Modern Day Slavery

Spider Web wrote: »

This really just takes the biscuit for deflection. It is downright disrespectful and insulting to the victims. Just read the following (from The Guardian rather than a newspaper with a right-wing bias):


If the above were about an operation run by, for instance, the catholic church, would you be so tasteless? Or what about the real life similar stories for migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar?

And no, we're not all slaves. Slavery means not being paid, having no rights, working in terrible conditions, working several hours beyond a standard working day. If capitalism is so terrible, stop buying goods, otherwise you're contributing to it.

Orwell, much as I admire the man, left out the less than minor point that we need to have an income.

Since the chattel slave is property, his value to an owner is in some ways higher than that of a worker who may quit, be fired or replaced. The chattel slave's owner has made a greater investment in terms of the money he paid for the slave. For this reason, in times of recession, chattel slaves could not be fired like wage laborers. A "wage slave" could also be harmed at no (or less) cost. American chattel slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living from the 18th century and, according to historians Fogel and Engerman plantation records show that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally – their material conditions in the 19th century being "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time". This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an economic system different from capitalist wage slavery. According to Mark Michael Smith of the Economic History Society: "although intrusive and oppressive, paternalism, the way masters employed it, and the methods slaves used to manipulate it, rendered slaveholders' attempts to institute capitalistic work regimens on their plantation ineffective and so allowed slaves to carve out a degree of autonomy."
Unlike a chattel slave, a wage laborer can (barring unemployment or lack of job offers) choose between employers, but they usually constitute a minority of owners in the population for which the wage laborer must work, while attempts to implement workers' control on employers' businesses may be considered an act of theft or insubordination, and thus be met with violence, imprisonment or other legal and social measures. The wage laborer's starkest choice is to work for an employer or face poverty or starvation. If a chattel slave refuses to work, a number of punishments are also available; from beatings to food deprivation – although economically rational slave owners practiced positive reinforcement to achieve best results and before losing their investment by killing an expensive slave.
Historically, the range of occupations and status positions held by chattel slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free persons, indicating some similarities between chattel slavery and wage slavery as well.
Wage slavery, like chattel slavery, does not stem from some immutable "human nature," but represents a "specific response to material and historical conditions" that "reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations… the ideas… [and] the social form of daily life."
Similarities were blurred by the fact that proponents of wage labor won the American Civil War, in which they competed for legitimacy with defenders of chattel slavery. Both presented an over-positive assessment of their system, while denigrating the opponent.

According to American anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Noam Chomsky, the similarities between chattel and wage slavery were noticed by the workers themselves. He noted that the 19th century Lowell Mill Girls, who, without any reported knowledge of European Marxism or anarchism, condemned the "degradation and subordination" of the newly emerging industrial system, and the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self", maintaining that "those who work in the mills should own them."