Got into a semantics argument with somebody recently who claimed slavery was only slavery if you were “purchased” or otherwise treated as a long-term commodity, it didn’t count if it was a “temporary” thing despite it fulfilling all other requirements of slavery.
Which got me thinking, if a country forcibly conscripts you for military service with absolutely no pay and benefits for wartime service, is that considered a form of slavery? Are civilians or POWs considered slaves if forced to work in munitions factories just temporarily?
I don’t know that you’re going to get more than a descent into semantics here. Forced labor and indentured servitude are both considered slavery by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Except… that document explicitly doesn’t apply to military conscription or forced penal labor. Because, well, the signatories of that document weren’t will to give those practices up.
If “slavery” is the broad term that covers all manner of being required to do labor that you don’t want to do under threat of punishment, then chattel slavery is the kind where you’re bought and sold, indentured servitude is the kind where you signed a contract to do it for a while, and military conscription is the kind that the state, in its munificence, has decided is kinda ok enough because they need cannon fodder.
I always thought it had to do with the ownership of people. In other words, slavery involves forced labor, but that’s not the defining characteristic.
And at any rate, conscripts are paid and have a lot of rights that slaves don’t have. Pretty much the only possible abridgement of rights involved is requiring you to serve in the armed forces, which is considered a duty of citizenship at any rate, not forced labor. It’s pretty clear when you read/hear the citizenship oath that naturalized citizens take.
A “duty” that is imposed on you without your consent that requires you do work, that deprives you of freedom of movement, that allows food to be withheld and corporal punishment…
The primary problem with historical American slavery wasn’t that slaves weren’t well-paid.
But, again, we’re into semantics. Do conscripted soldiers have it better than 18th-century African slaves? Sure, obviously. Do both fall under the umbrella term of slavery. I think so.
I’d think of forced labor as the bigger et - any labor you are forced to do against your will, especially if unpaid - and slavery as a small subset of that, where your slavery is your primary identity.
Legally, it’s considered a duty owed the government. You can refuse, and you’re punished similarly to tax evasion, presumably because they’re both duties owed the government. I didn’t consent to pay them a quarter or more of my income and do without whatever alternative uses of that money that I could have spent that on either
If you choose to perform your duty, you’re tacitly agreeing to be bound by the UCMJ I assume, which is also NOT slavery, even if it recognizes a different set of offenses and standards of conduct than the civilian world does.
You do run into semantics issues though, as there was a million variations. So 18th century Russian conscripts from Peter I to 1793 were conscripted for life. After that the term was ‘only’ 25 years, which in the brutal conditions of the Russian army, which was often deliberately starved and under-equipped for fiscal reasons, might as well have been for life anyway.
Technically they weren’t slaves. They retained certain minimal legal rights, at least in theory. But the difference between a Russian serf and a full-on slave was mighty thin.
Roman slaves were often paid a “salarium” in salt, and would even buy their freedom. They were still slaves. The Romans did not spend the effort the Greeks did on keeping their slaves compliant, and rather than risk numerous slave revolts, essentially converted slavery into indentured servitude.
I read that in Brazil, many natives were forced into seven-year indentured servitude terms, rather than slavery (which black imports were forced into). As the natives rarely survived that term, it was essentially slavery for life anyway.
Drafting soldiers is, IMO, slavery. (There were societies that employed slave soldiers. A German king, pre 1870, used to literally kidnap from foreign countries and force them to be soldiers. He would give them loaded weapons and training, and force them to risk their lives in combat for him… and they did. Such as the powers of organization.) Same with forcing POWs to work. Prisoners being “forced” to work is something I’m unsure of. I don’t know if they’re being forced, but the wages are “criminal” (no pun intended).
“Legally” is just descent into semantics. Laws are written by people and can be arbitrary. Literal chattel slavery was once legal, and it could reasonably have been construed as a duty to society, or to one’s owner.
The crucial difference between conscription and, say, tax evasion is that one is a claim on your physical person and the other is a claim on your stuff.
You don’t get thrown into jail if you can’t pay your taxes. They just take everything you own. You get thrown into jail for purposefully attempting to hide assets or defraud the government. If you fully agree that you own the government taxes but simply can’t pay them… I’m pretty sure there aren’t criminal penalties for that. They can’t make you get a job to pay them back, they can only take your wages if you choose to work.
You can make the “taxation is theft” argument, but it doesn’t extend to “taxation is slavery”. Just like a debt is not the same as indentured servitude, even though the likely result of both is working to pay them off. One is a claim on your stuff, and the other is a claim on your person. And since we got rid of debtors prisons, the stuff claim can’t be directly converted to the personal one.
Let’s consider a few things that might be essential components of slavery. Maybe these aren’t totally right, but I’m going to take a stab at them.
Slaves don’t have freedom of movement. They can’t live/travel where they want.
Slaves don’t have personal autonomy in their work. They can’t work how they want.
Slaves can’t unilaterally escape from their situation. They can’t break the contract or have a say in how it’s constructed.
All three of those apply to military conscripts, to forced prison laborers, and to chattel slaves. The first two apply to indentured servants (and in many cases the third does as well). Only #3 (sort of) applies to taxes owed.
Slavery involves a restriction of rights beyond the simple working nature of the institution. A slave is not a man, it is a “tool endowed with speech”, to borrow a phrase from the Ancient Greeks. A slave does not own their own physical body, has no autonomy, cannot own property (though historically some did or were granted some leeway in that regards). A slave cannot choose who they marry with, and their children are not their own either.
A conscript is not a slave, because even though they are coerced into temporary service ; they are not considered un-people as a result, are still expected to have a mind of their own (e.g. disobey illegal orders) and still have all the rights of regular citizens (voting, owning stuff, fucking who they want etc…). A slave has only one “right”, which is to do what they are told to without question in each and every aspect of their lives.
(note that the distinction can even be finer : a medieval serf was not a slave legally speaking ; and the people of that era did make a distinction between them. From a modern point of view however, weeeeeell…)
I think this is a good distinction. In forced labor or involuntary servitude or conscription, you may own a person’s labor. But the person still retains their legal status as a human being with a set of rights.
In slavery, you own the person himself. The slave is legally your property and no longer has the legal status of being a person nor holds any rights.
What the Constitution prohibits is “involuntary servitude”. Military conscription is definitely servitude, and it is definitely involuntary. If the courts were honest about it, they’d rule that the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits the draft.
Yes, conscripts are paid, and they eventually get their freedom back. Neither is relevant. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with unpaid labor, and in fact a lot of worthy enterprises wouldn’t work without it. And nowhere does the Thirteenth Amendment say that involuntary servitude is allowed as long as it’s temporary.
Indentured servitude can be allowed under the Thirteenth Amendment, as long as it’s voluntary. If you sign a contract with someone that says that they’ll do something for you now, in exchange for a certain amount of labor from you in the future, that’s perfectly valid. Key, though, is that you agreed to it.
This is a case where I’ll have to go with the originalists. It think it’s clear that the people who wrote and enacted the Thirteenth Amendment in 1864 and 1865 meant slavery when they wrote involuntary servitude. I don’t believe any of them thought the term applied to military conscription, which was in widespread practice at the time. If it had occurred to somebody that the amendment might one day be interpreted that way, they would have revised the text to explicitly deny it.
Cite? If you break such a contract, the other party can sue for damages. But they can’t sue for forcing you to uphold your end of the contract by doing whatever work you agreed to do.
So, while you could agree to such a thing, you can’t be held to the terms of it. And, presumably, someone agreeing to an indentured service would “judgment proof” in the sense of having no assets. So such a contract is, while maybe technically allowed, effectively moot.
There are two questions here. The answer to “is conscription illegal in the US because it’s slavery” is clearly no. No legal wiggle-room here. And the UN declaration on human rights also doesn’t cover it.
Is military conscription morally slavery? I’d say that it is.
In Aus, ‘slavery’ is a legal definition in the same way that ‘rape’ is, or technical phrases like ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
IANAL, but I think our definition is:
Our legal offenses are enslavement, ownership, trafficking.
Even if military draft was slavery, it wouldn’t be ‘illegal’ here in any legal sense, because prosecution requires permission from the crown prosecutor, that is permission from the government, that is, permission from the same people enforcing the draft. If permission to prosecute was granted, I’m not sure it would get up in the courts, because IANAL: our legal offenses refer to
, and I suspect that the ‘Government of Australia’ doesn’t fall within the legal definition of ‘A person’.
We also have a bunch of non-slavery offenses, involving ‘servitude’ and ‘forced marriage’ and stuff, but regardless of details I think they’d fail at the same hurdles.
“Salarium” is the ***money ***you use to buy salt, not salt in lieu of money. Nobody in Rome was regularly paid in salt, slave or soldier. This is a common myth.
That is also a myth. Salt has always been a very cheap and plentiful commodity. You can buy all the salt you need for a year for pennies, and always could.
The actual derivation of the Latin word *salarium *is obscure. Certainly there is some connection to salt, but it is unknown what it is. One suggestion is that it was payment to soldiers guarding the salt roads, but this is unproven.