Jim McIlroy: Slavery endemic to Australia’s colonial history

Jim McIlroy writes that Slavery endemic to Australia’s colonial history.

Slavery, as a system of forced labour, dates back to antiquity. Slavery, Australia-style, includes the original convict system, First Nations people being forced to labour on pastoral stations, the Blackbirding of South Sea Islanders and the Stolen Wages program in Queensland and other states.

While wage theft is the capitalist system’s standard business model and the colonisers generally accepted slavery, it nevertheless sat uneasily on their conscience. This is why the ideology of “scientific” racism, the belief that one skin colour was superior to another, allowed First Nations people to be enslaved for so long. It also underpins the right’s culture wars, currently taking a hammering with the rise of the Black Lives Matter-Stop Deaths in Custody movements.

Emphasis Mine

Racism is the ideological justification for slavery. It is not the economic or political justification. The economic justification is the maximum possible extraction of labour value from workers. The political justification was to create a collaborator class of poor whites to uphold the system of slavery.