British Columbia officially recognized Emancipation Day for the first time on Sunday.
The province has proclaimed the day on Aug. 1, to mark the date in 1834 that slavery was abolished across Canada and the British Empire.
Read more: Hundreds march in Vancouver to mark the day slaves were freed in Canada
“The Black community has been part of British Columbia since April 1858, when more than 800 members of the community came to traditional territories of the First Nations and the Métis fleeing brutality and exploitation," Parliamentary Secretary for Anti-Racism Initiatives Rachna Singh said in a statement.
“Yet the experience of Black British Columbians continues to be marginalized, their histories and contributions to this province little known or celebrated. This proclamation reaffirms our commitment to recognize the historical and present wrongs of exclusion, segregation, displacement, surveillance and over-incarceration that Black communities have experienced. We must and can do better."
Read more: March held in Fredericton to mark first-ever Emancipation Day
In March, the federal government unanimously passed a vote to designate Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day.
It comes amid a reinvigorated civil rights movement, that gained momentum in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minnesota police officer.
Last year, hundreds of people marched through downtown Vancouver to mark Emancipation Day.
That same day, Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart proclaimed Aug. 1 to be Emancipation Day in the city.
The theory of Marxism is based on the material development of the forces of production as the moving force of historical progress. The transition from one system to another is not decided subjectively, but is rooted in the needs of production itself. It is on this basis and this basis only that the superstructure is erected: of state, ideology, art, science. It is true that the superstructure has an important secondary effect on production and even within certain limits, as Engels explained, develops its own independent movement. But in the last analysis, the development of production is decisive.
Marx explained the historical justification for capitalism, depite the horrors of the industrial revolution, despite the slavery of the blacks in Africa, despite child labour in the factories, the wars of conquest throughout the globe - by the fact that it was a necessary stage in the development of the forces of production. Marx showed that without slavery, not only ancient slavery, but slavery in the epoch of the early development of capitalism, the modern development of production would have been impossible. Without that the material basis for communism could never have been prepared. In Poverty of Philosophy Marx wrote:
"Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
"Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy - the complete decay of modern commerce and civilisation."
Since this was true of the development of capitalism in America why are conservatives 'shocked' when it occurred in state capitalist economies of Russia and China. While such slavery is not apparent in Cuba, which is why it remains a farm based economy.
Kravachenko, in his book, “I Chose Freedom,” vividly describes the conditions of the Russian workers, whom he divides into two groups: (i) the workers who remain nominally free and are under the same compulsions as in a capitalist economy, only their standard of living is relatively lower, and, with a ruling class on their backs living in greater comparative luxury then their British or American equivalents; (ii) a slave army of 10 to 15 million who are destined to meet a slow and gruesome death, many because they have fought this criminal regime on behalf of their class. These conditions of abject misery, exploitation and degradation are called by some Socialism.
These crude forms of exploitation are the economic consequences of Soviet isolation and its inevitable subordination to the economic laws of surrounding World Capitalism. But, due to the low productivity of the Russian worker, Russian Capitalism had to take a far more ruthless form than its Western European counterparts: it had to remain in the hands of the State – world conditions did not permit anything else other than State Capitalism.
Even Lenin acknowledged that State Capitalism existed within the framework of the Workers’ State since the theory of value, which is the theory of the world market continues to operate. Only if the worker intervenes in the process of production through workers’ control could effective blows be delivered at the theory of value.
Marx based his analysis on the activity of men engaged in the process of labour, so, when he came to deal with Capitalism his principal criticism lay in the fact that man’s labours were not fulfilling their proper purpose, the advancement of man, but were alienated and used for exactly the opposite purpose – the increased subjugation of man, which, in turn, led to the increased rebelliousness of man.
“Modern industry,” says Marx, “compels society under penalty of death to replace the detail worker of today crippled by lifelong repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to a mere fragment of man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, and to whom different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.” (Marx, Capital I, p. 534.)
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