This is the full version of an article an edited version of which will be included in the next issue of Tubeworker

Our top politicians are feeling very smug in 2007, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade - when the buying and selling of slaves was made illegal in British law. As well as Blair expressing his 'deep sorrow' for the past and the Anglican church repenting for their role, they are celebrating the great deeds that brought the barbaric practice to an end. They give all the credit to William Wilberforce, who put the abolition bill through Parliament. Unsurprisingly, they don't mention the working class activists and slave rebellions, without whom there would have been no abolition movement. This is because the working class at the time did not see slavery as an isolated 'evil' in an otherwise free world. They fought on the principles of solidarity with exploited people throughout the world and saw slavery as part of that system of exploitation. Our rulers have no right to be proud for ending this barbarity in the past, as if the world today is 'free'. The trade they condemn was one of the building blocks of the capitalist countries they rule over. And we know that exploitation and poverty form a large part of the reality for workers across the world today.

Our politicians are right about one thing. The Slave Trade was barbaric from beginning to end. Slaves were captured, marched with weights on their feet for hundreds of miles to the coast, where they were packed like meat into trunks and inspected by buyers. Conditions on slave ships were cramped, filthy and inhuman. One slave owner killed some of his slaves and fed the meat to the rest. Many did not survive their passage. On the plantations, slaves worked as much as 15 hours a day and were whipped to extract greater productivity. A racist ideology that black people were inferior human beings emerged at this time to justify this inhuman treatment. Slaves were treated as property to be traded and worked to exhaustion.

'Capital' wrote Marx 'comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt'. The disgusting reality depicted above was the basis of how capitalism grew strong in Britain. Far from being a 'fair' and 'equal' system, promoting values like 'democracy', the slave trade is the ultimate example of the exploitation that lies at capitalism's heart.

It is estimated that the British made £12 million profits from transporting and selling slaves between 1630 and 1807. Throughout the 18th Century, profits from the plantations averaged £1,000,000 a year. Big money was made for the class of exploiters. British industry benefited too - by 1784 half of Britain's exports went to the colonies, providing goods needed to run the plantations. Huge areas of British industry exist because their intial funding came from the profits of the slave trade: the coal and iron industries in south Wales; the South Yorkshire iron industry; the Liverpool to Manchester railway. The history of capitalism and of slavery are directly linked.

With the development of capitalism, the British working class grew. Marx wrote that, 'The veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World'. The working class in Britain was exploited by the same class that exploited black slaves in the West Indies. Working class activists knew that solidarity with the slaves made sense. Overcoming the racism used by the capitalists to justify the trade, a mass meeting in Sheffield in 1794 pledged to overthrow the slave trade and 'avenge the ages of wrongs done to our Negro brethren'. Olaudo Equiano, an escaped slave, wrote his autobiography, which went through eight editions in Britain. He was a member of the London Corresponding Society, one of Britain's first radical working class organisations. A slave revolt in French colony, Haiti, in 1791, freed all slaves on the island - a result of the slaves' insurrection and the fact that France was in the middle of a revolution 'against royalty, tyranny and oppression of all types'; the Paris masses saw the slaves as their allies. So, against this background of slave struggle and solidarity, what about William Wilberforce, to whom people now give all the credit? He was the author of the first anti-trade union laws, the Combination Acts. He was on the side of the exploiters. He was a voice against abolition until the slave trade was no longer profitable for Britain. Just as we would not trust Tory politicians today to 'make poverty history', we should not credit him with wanting to challenge the system. The working class history of the abolition is one of challenging the most grotesque aspects of capitalism by people who saw that it was part of the system as a whole. The method they used was working class solidarity, joining together to make each others' struggles stronger. It is still the best tool that we have for fighting the horrors that underpin capitalism today - sweatshop labour - people working 14 hour days in horrendous conditions, for poverty wages. This is the reality that produces most of the things we wear and use today. Capitalism will never be rid of horrendous practices - it depends on them. But the best people to fight them are the working class themselves.