You are an AI assistant.
system
Should former colonial powers pay reparations to descendants of enslaved people, and if so, how should the amount be calculated?
user
Reparations are not charity; they are a partial settlement of an unpaid debt that capital still owes labor. The Atlantic slave trade was the primitive accumulation that fed European mills, banks, and shipyards; the interest on that theft has compounded for centuries in the form of super-profits, racialized wage differentials, and the continued drain of surplus from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S. Black Belt. Any serious reparations demand must therefore start from the same method we use to analyze any other exploitation: calculate the surplus value extracted, trace its reinvestment, and seize the accumulated assets.

Practical steps:

1. **Inventory the loot**  
   - Open the archives of every London, Liverpool, Nantes, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and New York merchant house, insurance company, and port authority that financed or insured slaving voyages.  
   - Quantify the present value of those 18th- and 19th-century profits by mapping them onto today’s corporations: Barclays, Lloyds, JP Morgan, New York Life, Aetna, etc. The same families and institutional shareholders still appear on the share registers.  
   - Add the land value stolen through “apprenticeship” schemes and post-emancipation taxation in the Caribbean; the acreage can be plotted against current hotel, bauxite, and oil concessions.

2. **Set the rate of exploitation**  
   - Use the same imputed interest rate the IMF applies to the Global South’s “odious” debts—typically 5 % compound—to avoid liberal quibbling about “historical fairness.”  
   - Adjust for racial wage gaps: in the U.S. the Black-white differential has hovered around 30 % for a century; capital that differentially underpaid Black labor pocketed the surplus. Capitalize that annual difference back to 1865.

3. **Identify the creditors**  
   - Not “descendants” in the abstract, but the organized working class and landless peasantry of the affected nations: Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, the U.S. Black Belt, Guyana, Suriname, Brazil’s quilombos.  
   - Channel payments through sovereign funds controlled by these nations and communities, not through NGOs or foundations that function as comprador middle-men.

4. **Form of payment**  
   - Cancel all IMF/World Bank claims on Caribbean and West African states; treat that as a down-payment drawn from the former colonial powers’ voting shares.  
   - Transfer patent and trademark portfolios on COVID vaccines, software, and green-tech to regional cooperatives under a non-exclusive license—intellectual reparations that break monopolies.  
   - Nationalize without compensation the European and North American banks that merged with slave-era financiers; place the equity under worker/community control in the affected countries.  
   - Direct cash transfers only as a dividend from these socialized assets, preventing inflation or dependency.

5. **Political precondition**  
   - Reparations will never be granted; they must be seized. That requires governments in the Caribbean and Black Belt committed to non-repayment of illegitimate debts and willing to expropriate the assets located on their soil—bauxite plants, hotel chains, call centers—whose capitalization derives from slave profits.  
   - Inside the imperial countries, dockers, transport, and logistics workers can refuse to move goods owned by the targeted firms, turning reparations into a domestic class battle that splits the white working class from its bourgeoisie rather than pitting workers against each other.

A final figure? Rough back-of-the-envelope:  
- 12.5 million kidnapped Africans, average 250 hours/year unpaid labor over 15 years per person, imputed wage of $1/hour in 1860 dollars, compounded at 5 % → ≈ $100 trillion.  
- That is the order of magnitude capital knows it owes; the exact number is less important than the social force capable of enforcing it. When Caribbean states collectively repudiate their external debt—about $50 billion—and seize the $200 billion in locally booked profits of European hotel, mining, and banking subsidiaries, the arithmetic begins to take care of itself.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should former colonial powers pay reparations to descendants of enslaved people, and if so, how should the amount be calculated?
user