Read on Twitter
"Elisabeth welskopf, the late east german scholar who was one of the leading marxist students of slavery, discussed at great length the critical role of direct violence in creating and maintaining slavery. Force, she argued, is essentisl for all class societies.
Naked might - violence, in georges sorel's terminology - is essential for the creation of all such systems. However, organized force and authority - what welskopf calls 'spiritual force' - usually obviates the need to use violence in most developed class societies
Where non-slaves make up the dominated class. The problem in a slaveholding society, however, was that it was usually necessary to introduce new persons to the status of slaves because the former slaves either died out or were manumitted.
The worker who is fired remains a worker, to be hired elsewhere. The slave who was freed was no longer a slave. Thus it was necessary continually to repeat the original, violent act of transforming free man into slave.
This sort of violence constitutes the prehistory of all stratified societies, welskopf argued, but it determines both 'the prehistory and (concurrent) history of slavery.'"
"When we say that the slave was natally alienated and ceased to belong independently to any formally recognized community, this does not mean that he or she did not experience or share informal social relations.
...the important point...is that these relationships were never recognized as legitimate or binding. Thus American slaves, like their ancidnt Greco-Roman counterparts, had regular sexual unions, but such unions were never recognized as marriages;
both groups were attached to their local communities, but such attachments had no binding force; both sets of parents were deeply attached to their children, but the parental bond had no social support.
The refusal formally to recognize the social relations of the slave had profound emotional and social implications."
From Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson
@threader_app compile
