.

For capitalism to expand, forced conscripted labour would be replaced with a new form of exploitation; wage slavery. Which itself was evolving from both indentured servitude and slavery during this period.

Rediker takes a libertarian socialist view of the Atlantic trade and its importance in the creation of global capitalism continuing the social/labour history tradition developed by E.P. Thompson in creating approachable and readable works.

Over more than three centuries, more than 12 million Africans were loaded on ships, bound for the Americas to be slaves.

Aboard the slaver, or Guineaman, as the vessels were also known, the kidnapped Africans frequently had to travel in living quarters as cramped as coffins, and suffered savage beatings, outright torture and death to quell uprisings and forced dancing to keep them fit.

While the plantation system and other aspects of slavery have been widely studied, the history of the slave ship itself is largely unknown, says historian Marcus Rediker, author of "The Slave Ship — A Human History."

"What I'm basically interested in is how captains, ship captains, officers, sailors and the slave interacted with the slave ship. What was the actual reality? Of course, it was quite horrifying," said Rediker, a University of Pittsburgh history professor. "In many respects, the development of the Americas through slavery and the plantation system is unthinkable without the slave ship."

For a couple hundred years, most people thought they knew what happened during the Atlantic crossing, Rediker says. Abolitionists had produced evidence of life aboard slave ships, but many scholars were suspicious of what they'd gathered, thinking it propaganda.

Perhaps the most significant reason for lack of scholarship, he says, is an assumption that "history happens on land, that the landed masses of the world are the real places and that the seas in between are a kind of void."

Marcus Rediker escapes the 'the violence of abstraction' in this history of slave ships that richly mines the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves.

But, as promised, this account of life aboard the "vast machines" is not told with charts and tables. The slave ship, as a floating factory, prison and weapon, was recognized by all as a world-altering technology. Rediker's sources include parliamentary hearings, abolitionist pamphlets and the extant writings of captains, sailors and slaves. Chained below decks aboard what some imagined were "houses with wings," Africans were already, according to Rediker, forging new communities.

The slave ship ranged in size and design from 11-ton sloops, capable of carrying 30 slaves, to 566-ton behemoths, capable of carrying 700 to 800 slaves. Such variety belies the slow pace of innovation within the trade. In spite of its centrality to European ventures abroad, the great minds of the Enlightenment added to the slave ship -- over the course of 100 years -- copper-sheathed hulls (to protect against shipworm), ventilation and netting to catch those who tried to jump overboard. Liberté, égalité and fraternité came separately.

Much of Rediker's book also concerns the lives of sailors, the trade's "white slaves." Many were compelled to sea by debt, others by trickery. Half were cut down within months by West Africa's endemic parasites. Those who survived disease had to endure the cruelty of captains driven mad by profit. Some escaped, only to be caught and sold by African traders. Others became pirates. But all were lucky compared with the chronically ill, penniless sailors who, cheated of wages and their passage home, littered 18th-century ports from Kingston to Charleston.

Rediker looks not at that bigger picture but at the slave ship itself, as a microeconomy where the captain was chief executive, jailer, accountant, paymaster and disciplinarian, exercising these roles by maintaining, from his spacious captain's cabin in a very unspacious ship, the mystique of what later military leaders would call command isolation. Slave ships are, after all, a far larger part of our history than we like to think. Our normal picture of an 18th-century sailing vessel is of one filled with hopeful immigrants. But before 1807, ships carried well over three times as many enslaved Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans.

Not only was the business a booming one, it was, until pesky abolitionists started making a fuss in the 1780s, considered highly respectable, as central to the Atlantic economy as is something like oil today. "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is," wrote James Houston, who worked for a firm of 18th-century slave merchants. "It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves." John Newton, who later wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace," spent part of his youth as a slave-ship captain and believed that because of the long periods of time at sea, there was no calling that afforded "greater advantages to an awakened mind, for promoting the life of God in the soul."

Slave ships were death ships for crew and captives

Monday, October 01, 2007

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The typical slave ship began its life as a merchant vessel, and was refitted later for its grim purpose.

The primary remodeling, which often occurred on the outward leg of the voyage, was to build walls below decks to separate men and women, and then build horizontal platforms halfway between the first and second decks on which to stack the slaves.

The height between the first and second deck usually was only about 5 feet before the remodeling, said Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh history professor and author of "The Slave Ship: A Human History." Once the platforms were built, headroom was about 2¹/₂ feet.

"This produced crowding of a kind that is almost incomprehensible," he said. "One of the things that struck almost everybody about a slave ship was the stench of it.

"It was said in Charleston, S.C., that when the wind was blowing off the water a certain way you could smell a slave ship before you could see it. It was a function of sickness, vomit, diarrhea, death and also the way the human body perspires in the condition of fear."

And while it is true that some slave ship seamen joined the crew because they were sadistic or wanted sexual access to African women, many of them were victimized almost as badly as the slaves, Dr. Rediker said.

"One of the great mysteries I wanted to explore was how sailors were recruited to slave ships when they knew the conditions were going to be horrible and the death rates were going to be high."

He discovered that in many cases, ship captains would get sailors to run up debts in taverns, and then would pay off the tavern owners with some of the sailor's advance wages in return for the sailor being handed over to work on the crew.

Slave ship captains also would offer sailors advance wages worth $800 to $1,200 in today's money or to pay part of the sailors' salaries to their wives once a week.

Once they were onboard, many crewmen were treated almost as brutally as the slaves. For a huge variety of infractions, they were whipped, chained, denied food, stabbed and even shot.

In fact, the death rate among slave ship crews was almost as high as among the slaves, Dr. Rediker said, and hit 5 percent even on the healthiest of voyages.

The slave trade was required to create vast accumulations of capital. And it is directly tide to British expansion and so called Free Trade.

People in Norfolk are about to have their eyes opened to the county's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

If you think of the trade in enslaved Africans using British ships, Liverpool, Bristol and London spring to mind. But project historian Richard Maguire is about to shock Norfolk people with the deep links he has unearthed concerning the role the county played in the trade - and its abolition.

His research culminates in an exhibition at the Norfolk Record Office at County Hall from Monday.

He said: “The original idea was to look at something that was never looked at before - Norfolk's connections to transatlantic slavery.

“People have always tended to assume that the slave trade was exclusive to Liverpool, Bristol and London. But research we have done at the Record Office has revealed there to be a goldmine of information relating to Norfolk. Norfolk was connected at all levels of the trade - slave ships left King's Lynn for Africa, county people owned slaves and invested in plantations and traded slaves from here. But on the other hand Norfolk people from the 1780s onwards were equally involved in calling for the end of the slave trade.

“We are trying to give people an understanding of part of the history that nobody knew about before.”

The exhibition also reveals black people have lived in Norfolk since the 17th century. Documents on show reveal that a black man lived in King's Lynn in 1673, a black woman Rachel was baptised in Diss in 1799, and Elizabeth Buxton, from Stradsett, left £10 to her black servant in her will of 1729. Other documents reveal the inhumane treatment slaves received from owners, and a list of the enslaved people on the Hanson Plantation, Barbados, owned by Sir John Berney of Kirby Bedon Hall, lists black people as stock alongside cattle.

And in a related story a freedom ship may be at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

A fantastic story is unfolding along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Indiana.

It involves a 150 year old shipwreck, a Porter County Historian, fugitive slaves and The Underground Railroad.

Legend has it a wooden schooner would stop on the shore in Indiana to pick up fugitive slaves and take them to Chicago where they would hide on ships bound for freedom in Canada.

After the 1850 Compromise was passed it became dangerous to help escaped slaves even in free states like Illinois and Indiana.

According to the law you could be prosecuted, fined and even thrown in jail. The mysterious ship met with a tragic fate.

Now a team of researchers is racing against time and the elements to solve this mystery and prove this was the legendary ship used to smuggle fugitive slaves to freedom.

Again the idea of piracy and privateers arising from the Atlantic Slave trade to become the basis of capitalism in the new world plays an important role later in the industrial revolution created by the American Civil war.

Just as it is important today in the creation of what Phillip Bobbitt calls the New Market State. Which we see in the rise of gang (pirate) controlled countries like Somalia and Jamaica.

Piracy was the origin of capitalism as it evolved within the declining feudal economies of Europe.

The history of capital is not merely the history of wealth accumulated by a few families who hand it down, it is the history of the worlds wealth created by slavery, indentured servitude, serfdom and its transition through the creation of labour saving machinery to replace the degradation of humans to become the degradation of work.

See:

Abolishing Slavery In Canada

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Jamestown; the beginning of Globalization

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Black Like Me

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism;William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

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The Slave Ship — A Human History, R.Buckminister.Fuller, The Many Headed Hydra, pirates, piracy, freebooters, capitalism, free-association, Marcus Rediker, anarchism, anarchy, libertarian, libertarianism, left-libertarian, primitive-accumulation-of-capital

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Paschal Beverly Randolph (P.B. Randolph) was a 19th Century magickian, a spiritualist and founder of the Rosicrucian movement in the United Sates.

Like Paul Lafargue he was a mulatto but one who initially denied his Negro roots.

( 8 Oct. 1825 - 29 July 1875 ), physician, philosopher, and author, was born in New York City , the son of William Beverly Randolph, a plantation owner, and Flora Beverly, a barmaid. At the age of five or seven Randolph lost his mother to smallpox, and with her the only love he had known. Randolph later stated, "I was born in love, of a loving mother, and what she felt, that I lived." His father's devotion is questionable. In 1873 Randolph hinted at his own illegitimacy, stating that his parents "did not stop to pay fees to the justice or to the priest."

Randolph 's mother possessed a strong temperament, unusual physical beauty, and intense passions, characteristics that Randolph inherited. Later many, especially his enemies, perceived Randolph as being of "Negro descent," which he denied. Sent to live with his half-sister, Randolph was ignored, unloved, and abused and eventually turned to begging on the streets.

Being born in New York to a 'free black' woman, his reluctance to be considered a Negro at the time is understandable. And since his upbringing was in the time and area of the Gangs of New York, plagued by nativism as it was, it is also understandable.

But by the time of the Civil War he was an outspoken advocate of Negro Rights.

Born poor and of mixed race in 1825 and raised (more or less) by prostitutes in the Five Points slum of New York, Randolph was self-educated and prickly proud. Creating himself, he picked and chose just how "black " to be. He could de-emphasize his African heritage in the face of prejudice--after his suicide, a newspaper said he was "part Spaniard, and inherited all the suspicious distrusting qualities of the people of that nationality. " At other times, he emphasized it, as during his Civil War Black Nationalist phase, when he worked briefly as a teacher for the short-lived Freedman 's Bureau, an agency designed to educate freed slaves but only halfheartedly supported by the federal government.

Yet when some Northerners advocated a scheme to ship freed slaves to Africa, Randolph, speaking for the slaves, emphasized "American: " "We men of color were born here; so were our fathers and mothers down a long line of ancestry....Are all our sufferings to be rewarded by our removal to African deserts and barbaric climes and places?...No! Never! Here is our home, and here we mean to stay, and on this soil will die, and in it be buried. "

And like Lafargue he was an internationalist, traveling and training as well as lecturing in Europe. As with many in the occult movement of the 19th Century he was a social reformer. And like his contemporary Virginia Woodhull, Mrs. Satan, he was an advocate of womens rights and Free Love.

Randolph is to be remembered for his philosophical works on love, marriage, and womanhood. He provided new and unique insight into the then taboo world of sexual love. He aided the education, rights, and equality of both women and blacks. He foresaw the evils of tobacco and drug abuse. Finally, Randolph, through his position as the Americas' first Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas Rosæ Crucis, directly or indirectly touched the lives of more than 200,000 neophytes (students) comprising the Fraternitas and other Rosicrucian orders.

P.B. Randolph 's life story demonstrates also how reform-minded American Spiritualism turned into "occultism. " Spiritualism was well-intentioned, "scientific " but also passive, linked to social reform (early feminism, the abolition of slavery) but also to faddishness, most notably "free love, " which could, depending on who was talking, mean anything from a partnership of equals to mere spouse-swapping. ( "You and I were meant to be soul mates. ") Occultism, on the other hand, is individualistic, rooted in personal development and self-improvement, and generally not connected to any social or political philosophy.

With the democratic decline in Europe after the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune secret societies were formed for the purposes of pursuing democratic as well as socialist revolution. In England and the Commonwealth they were formed for the purposes of pursuing trade unionism which had been banned as an illegal combination.

That secret societies should form for finding and revealing secret knowledge, was thus a natural outgrowth of this period and was coincidental with the growth and popularity of fraternal orders after the Civil War in America and across Europe.

His patron both in Spiritualism as well as getting him work with Lincoln was Colonel Ethan A. Hitchcock, a noted military officer as well as practicing alchemist. Like other occultists, John Dee comes to mind, he too was also a spy. The secrecy of the occult overlaps with the secret society of intelligence gathering. They share a similar cosmological outlook that is the search for hidden or secret knowledge.

As happens in the Occult community, as in the political one, sectarian differences are frequent and lead to rivalries and mutual denunciations. Such was the case with P. B. Randolph, who is credited with founding the Rosicrucian movement in the United States.

He faced attack by rivals for hegemony over the occult movement in America denouncing him for his Luciferian ideas from the likes of Madam Blavatsky and her Theosophists and from the white supremacist founder of the American Scottish Right of Freemasonry; Albert Pike. Ironic because both of them are also accused of being Luciferians.

Such is the case of 19th Century occult wars not only in America but in Europe where again competing orders of Rosicrucian's charged and counter charged each other as being in league with Lucifer.

The Luciferian charge comes about from Randolph's advocacy of free love, which was also embraced by American Anarchists at the time. His theories were outlined in his book Eulis and in his other famous treatise; Magia Sexualis

Today we would call his practices sex therapy, where he discussed sexual dysfunction with his patients, and as a Doctor he practiced mesermism, the passing of hands over the body to affect the magnetic energies. He also advocated the tantra practice of heightened sensuality by controlling the male orgasm and ejaculation.

 In 1870 he founded the Order of Eulis, which kept its teachings
secret because of the sex and drugs.  Some people must've talked,
though: H. P. Blavatsky denounced Randolph as immoral, a charge also
leveled at the Luciferian Freemason Sir Albert Pike.  An occult war
followed.  In 1872 his "Rosicrucian Rooms" were raided by police and
he was jailed for distributing "Free Love" literature.  Fires,
robberies, and disease followed, and on July 29, 1975, he shot
himself.  His friends and followers claimed that Blavatsky's curses
had nailed him.  Blavatsky founded the philosophical society the same
year.

By the 1870s many of Randolph's writings dealt with 
occult aspects of  love and sexuality.

Randolph, as a physician, also counseled many of his patients on matters of
family relations, marital bliss and the art of love. These acts of kindness and
concern were sometimes taken as conduct condoning "free love."

In February 1872, he was arrested and imprisoned for promoting
"free love" or immorality. Although acquitted of all charges, as it was discovered in
court that the indictment was merely a clever attempt by former
business partners (now enemies) to obtain his book copyrights, Randolph
never recovered from the humiliation of the proceeding.

Although dying at age 49, Randolph was a prolific writer, producing many books
and pamphlets on love, health, mysticism and the occult.

And further confusion was sown with his initiation into a mystical Gnostic cult from Syria/Iraq which mistakenly has been associated with the Yezedi.

The Yezedi created a sensation amongst some 19th Century scholars who had finally discovered a genuine devil worshiping cult. And the devil they worshiped was Lucifer.

Despite my best googling efforts the only references I could find to Ansaireh is that referred back to the region in Syria/Iraq which is named after a Mountain.

Gertrude Bell in her diary refers to visiting the region and the Yezedi who dwelled there. Which may have been the reason the author of the introduction to Magica Sexualis thought Randolph had been initiated into their religious teachings.

During his journeys to Paris, Pascal became aware of several works which were being published in France and Germany dealing with the Ansaireth or Nusairis of Syria. 25 There was much discussion, in the Rosicrucian circles that Randolph traveled in, of the purity and sublimity of the teachings of the Ansaireh. Books by Niebuhr, M. Catafago, Victor Langlois and others told of these mysterious hill dwellers in Northern Syria who were neither Jews, Christians or Muslims. They may well have been the people that modern anthropology has identified as the Yezidi, the devotees of the Peucock god, Melek Ta'aus.

PBR tells how the chief of the Ansaireth, Narek El Gebel, arrived at the Rosicrucian Third Dome in Paris with letters of introduction and then, recognizing Randolph's abilities and character, invited him to come to Syria and to study with the Ansaireth. Randolph went to Syria and was initiated into the Ansairetic Brotherhood. Upon his return to America, he established the Priesthood of Aeth based on the Ansairetic Mysteries

There were a variety of Christian and Islamic sects in the region. Including the Druze and Nusairis and one of the last surviving gnostic sects the Mandaens. As well as Kurds and Yezedi, Sabians all of whom faced persecution from the Turks for being dhimmis.

In another part of this Consular District there seems to have been little change from the old times of rapine and bloodshed in Turkey. I allude to the Ansaireh mountains, stretching from the valley of the Orontes to Mount Lebanon. On a late occasion a member of the Medjlis of Tripoli, passing through a Christian village in pursuit of the revolted Ansaireh, set fire to it, and, when the inhabitants conveyed their moveable property of value into their Church (…), it was broken open and plundered. This case, with many others equally abominable, of simultaneous occurrence, was laid before Her Majesty’s Consul General for Syria, the perpetrators of the outrages being under the jurisdiction of the Pasha of Beyrouth, and will thus have already come under Your Excellency’s notice. (Aleppo, 31st March, 1859; FO 78/1452 (No. 11), Skene to Bulwer, Constantinople)

The author of the introduction to Magica Sexualis is mistaken in associating the Ansairth with the Yezedi. As I said the Yezedi at the time had become somewhat of a sensation amongst certain Christian religious and historical scholars. And the Nusairis refer to an Islamic Shi'a Sunni sect.

Randolphs Rosicrucian Order and his fellow occultists of the time were fascinated with the recent discoveries of Gnosticism and the Gnostic's. Finding a living Gnostic religion which offered initiation would have been more in keeping with their occult traditions.

I suspect Randolph had been initiated into the the mystery religion of the Mandaens. Whose followers were in the same region of Syria at the time.

Within the Middle East, but outside of their community, the Mandaeans are more commonly known as the Ṣubba (singular Ṣubbī). Likewise, their Muslim neighbors will refer to them collectively as the Sabians (Arabic al-Ṣābiʾūn), in reference to the Ṣabians of the Qur'an. Occasionally, the Mandaeans are also called the "Christians of St. John" (a misnomer, since they are not Christians by any standard), based upon preliminary reports made by members of the Barefoot Carmelite mission in Basra during the 16th century.

Other groups which have been identified with the Mandaeans include the "Nasoraeans" described by Epiphanius and the Dositheans mentioned by Theodore Bar Kōnī in his Scholion. Ibn al-Nadim also mentions a group called the Mughtasila, "the self-ablutionists," who may be identified with one or the other of these groups. The members of this sect, like the Mandaeans, wore white and performed baptisms.

The similarity of beliefs about healthy living, not eating meat, avoiding tobacco, reincarnation and sexuality strike me as Mandaean rather than Yezedi.

According to E.S. Drower in the introduction to The Secret Adam, Mandaeans believe in marriage and procreation, and in the importance of leading an ethical and moral lifestyle in this world, placing a high priority upon family life. Consequently, Mandaeans do not practice celibacy or asceticism. Mandaeans will, however, abstain from strong drink and red meat. While they agree with other gnostic sects that the world is a prison governed by the planetary archons, they do not view it as a cruel and inhospitable one.

The Rosicrucian movement he founded still exists today publishing his works;

SEERSHIP; Guide to Soul Sight


The importance of Randolph cannot be underestimated. His works influenced later magickal and occult practitioners including Eliphas Levi as well as the Ordo Templi Orientis in particular Theodore Reuss and Aleister Crowley.




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Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

For Black History Month I will look at some of the historically obscure but influential black intellectuals of the 19th Century.

Today I feature Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son in law who was a Mulatto and faced racial discrimination as well as being subjected to antisemitism.

Paul Lafargue was born in Cuba in 1842. As he would later boast, he was an “international[ist] of blood before [he] was one of ideology.” By which he meant that of his four grandparents, only one was a Christian French citizen – one of his grandmothers was an Indian from Jamaica and one was a mulatto refugee from Haiti, and his maternal grandfather was a French Jew. He also liked to say that “the blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins” and when Daniel DeLeon asked him about his origins, he promptly replied, “I am proudest of my Negro extraction.”

Despite his family ties to Marx and his friendship and patronage by Engels we was no Marxist, he was a follower of Proudhon and an avowed anarchist/libertarian socialist.

He is known for his famous exhortation to the working class to struggle against work; The Right To Be Lazy (1883)

This would be the inspiration for the polemical proto-situationist text; The Right to Be Greedy and later Bob Blacks popular consumer version;The Abolition of Work

Lafargue's critique that workers under capitalism were no better off than slaves rings true even today. He applied the term wage-slave literally, and literarily. He exhorts workers to not to demand the right to work but to demand the right to leisure. Something capitalism of his time could not provide, though today it is all around us in modern consumer society of the G8 countries.

Capitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the social and political life of a century of science and industry, has become bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like the owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to provide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they dared demand the right to work -- a slave's right.

His tongue in cheek sarcasm and ridicule makes his writing humorous, accessible and pointed. In this case he points out that those who advocate for the morality of animal rights would do well to advocate for the ultimate pack horse of capitalism, the worker.

THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely and more firmly to his economic duty.

"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity but they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds call "lower."

Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too great a task to go through the longs list of its benefactions; I will name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.

Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.

Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover, timothy and other succulent plants.

These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their feats of running and leaping They respect none of the social dignities before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence. At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an apology and withdrew.

It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been corrupted by their high social station; had they taken it into their heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing- lace and diamonds, and drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more overwhelming drudgery would he impending over the class of wage-workers.

Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh, like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their anthropophagic tastes.

The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of Man." The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.

The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols until he is grown.

The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable abomination -- to demand for babies the rights of colts.

As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work. and their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.

This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without his heart being torn by it.

This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the entertainment of a quadrupled than for paying the wages of a biped. It has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his death.

The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the consciousness of all men.

The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights, with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality, to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.

Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons, pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on the tender grass of the mountains.

The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a weary lamb.

True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.

Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.

Also See:

Black Herstory Month: Lucy Parsons




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