revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

7
An American agriculture developed to a mode of agriculture compatible
to a
labor-intensive system of production, it eventually turned to Africa
as a supplier of labor . Theordore Allen, in Class Struggle and the Origin
of Racial Slavery ,
mentions how indentured servants, from Europe were used
as the first labor supply in 17th century Virginia . Africans were also
imported as indentured but unlike their European counterparts, were very
rapidly reduced to the position of chattel slaves . The enslavement of
Africans as opposed to Europeans is
significant because it necessitated
the development of the ideology of racism . The availability of African
labor, the tremendous profits that could be made in the trade and the
dependence of the expansion of crops, such as cotton, on slave labor
brought about the eventual institutionalization of African slavery . The
origin of racism in America is based in class struggle . Racism, which begins
to arise as an ideology in 17th century Virginia, is an attempt, not
only to justify slavery as is commonly thought, but to divide the unity
which had formed between the European indetured servants and
the African
slaves who rose in the Bacon rebellion against the colonial state . 4
The history of chattel slavery from 1619 to 1861 is a history of
Black resistance to the American slave system .
African captives resisted
slavery in various forms, from insurrections on slave ships during the
middle passage,
sabotage, maiming and killing animals, non-cooperation,
work slowdowns, running away, suicide, work strikes, to organized
rebellion
and guerrilla warfare . During slavery, some 204 slave insurrections
occurred, some having the objectives of seizing land and forming an
4Theodore William Allen, Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial_
Slaver (Hoboken : HEP Publishing Company, 1975), p . 6 .