OK, I can see ‘house slaves’ [cook, house keeper, man’s valet, ladies maid, chauffeur and gardener] more than field or factory hands. We simply aren’t oriented to great tracts of land as wealth needing field hands for agricultural work, though you could I suppose have barracks associated with a factory making electronics, clothing, cars or whatever [didn’t some Chinese factory have barracks with a suicide problem a few years back?] The image I have of the really rich is more of a nice mansion, or a Manhattan penthouse, limiting the possible numbers of slaves.
“Generally accepted”, probably not. But “blind eye turned for some other generally accepted benefit”, yes - be it something cheap in the shops produced by God knows who, under God knows what conditions, on the other side of the world, or Vietnamese teenagers trafficked/smuggled into undercover cannabis production in the housing estate next door (and yes, it happens).
Once again I see something like this asserted and wonder where in the hell it comes from.
Not sure what you’re getting at. Conscription is not slavery to you is it?
Well, one involves stripping a guy naked and examining him from head to toe before telling him where he’ll live when getting ordered to perform physical labor, and if he runs off he can be shot dead or captured and confined; and – so does the other?
Automation is something in the modern world which makes slavery less likely. As discussed in the post directly before yours.
I disagree it was simply about looking down on someone. Racism certainly helped cause the acceptance of slavery as an institution, but it was economic reasons that created it in the first place.
I don’t know when it stopped being economical (or if it ever would have been), but slavery has inertia. A slave cost roughly the entire economic output that a person could be expected to produce in their life. So while it may stop making economic sense to use slaves instead of the cheap labor of freemen, no slave owner is going to voluntarily get rid of their most expensive investments. Not without a huge payment from someone (the government) in return. Or a hell of a fight, which is how it ended up happening.
That’s not even counting slaves’ desirability as status symbols. Anyone who could afford even one slave was well into upper class “rich” territory, while someone who owned many, such as a large plantation owner, was equivalent to a billionaire today.
https://measuringworth.com/slavery.php
It isn’t chattel slavery. It is involuntary forced labor. I’ll leave it to you to tease out the difference.
You can’t use your imagination just a little bit?
Do you think peope like Donald Trump do their own gardening? Vacuum their own rugs? Make their own meals? Do their own driving? Wash their own cars? Pick up their own dry cleaning? Do their own dry cleaning? Scrub their own toilets? Nurse and diaper and play with their own children? Some of these jobs may one day be semi- or fully automated, but not all of them. And there will always be folks that prefer a human touch, even from humans who are slaves.
There is also a market for sex. Imagine a society in which prostitution is legal and unregulated and there’s a large class of people who are unemployable. You better believe both men and women will give their bodies up to whomever will have them in exchange for three hots and a cot. And of course there will be a demand for that. Sex trafficking is something that exists in the US right now, and it’s a profitable business.
Do I think everyone would become a slave under a worse case scenario? No, because that’s impossibe. Do I think most people would be enslaved? No (although there’s no good reason to think it couldn’t happen). But do I think a technological advanced society could support some sizable enslaved lower class? Yes, why the hell not? There wil always be a market for cheap human labor. Computers and robots have their limits.
I really we could stop with the “sense” talk. Labor shortages do not explain why slavery existed in the New World for centuries.
Nice words, but care to explain your theory? I doubt it will hold up.
Sure it does. When labor is scarce there’s greater and greater incentive to engage in various forms of forced labor, which takes many forms all the way to chattel slavery.
If “humans are bastards” is the explanation for slavery, why is slavery very commonly practiced in some places and times, and hardly at all in others? In Europe itself there wasn’t any slavery during the time when Europeans were enslaving millions of people over in the Americas. In some places you have slavery, or serfdom where although you aren’t a slave it’s a literal crime for you to leave the farm. And that’s because the aristocrats need people to work on the farms, and if they let people leave there won’t be enough people left. And then along comes the industrial revolution, and suddenly the aristocrats are enclosing the lands and far from forcing the serfs to stay bound to the land they’re forcing them off the land to go starve in the cities.
The point is using force to coerce people to work at below market wages. When “market wages” are depressed enough that proletarian workers can barely afford food and shelter there’s no need for slavery because starvation wages for free workers and a starvation diet for slaves costs the same.
Dude, this is bananas. Labor was hardly scarce during most of the time that American slavery was practiced. In the early days (17th century), sure. But once the Transatlantic slave trade was abolished in the 1800s, the labor pool was quite large. It’s just that the people in power wanted to maximize their profit as much as possible by not paying for this labor. (Most American slaveowners only had a couple of slaves. Do you really think they couldn’t have found paid laborers to work for them?)
There is slavery right now all over the world. The clothes we buy from department stores are churned out by people living on very low wages, who might as well be slaves. Do you really think sweat shops exist because of labor shortages?
Labor shortages don’t have anything to do with with the attractiveness of slavery. Slavery thrives where there’s a pool of people who are easy to exploit because there are a lack of other options. It isn’t labor shortage that is correlated with exploitation. It’s labor surplus.
Where have I said that “humans are bastards”? I don’t think humans are driven by “sense”, at least not when it comes to brutality and exploitation. I don’t know or care whether this makes them bastards.
Not unless there’s some prestige or modicum of hope tied to enslavement. The OP mentions the world described in “The Handmaiden’s Tale”, where women receive some tangible and intangible benefits for their servitude. If free poor people have zero status and are scorned by society, but enslaved people are praised for their selfless devotion to community, then expect to find some portion of the underclass signing up for this and some portion of the overclass exploiting them. It doesn’t matter if both free and enslaved are living in the same hovels and eating the same shit. There’s more to being human that food and shelter. And if free people are being mowed down in the streets by state-sanctioned killbots while the enslaved enjoy the protection of their masters, expect to find even more people asking how they can turn over their inalienable rights and become pieces of furniture. Turns out that people prefer being alive and imprisoned versus being dead and free.
Modern technologically advance society =/= morally upright, enlightened, and free society. I think it is a major mistake to assume that one naturally follows from the other.
In the New World, there was a shortage of labor. A limited number of emigrants went to the Americas, where a great deal of what was produced was re-exported back to European markets (cotton, tobacco, etc.). The immigrants could provide the labor to produce what they consumed, but additional labor was needed to produce what was exported.
Hence the South got out-competed economically once the Industrial Revolution began, and crushed militarily . Chalk that up as a “no” to the OP’s question, it seems to me.
Um…where and when?
As of around 1860 in the United States (and I understand prices had grown, over time), the average cost of a slave was about (from memory, and a few cites I’m seeing online) $800. Or about $20000 in today’s money. About the cost of a new Kia, in today’s terms.
I’m seeing wage figures for an average unskilled laborer in the US in that timeframe being about…$300 a year, back then. So year, a slave cost a bit of money, comparably, but they weren’t completely astronomical. I mean, aside from the potential moral, ethical, sociological, and/or eschatological cost, of course.
I would say it’s more correct that a slave should rationally cost the difference between the economic output of the slave over their life, and the cost to maintain that slave. Sure, a worker might earn $300 in wages over a year. But that’s not the yearly profit for owning a slave, any more than the proletarian worker gets to put $300 in the bank every year.
The slave owner has to feed, house, and clothe the slaves, plus the whole apparatus of overseers, guns, whips, chains, stocks, pattyrollers, and so on. Luckily for the slaveowner the costs of forcing slaves back to the plantation are partially carried by the external society, as the Fugitive Slave Act showed. Public subsidy for private profits.
And that also discounts the fact that prices aren’t rationally set.
And yes, of course in the Americas during the 1700s and 1800s there was a massive labor shortage, in the sense that there was plenty of work that could be done but very few people to do that work relative to the amount of work. Contrast that to Europe with a labor surplus and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
I agree with Monstro that the point of slavery is to force people to work for you, because you get the surplus value of their work, rather than them. But with a labor surplus like back in Europe there’s almost no surplus value to extract, the proletarian workers are paid starvation wages and consider themselves lucky. This is why there was widespread slavery in the Americas and almost none back in Europe.
Slavery existed world-wide. It was practised by civilisations from Ireland to Japan, from Mali to Malaysia, from Siberia to South Africa. White, black, yellow, green with purple polka dots, everyone practised slavery.
On one hand I really do believe and experience tells me that bothering to select and motivate your workers results in a more-productive workforce, and that positive motivation works better the immense majority of the time (if there is someone for whom it doesn’t work at all, consider going back to “select”). On the other, there are companies/managers which have very strong faith in negative management: I have very little problem picturing those same managers being sure that a slave workforce is better.
As so many things in social sciences, often it isn’t a matter of numbers but of beliefs.
You seem to have an…interesting notion of “rationally cost.” And “rationally set.”