Adam Smith 1

 Karl Marx  0

Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 1846: "As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map . . ."

Adam Smith, widely considered the first major theorist of capitalism, abhorred the institution of slavery. "Whatever work [a slave] does…can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own," he wrote in 1776. In an earlier lecture, Smith indicted laws that "strengthen the authority of the masters and reduce the slaves to a more absolute subjection." The plantation system at the core of this economy was not a competitive market; planters had secured a state-sanctioned "monopoly against all the rest of the world" and "indemnif[ied] themselves by the exorbitancy of their profites for their expensive and thriftless method of cultivation." Smith singled out the exceptional cruelty found in the British colonies of "Jamaica and Barbadoes, where slaves are numerous and objects of jealousy [and] punishments even for slight offences are very shocking."