Slavery is compatible with capitalism, but capitalism rarely tolerates the stability of any economic institution.
I wasn’t clear, and I’m sorry. When I said, “You can’t just pick someone at random…”, I mean to become a blacksmith requires specialized training. It doesn’t take any special skills to pick cotton…I could teach you to pick cotton in a day. But to become a blacksmith takes years of training. Obviously, slaves weren’t generally given a choice in the matter.
The slaves aren’t the only people in the economy. For a slave to be efficient, her marginal production has to equal her marginal costs. The problem for the slaver is that the slave presumably isn’t being paid the marginal value she’s creating, therefore the system is inefficient: the cost to her of production is less than the benefit she gains. The slaver can adjust this by increasing the cost of non-production, i.e., he engages in negative reinforcement: produce more and I won’t beat you. The slaver could find other ways to balance her competing ends, such as non-monetary payouts.
Slaves did engage in complex tasks and were often efficient users of their own labor. IIRC, in the Virginia Piedmont (I’m recalling from a graduate economic history course) the agriculture was such that each slave family organized itself into a production unit where each member handled tasks appropriate to her ability. Children would do light lifting, for example, while the father did the heavy lifting. This is the same sort of efficient production systems that obtained in early proto-factories (e.g., Swiss watchmakers) and modern factories. I see no reason why slaves, under the right conditions, wouldn’t be viable within a so-called capitalist system. Besides, it’s the slaver who’s going to do the creative thinking, right?
Imagine a slave system unlike the one the U.S. had. In this system being a slave was just a condition in life, like being drafted into the army, and it carried no stigma. Suppose further that slaves were allowed to buy their freedom and enter society.
Now suppose you own a slave, for whom you paid $1. You’d be willing to sell the slave for $2, for whatever reasons. If you pay the slave her marginal production, you’re still profiting off her because of diminishing returns. She is being paid what she’s worth and if she saves up to buy herself, then you’re making your $2 reservation price. Where is the inefficiency in that?
There is the sticky question of the slaves status as an economic actor. But then, what is the difference between her and any other piece of capital? If slavery is inherently unsupportable, then why are robots not similarly unsupportable. How is R2-D2 different from a slave? How dumb does a machine have to get to become qualitiatively different from a slave, and therefore viable?
One does suspect that the real problem with slavery, IN TERMS OF INEFFICIENCY, is the lack of good contract law.
On the whole, I wonder whether the real motivation behind the assertion the OP is asking about may simply be a definitional issue. If one imagines a capitalist society where people can make their own decisions, then a society that violates that proviso is not capitalist. The two are mutually exclusive.
As reprehensible as slavery is, I’m not seeing why it isn’t economically viable.
Slaves could also buy their freedom. How they were supposed to get that money, nobody knows. But that is exactly the same situation as an indentured servant who are required to fill their “debt” (which they were neither consented to or were informed of, and which they cannot pay back through their work) before they can leave. Furthermore, debts from indentured servants pass through the generations, leading their children to be forced in to servitude. In Pakistan, bonded laborers even wear leg shackles. Indentured servitude, my friend, is a friendly name for slavery.
There are plenty of other forms of slavery, too. There are Eastern European and Asian prostitutes who are largely tricked into bondage by advertisements calling for “nannies” and “waitresses” in various countries. There are child camel jockeys in the Middle East who are literally kidnapped from their homes in India, worked for a few years, and then abandon in the nearest slum. There is slavery of the kind that any plantation owner would recognize in Sudan. There is extreme child labor all over- young children forced to work every waking hour in exchange for food and a place on the ground to sleep. There is forced agricultural labor under the watch of the military in the Dominican Republic. There is forced child labor on cocoa plantation in Benin. There was a large scale freeing of agricultural slaves in Brazil in the 1990’s. To put it simply, slavery is all over. Everywhere. Right now.
And we buy the products they are producing. Perhaps there aren’t slaves in the United States, but the United States certainly supports a lot of slaves outside it’s border. We no longer produce much sugar on our land because it’s too expensive labor-wise. But we happily buy that same amount of sugar from producers who use labor violations we would never dream of allowing. Just because the bad stuff doesn’t happen on our land doesn’t mean our economic systems are preventing it from happening or somehow guard against it.
No, it’s not moot. There is a huge a difference between being able to voluntarily leave a position and be condemned there. Even despite whatever external pressures there are to keep both types of workers in their current position, the wage laborer still has the opportunity to improve his situation and has incentive to do so. To think or equate otherwise is an insult to slaves.
Droids don’t seem to be hostile about it, unlike human slaves, and the more highly skilled human slaves are in a modern society, the more damage they can do. Would you really trust a bridge or a house designed by a slave architect ? Given that architects can and do make subtle, uncaught mistakes that cause disasters, why wouldn’t a slave do so on purpose, if he’s angry enough to take the consequences ? Would you trust your money to a slave accountant ( don’t trust the law to protect you from him; he can always use bribery, once he has your money ) ? Would you dare use a program written by a slave, or let it acess the internet ?
Sure you can have them watched by experts as good as them - but then you have 2 people doing the job of one, and you still can’t be sure anything the slave does will get caught. For that matter, people tend to make mistakes that favor whatever beliefs/agendas they happen to have, even when they try not to. A slave would likely make more dangerous mistakes than a non slave.
This is a good point and I see what you are saying, but I argue that such extra added costs (more beatings, better food if you do “well” etc.) eventually make such a model inefficient and will eventually drive it out of existence in a ‘post-industrial’ capitalist economy (that distinction again, which I told myself that I wouldn’t make, but I suppose it is necessary to do so). Perhaps, with human conditioning, one can be brought up to be a slave (and, therefore not human (or what it means to be human), but that’s another debate), but I shudder to think of such outcomes.
Again, I suppose I have to make the distinction between a more technology advanced capitalistic system and, again, being able to properly “condition” the slave, such that his want or need to become free doesn’t make him even more inefficient or drive up those slaver costs.
I don’t know why there are all these def’s for slave. Perhaps it is my issue, but I think we should all agree that a slave cannot earn wage and cannot buy their freedom. They are indentured servants, otherwise. What I say about slaves in the capitalist economic system does not apply to indentured servants.
IANAE, but I think your conflating that issue again of treating the slave as a quasi-wage earner. My issues with efficiency arise in the situation where the cotton farm owner with the wage laborers and the cotton gin (note: there’s that technology again) outproduce the slaver and his slaves, such that the costs of keeping the slaves in line make his product uncompetitive (i.e. price is too high, will to be free trumping all).
For example, you need a ton of slaves to keep up with the cotton gin. You also need paid slavers to keep all these slaves in line (assuming the cost of turning a slave into a quasi-slaver is too high and/or too rare to be commoditized), and those employed will be employed much longer than the wage laborer because the wage laborer is free to end his work (or free to do more work at more wage.) All these costs add up such that it is much easier to just have wage laborers. I could try putting some realistic numbers in place (I’ll just abuse my finance team :)), but I (and they) are suprisingly busy on a Friday and I don’t dope on the weekends 
What I envision is that only the most irrational, psychopathic slaver would continue to his slave his operations at the detriment to his slaves inspite of any economic incentive not to. People are crazy.
I agree.
Again, to reiterate my point, robots aren’t trying to become free.
I also veiw robots not to have emotions or to behave irrationally (economically irrational, not psychologically irrational). R2-D2 doesn’t need the latest fashions, doesn’t want to spend the day lounging around on the beach, or need to hang out with his friends (I’ll stop now, because I don’t want to drag this discussion into what it means to be human).
I’d agree on this part from my training in Law and Economics (there is some really weird outcomes in these situations where the law is economically based), but only on the fact that such laws really only apply to indentured servants and not slaves (slaves cannot enter into contracts, they are not human, they are property, to further expand my definition of slave – if you or anyone else want to disagree, start another thread on what it means to be a slave).
Agreed. In my undergrad, one of my school’s professors won a nobel prize in economics stating that capitalism didn’t drive out slavery. In a sense, I agree with him – given the technology available at the time, but I disagree that an advanced technological capitalistic society wouldn’t have ultimately driven it out on its own. I can’t really argue with him as I never took a class with him or heard any of his lectures on the topic.
I take it you haven’t read Small Gods.
Why not? Isn’t the engineering going to be vetted by somebody? The engineering plans are generally vetted when free engineers design bridges, so why wouldn’t plans drawn by the slaves.
The question is whether slavery would be viable, not whether slavery with slave engineers would be viable. I am just not seeing why the ownership of others as a capital input is not viable, even if the role of the slaves is kept on the level of scrubbing toilets and such. Reprehensible & immoral? Sure. Not viable? I’m not convinced.
I just want to second that statement. If ever there was an intellectually dishonest term, “wage slavery” is certainly one.
As js-africanus quipped, perhaps the issue in this case is a lack of good contract law. If there is no end in sight to the situation, then it’s slavery, plain and simple.
Your notions of “support” is something that I find suspect. This is like saying that capitalism supports terrorism. Only the transaction between buyer and seller is actually capitalistic. The production by the seller (or slaver in this case) is actually at best, feudal.
People optimize on the margin. That’s life. The non-monetary benefits are not extra; you have a basic assumption that slavery, by definition, means that labor isn’t being paid it’s marginal product; however, that’s not what defines slavery. If a slave is earning her marginal product, then she is efficient in an economic sense. The slaver is still earning money off her and she’s getting paid what she produces, the difference between her and free labor is that she’s owned by the slaver. You’re not showing me anything inherent in that which creates the inefficiency. In a very real sense, WWII was won by slaves: those draftees weren’t voluntary labor.
The slave wants her freedom, right? So if she’s paid what she’s worth she can save up and be free and then buy her own slave.
I’m not sure what that sentence is intended to mean; however, if my suspicion is correct, that you have asserted that I’m defending slavery, then you can kiss my ass. I see no reason why the institution is necessarily inefficient; believing it is so simply to salve my conscience is just silly. Why would I accept something as true on the basis of a moral stance rather than a logical one?
Then you appear to be in error. The OP asks about whether slavery is impossible, not whether some particular form of slavery is impossible. You may be absolutely correct, but that doesn’t interest me; I’m curious whether all forms of slavery are impossible under capitalism, not whether some forms are.
Why not? Okay then, instead of R2-D2, substitute Bender from Futurama. In the first episode he escaped with Fry to be free. But he’s still a thing. Trying to put this break between human and not human is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because if slavery really is not viable, surely there’s a better reason than just saying, “Well, we’re human so it won’t work.”
Why not? You’re using assumptions that aren’t justified. Slaves are humans, because if they weren’t human they wouldn’t be slaves. There’s no reason to imagine a slave system where slaver and slave have binding contracts.
But ancient and american slaves did have the ability to work for wages sometimes and to sometimes use those wages to buy their own freedom. Yes, for a field hand or a mine worker this would be impossible. But in the American south skilled slaves did work for wages, many slaves were rented out on a scheme where the slaveowner would get a fixed amount for the use of his slave, and any extra money the slave was able to earn would remain his. Slaves purchased their freedom this way, and freedmen purchased the freedom of family members. In some cases slaves were freed by will on their master’s deaths.
If we dismiss ancient slavery as “not really” slavery because sometimes slaves could earn money, could earn their freedom, could be freed, or could be ransomed, then where does that leave American slavery, since all those things could happen to American slaves? If we say that slavery is only slavery if a slave can never be freed and has absolutely no legal rights then slavery has never existed.
The idea of slaves earning money seems preposterous to us, what prevents the slaveowner from just taking the slave’s money? Yes, the vast majority of slaves in the Americas or ancient times never got to touch money, but allowing skilled slaves to accumulate money increased their value to the slaveholder, since the slaveowner would not only get the money from the slave’s base wages but would eventually get their entire capital investment returned when the slave was able to buy himself. If the skilled slave isn’t allowed to keep their own money then there’s no incentive for them to work beyond the bare minimum to keep themselves from being beaten.
I think it’s quite possible for a master to provide other incentives to a slave to get him to work harder without paying the slave any money. I recall that there was a difference between “field slaves” and “house slaves”… the slaves that were the masters favorite got to be the house slaves and they were afforded better priviledges (better food, better sleeping quarters, whatever).
I think that you (and anybody that tries to make some kind of point by pointing out that Jesus never condemned slavery) need to realize is that slavery in Roman times was very different than slavery in the ‘New World’.
No offense to you Cal , I just wanted to (re)make that point.
I think those differences are overblown. Most slaves in ancient times were taken captive by a conquering army and sold into slavery as agricultural workers. Those people certainly weren’t equivalent to indentured servants and many could expect to be worked to death. Highly skilled slaves could expect a better fate…but only if their master recognized their skills and had the intelligence to exploit those skills. I’m sure there were plenty of skilled blacksmiths who died in the mines because no one gave a rat’s ass about their skills.
The biggest difference between American slavery and ancient slavery isn’t the status of the slaves, which seem to me to be pretty similar. The big difference is the status of free citizens. Ancient slaveholding societies weren’t democratic republics, and the line between a free serf or subistance tenant farmer and a slave is pretty thin. It isn’t that an ancient slave was treated better or had more mobility than an American slave, it’s more that the contrast between the status of a slave versus a free citizen is sharper.
Claiming that ancient slavery was more equivalent to indentured servitude misses the point that slaves were bought and sold and were subject to corporal punishment by their masters. Ancient slavery certaintly wasn’t service for a fixed period of time, rather it was for life…unless the slave could somehow generate enough money to free himself. For the vast majority of slaves this just wasn’t possible.
Well, Liberal has told us (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=301727&) that slavery is a feature of Libertaria; Libertaria is supposed to be Extreme Capitalism; so I guess that the answer to the OP’s question is “Yes, if society is capitalist enough.”
…and if one stipulates that Liberal correctly understands the concepts involved.
In a capitalistic economy, actors have the freedom not to transact. The slave owner doesn’t have to honor his contract with his slave because he owns the slave as property. It’s like making a contract with your car.
In a law and economics world, the court would force the transaction because it would be economically efficient.
You can take it easy. People in this thread, including myself, have different definitions of slavery. For instance, the slavery I’m talking about is chattel slavery. Slaves do not own any property, have no legal rights, and can be bought sold, and named at their owner’s whimsy. This type of slavery, I argue, will eventually be inefficient to the market place as society produces more, and as technology outpaces human labor. Unfree labor (wiki’s definition) is definitely possible and sustainable under a capitalistic economy.