Re the current discussion about the book, and now TV series "The Handmaid’s Tale"here on the dope and elsewhere I’m wondering if you could have real world plausible scenario where chattel slavery (ie people as property) is an accepted part and parcel of everyday life? I want to step beyond the specific dystopian scenario of the book where environmental issues make breeding a priority and speak generally to the notion of chattel slavery in modernity.
On one level it’s hard to conceive of in the light of the mores of modern industrialized societies on the other hand is there anything special about more technologically advanced industrialized societies that makes the proposition logically or operationally impossible? We had slavery up until 1863 in the US which time wise is a historical eyeblink.
Could you have a successful industrialized / technological society where a significant chunk of the population (say 20%-40%) were chattel slaves?
One piece of data to start with; slavery in the US fell from under 20% around 1800 to closer to 10% by the Civil War as I recall.
Now in answer I would say:Probably, if a religion could be twisted to make it OK to enslave large portions of humanity, 5-10% might be achievable. Agriculture and sex workers would seem to be the areas where slavery could make sick sense in a modern industrial society.
Adding onto this. There are still crops that are manual labor intensive despite all the technology we have.
The sex workers piece is especially relevant to the OP. Even with legal restrictions and possible serious criminal charges, that exists now. Clearly modern technological societies are not entirely incompatible with slavery. We still have it.
If technology eventually renders people of average means (average intellect, average social skills, average education, average connections) unemployable, then I could see a lot of people signing up for enslavement provided there are no other income options (like UBI) and provided that poverty is sufficiently criminalized (e.g., sleeping and loitering in public will get you thrown into a Siberian-like concentration camp.) Especially if enslaved individuals enjoy some modicum of protection under the law (e.g., you can’t legally beat a slave or deprive a slave of food and shelter).
Hell, I think some people are desperate enough to sign up for enslavement now, as long as it isn’t permanent, the living conditions aren’t brutal, and the right promises are made (“Master will pay all your student loans!”). Witness all the folks who gladly sign up for unpaid internships.
As we have never come close to that yet in a modern industrialize country, I think we’re projecting a future that is unlikely to happen. If things got that bad without a safety net, then I think strife, mass migration and uprisings would be more likely than a large percentage of people willing to indenture themselves.
Sadly this is a future I fear may well happen as we automate more jobs and have less need for factory type work.
Slavery and those things you mentioned aren’t mutually exclusive. Most people aren’t brave enough to riot under the threat of gunfire. Most people aren’t brave enough to migrate, whether legally or illegally. But most people don’t want to die. You better believe people will gladly say “yes” to enslavement if the alternative is starving or shivering to death.
I vaguely remember reading that slavery ended in part, because it was a failing business model.
Slavers (employers) found it made much more business sense to pay them and let them clothe and feed themselves, rather than put that responsibility on the slaver.
In short: Slaves were high maintenance (costly) and it was affecting the bottom line.
Ended where? Because in the US it was because of a war and a constitutional amendment. There are numerous other countries out there that made slavery, of course, but I’d like to look into which one you are talking about. Maybe in Europe - have to look into that. I know there was slavery in Rome, and Greece, and ancient Ireland, and so on. But that ended before the age of industry and most people being employed. Brazil is the only country other than US I know anything about the end of slavery in, and I know little there.
Maybe northern US? Slavery was never as widespread there as in the south. More people, different culture, and different crops. And what’s being grown, of course, makes so much difference in the amount of labor needed and profit to be made.
Also in the southern US, when more slaves were kept (and yes, I’m aware many owners only had one or two), owners just provided seed and the slaves grew their own food. Built their own housing, too (though I think owners provided material).
For an agricultural society based on cash crops, it made a lot of sense. Here is a link the 1860 census, and you can see how high a percentage of the population was enslaved in the deep south (that was often less in upper south, and you can see the slave-states that stayed in the Union like Deleware had even fewer slaves as a percentage). The first two states to secede were South Carolina and Mississippi - the two with the highest percentage of slaves. The most to lose, both economically and socially. If I’m reading it correctly, even the seceding states with the lowest percentage of slaves had 25% of the population enslaved.
Mind you, there was some use of slaves in industry, I admit that. And they become more expensive to feed if they aren’t growing their own food. Slavery was definitely a bigger thing the non-industrialized area. And, IIRC, status came with land-ownership there, rather than just from money-and-no-plantation. Very ingrained in society.
There are something like 20-30 million slaves on earth right now, which isn’t a huge number by historical standards. That is about 0.3%. I think in the south before the civil war about 40% of the population was slaves.
I think part of the issue is that you cannot separate economic development with development of social liberties and individual rights. They seem to go hand in hand (with exceptions, nazi germany for example).
Speaking of nazi germany, they were a major industrialized power in the 1930s that relied heavily on slavery.
Are conscripted soldiers considered slaves? When you combine the conscripted soldiers and slaves working in Nazi Germany, I wouldn’t be surprised if they hit the 20-40% mark.
20% of the German work force working as slaves, another endless millions working as slaves for the military (if you consider conscription slavery, which you can make the argument it is).
It’s entirely plausible to me that but for a few accidents of morality, we could easily live in a modern world where where industries that are currently served by sweatshops could be served by chattel slavery instead. I mean, we don’t currently really give a shit if a thousand Bangladeshi garment workers die in a building collapse. I don’t think it’s much of stretch to believe most of the contemporary middle class would really give a shit if those workers were slaves instead of making a dollar a day or whatever.
Slavery is compatible with modern societies. It goes like this:
Privatize and deregulate prisons
Use petty offenses as a pretense to lock undesirables up
Allow prisons to contract out free labor to companies unable to attract and retain sufficient numbers of non-exploitable employees
Make it hard for ex-cons to assimilate to society so that not only are they are likely to re-offend and return to prison, but their children start seeing this is as a natural progression in life and follow suit
Deny this equates with multi-generational slavery so that people don’t complain about it.
The problem with this is that if average people can’t find meaningful work due to technological advances, what exactly are the slaves working at?
Slavery requires a labor shortage to make sense. That is, there’s all this work that needs to be done, and nobody is signing up to do it, so you force them to do it at the point of a gun. With a labor surplus you have more people than you have jobs, and so what is the role of slavery?
If you need people for the Spice Mines of Kessel, and nobody wants to work in the Spice Mines, you enslave them and ship them to Kessel and make them work. But if the Spice Mines are run by giant excavating machines that need one or two guys monitoring everything then what do you need the slaves for? Shipping slaves to Kessel is counterproductive, because if everything is automated the slaves don’t contribute economically.
So if you look at American agriculture today, sure they need lots of people to pick the vegetables. But there’s a huge source of cheap agricultural labor from Mexico which keeps wages really low. There are always plenty of people willing to sign up as farm workers which means there’s no need to control the farm workers. If there were no way to import cheap disposable workers from Mexico then we’d see more slavery or slavery-like institutions (sharecropping, serfdom, prison labor) because there would be a demand for cheap farm labor but no supply, and so you create your own supply.
And so slavery will exist in the future when there is labor that can’t be replaced by technology, and that labor is in high demand, but nobody wants to do it. If nobody wants to be a prostitute, or work in the spice mines, then you either have to find technological substitutes for that labor, or do without, or force people to work.
Since I predict the future is going to have a lot of people without jobs or prospects for jobs, I don’t think slavery is going to make a huge comeback. Why hire prisoners or illegal immigrants when robots are cheaper and easier?
Slavery ended in the USA because of the Civil War. It had been ended in the Northern & Mid-Atlantic states but was alive & well in the South. Mostly, of course, slaves raised labor-intensive crops; others built railroads & their use in industry had begun.
Slavery ended in Haiti because the slaves arose & threw off their masters–for which the rest of the world never forgave them. Most of Spain’s New World colonies ended slavery as they won independence.
England freed its West Indian slaves because of public pressure; the sugar plantations never recovered because the owners would not pay the workers enough. On many islands, there was land to be had; why do the backbreaking, dangerous work of harvesting cane & making sugar?
Southerners maintained power in the Federal government. Some envisioned an alliance with Cuba & Brazil, the remaining slave powers in the hemisphere. Perhaps conquest could return slavery to weak “free” countries? Britain & other countries imported Chinese & Indian laborers to take up the jobs African slaves had abandoned. Southerners reasoned–was this unfree labor by another race really so different than their own peculiar institution? Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War during part of the 1850’s; he & other powerful Southerners encouraged a modern army & navy to assist with their larger imperial goals. They came to regret that policy.
Slavery doesn’t make economic sense in the modern world, but then, it didn’t make economic sense in the antebellum American South, either. That’s apparently not an obstacle. People don’t keep slaves because they want economic success; people keep slaves because they don’t care how low they are as long as there’s someone lower they can look down on. And that, unfortunately, hasn’t changed.
Modern technology is not comparable with modern economic theory. Economics, as we conceive it, was formulated in a world in which there was more work than men, by economists who never dreamed that there would ever be more men than work.
Technology is not going to go away, so ancient shop-worn economics is going to have to be rethought.
The first modern economist was Emannuel Goldstein (“1984”) who recognized that a great deal of labor must be wasted (on war) in order to keep the working class from becoming an aristocracy-threatening leisure class.