RWER issue 55: Marvin Brown
Adam Smith’s view of slaves as property: A response to Thomas Wells and Bruce Elmslie
Marvin T. Brown [University of San Francisco, USA]In a previous issue of the Review, both Thomas Wells and Bruce Elmslie argue that I got it wrong when I pointed out in “Free Enterprise and the Economics of Slavery” that in The Wealth of Nations, Smith treated slaves as property. I argued that since they were property—one could buy and sell them—one could ignore their human misery. I used Smith, as well as John Locke, to illustrate this peculiar Anglo-American tradition of basing freedom (free enterprise) on property and property rights. (On the European continent, freedom was generally based on the human will (Rousseau) or the moral will (Kant). So, did Smith treat slaves as property in The Wealth of Nations or did he not?
In Civilizing the Economy, where I provide more details about Smith’s treatment of slaves in The Wealth of Nations, I quote his comparison of the treatment of cattle and slaves:[1]
In all European colonies the culture of the sugarcane is carried on by negro slaves . . . . But the success of the cultivation which is carried on by means of cattle, depend very much upon the good management of those cattle; so the profit and success of that which is carried on by slaves, must depend equally upon the good management of those slaves, and in the good management of their slaves the French planters, I think it is generally allowed, are superior to the English.[2]
Comparing the management of cattle and of African slaves, of course, expresses the full meaning of “chattel slavery,” since chattel has the same root as cattle. Furthermore, just as cattle were treated as property, so were slaves.
Elmslie makes much of Smith’s argument that free labor, in most cases, is superior to slave labor. Smith does write this, but I think he is thinking about this much like one would think about getting the most from what one has purchased. As Patricia Werhane has pointed out, for Smith, labor is property. The difference between whether it is free or slave labor depends on who controls it. She writes:
Because that property [one’s productivity] is one’s own, to which one has a perfect right, and because productivity is exchangeable, one should be free to exchange this commodity, and others should be free to employ it. Thus one can sell one’s labor productivity (but not one’s strength and dexterity) without thereby selling oneself into serfdom. If one is not paid for one’s productivity, one’s property rights will be violated. Worse, because one’s productivity is an outcome of one’s own labor, if it is not recognized as an exchangeable commodity, one thereby will be treated as a slave.[3]
Slaves, in other words, were not free to exchange their labor, but were exchanged as labor. So when Smith argues that free labor is usually more productive than slave labor, he is merely calculating how to get the best return from one’s investment.
It is true that I do not give much credit to Smith’s statements against slavery in his other writings, although I do recognize them. The issue, however, is not Smith’s view of slavery as a moral philosopher, but his view as an economist. When he thinks economically, if we may call it this, he treats slaves as property. This is significant because we live in his legacy of this uncivil economics. In this tradition, we can be quite civil, in our religious, legal, and political life, but uncivil in our economic life. As we see the commercial gaining control over the civic today, we need not only to expose this tradition of treating people and the planet as property, but also to switch to a economics based on civic relations, rather than on one based on property and property relations.
References
Brown, Marvin T. Civilizing the Economy: A New Economics of Provision, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Smith, Adam The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1994), p. 633-634
Werhane, Patricia. Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 135
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SUGGESTED CITATION:
Marvin T. Brown, “Adam Smith’s view of slaves as property: A response to Thomas Wells and Bruce Elmslie”, real-world economics review, issue no. 55, 17 December 2010, pp. 124-125, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue55/Brown55.pdf
[1] Marvin T. Brown Civilizing the Economy: A New Economics of Provision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 25.
[2] Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1994), p. 633-634
Marvin Brown’s article on the “uncivil” treatment of labor in modern commercial labor markets as a “legacy” of the chattel slavery described by Adam Smith, is “long” on righteous indignation:But “short” on historical comparison with non-commercial modes of forced labor.The chattel property system of slave-holding in Smith’s time and the ante-bellum South, was the direct descendant of the Roman system of hypothecated bondage in-property. Which did indeed look upon that odiously persistent human institution as capable of constraint by debt-obligation & the opportunity for manumission.If we accept Mr. Brown’s thesis that “civic relations” (force-majure monopolized by state-governance?) rather than “property -relations” ought to govern labor-relations, we have no further to look than the treatment of labor, in the twentieth century, under both Soviet (marxist-inspired) Socialism & its first cousin, National Socialism. Neither pretended much respect for “property-relations”, other than as the meager residual of what the state did not immediately require. Instead the significant slave-sector of their “economies” was governed in daily practice by the principle of human labor as a ‘free good”.John Von Neumann’s famous definition of it ? A factor of production, whose output supplied from a previous period of production, always exceeds its input, demanded as a factor of production,in the present period.We should also consider for comparison purposes only, the justification for human slavery as a permanent human institution, by contemporary Islamic economic thought, and variations thereof in modern China. On site “field-work” not recommended. Additional references (1)ROLL JORDAN ROLL, by Eugene Genovese (2)THE GULAG ARCHEPELAGO by Alexander Solzhenitisyn. Norman L. Roth, GOOGLE on WEB (chrome)(1) Norman Roth on Economics (2) Norman Roth, Markets
For some more interesting examples of a civic economy, one could look at times when workers have been treated as citizens in the United States, such as laws against racial discrimination or the laws against sexual harassment. In both bases, laws have been based on civic relations not property relations. Even the right to unionize is based on civic rather than property relations. This legacy of treating workers as citizens, rather than the legacy of treating workers as commodities, could provide a basis for property laws, instead of property laws providing the basis for civic relationships.
Marvin Brown seems to harbor an utopian daydream about something he calls “civic economy” as the force-majure that ought to govern “property relations”. Perhaps he is a secret disciple of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a 19th century Anarchist who declared: “Property is theft”..Especially other peoples’ property.Or: Do we detect here a common academic variety of nostalgic marxoidism? In the guise of “pluralistic” economics ? In this regard M. Brown is at odds with more than 4000 years of human economic experience. Commerce has always been, in balance, a civilizing force. The grossest tyranny & injustices have usually been inflicted by those who are hostile to the very idea of free men & women choosing what to buy in the market-place, for any reason they like..Or no reason at all.By the way M.Brown: Who would choose what is meant by the hegemony of “civic relations” (??) over “property relations”…And how would such a “utopia” be enforced ? Have we not passed that way before ? Remember:The map of our world includes the “trade-winds”. Was the nightmare of seventy years of Marxist socialism completely flushed into the sewers of history ? Or does this Japanese haiku provide more insight ? “When the glaciers melt & retreat, old weeds bloom afresh” ? GOOGLE (chrome) on the WEB:(1)Norman Roth, Markets or (2) Norman Roth on Economics
Mr Roth’s response is a good example of the economics of dissociation that I detail in Civilizing the Economy. One only could say that “Commerce has always been, in balance, a civilizing force, by splitting off any awareness of the misery caused by the economic enslavement of millions of Africans during the early modern period. The reason for this dissociation was that slaves were treated as property. We see a similar dissociation today in terms of the treatment of the biosphere as property instead of a living system. I do think there is a relationship between our treatment of people and the planet. I think we can see them as living beings instead of as properties. Perhaps Mr. Roth will not agree with my assessment of the past, but I would hope he would join many of us who are trying to create an economic framework for a viable future.
Political versus economic rationality regarding slavery
It would be interesting to contrast the economic and political rationale of slavery. For a starter, one could talk about ‘property relations’ to articulate the economic rationale and ‘civic relations’ to articulate the political. To do this, one would need a meta-theory of social institutions subsuming both the market (over property relations) and the political state (over civic relations). Unless there is a theory of social institutions, the debate will have no track to reach any recognizable destination.
If we had a theory of social institutions, we might get something like the following. In step one, we would recognize three basic human needs. These would be the economic need of self-sustenance, political need of self-defense, and cultural need of self-reproduction. In step two, we would endorse some kind of rights to meet those needs in a society, with the supreme prohibition on cannibalism, namely that no individual is free to kill and eat another member of society (his body or his property or reputation) to satisfy his need. A right would make a list of acceptable practices to meet the needs without jeopardy to other members of society. In step three, we would see social institutions, as sets of rules with a manner of rule enforcement to protect those rights and thereby facilitate individual effort to meet the needs.
If we could do that, we would see that the state exists as a collective organ of defense against predators (external enemies) and cannibals (internal criminals). Slavery originates in outright plunder as the victor enslaves the vanquished. The state must defend the weak against forcible enslavement by the strong criminal. The enslavement of debtors and the manumission system of freeing a debtor is incidental to a few cases: most slaves were put into slavery because they were weak and defeated in battle or thuggery, and not because they were in debt. Romans did not first lend money to Slavs and then jailed them into slavery to recover the debt: they just suppressed the innocent. Others plundered innocent Africans and sold them to Europeans and Africans. They were not recovering defaulted loans. Does a thief have property rights over what he has stolen?
In short, unless we recognize slavery as the general result of criminal wrongdoing by invaders and armed slave-hunters, and rarely as a consequence of debt default, we miss the issue. Civilized societies do not allow debtors to be turned into slaves: bankruptcy law is a civic recourse.
Mohammad Gani, Independent University Bangladesh
Please read as: Others plundered innocent Africans and sold them to Europeans and Americans.
I agree with your view of slavery. I am worried with your suggestion that we separate the political and the economic. The point of examining Smith’s treatment of slavery in The Wealth of Nations was to highlight how he grounded economics is property and property relations. There are certainly property rights, but these are political rights, which means that the political, or at least the civic, should be recognized as the foundation for economics. In the Smithian economic framework, It is not just slaves that are treated as property, but so is nature, labor, and money. That’s the mistake. A correction is to recognize and expand the civic foundation for economics.
Mr. Roth,
As far as I know, the (commercial) plantations in Surinam in the seventeenth-nineteeth centuries needed a continous supply of fresh slaves from Africa, bought, transported and sold by (commercial) enterprises like the dutch West Indische Compagnie as deaths almost always exceeded births among the slaves. This trade and these plantations were financed by (commercial) Amsterdam banks.
Sometimes, markets can be a civilising force. Sometimes, not.