ABSTRACT
This chapter will not be confined to the analysis of slavery as a system of social production. Slave production presupposes the existence of slavery as an institution – slavery is always first and foremost a legal or customary status. Slaves and the institution of slavery can exist where slave labour is not the basis of the system of social production. In the first section of this chapter we will examine the legal form of slavery. No question is subject to more humanist mythologising than slavery - slavery is the most extreme form of denial of the human essence, the most important attribute of which is freedom. For the humanist slavery is a form of human subjection or domination - an impossible form, doomed to ruin and failure by the revolt of the slaves, and the degeneration and demoralisation of their captors. In the second part of this chapter we will question these humanist assumptions about slavery as a form of domination. In the third section we will pose the question: Is there a slave mode of production? We will attempt to develop a concept of a mode of production in which slave labour is the basis of social production. In the fourth and final section the effects of the analysis of slave systems of production in terms of humanist and subjectivist concepts will be examined and criticised - Eugène Genovese and John Cairnes will be taken as examples.
