Note 13 — Chapter I · DEFINITION AND DISTINCTION FROM KINDRED PHENOMENA.

The great function of slavery can be no other than a division of labour13. Division of labour is taken here in the widest sense, as including not only a qualitative division, by which one man does one kind of work and another a different kind, but also a quantitative one, by which one man’s wants are provided for not by his own work only, but by another’s, A society without any division of labour would be one, in which each man worked for his own wants, and nobody for another’s; in any case but this there is a division of labour in this wider sense of the word. Now this division can be brought about by two means. “There are two ways” says Puchta, “in which we can avail ourselves of the strength of other men which we are in need of. One is the way of free commerce, that does not interfere with the liberty of the person who serves us, the making of contracts by which we exchange the strength and skill of another, or their products, for other performances on our part: hire of services, purchase of manufactures, etc. The other way is the subjection of such persons, which enables us to dispose of their strength in our behalf, but at the same time injures the personality of the subjected. This subjection can be imagined as being restricted to certain purposes, for instance to the cultivation of the land, as with soil-tilling serfs; the result of which is that this subjection, for the very reason that is has a definite and limited aim, does not quite annul the liberty of the subjected. But the subjection can also be an unlimited one, as is the case when the subjected person, in the whole of his outward life, is treated as but a means to the purposes of the man of power, and so his personality is entirely absorbed. This is the institution of slavery”14. We have not much to add to this lucid description of slavery and its function. The function is a system of compulsory labour, and slavery is the absorption of the whole personality of the forced labourer to this end. As this absorption is properly expressed by the word “property” or “possession”, we may define the slave as a man who is the property or possession of another man, and forced to work for him.