Slavery is universally regarded as a bad thing - at least in the universe of enlightened Western nations; it's outlawed, and children are taught early and often that it's a crime of the past and a mark of inhumanity where it does exist today - in those backward places in the world where the law and common sense and decency have yet to work their transformations, from the rough brutal primitive to the refined compassionate modern.
As long as we let capitalism define slavery in its own terms it's "making people work for you and not paying them."
Once you pay them it's not slavery anymore.
But if we separate the real crime from its incidental costume what we have is something more like - slavery is making other people miserable to enrich yourself, forcing other people to do work, in order to survive, that they would not be likely to want to do if they were free to choose, and it's work that because they do it, the owner/employer becomes more prosperous. In the legal terms for slavery, the misery is decreed to be financial.
But how hard is it to imagine someone working in a factory, where the air is poison and the wages aren't enough to live on let alone save for later, where the body-damaging and mind-numbing effects are the responsibility of the worker, not the owner?
Or imagine a place that has no other way to make a living, where not working in the only employment available means starving. Not technically slavery, and yet the opportunity for slavery-like conditions is obvious. And the benefits to someone who can run those places of employment to their own benefit, at the expense of the people who work there and especially of those who don't, how different is that from owning slaves?
It is precisely this different, that the law very clearly defines slavery as making people work for you and not paying them; therefore, when people are free to not work for you, even if it means starving, and when they do work for you if you pay them, even if you don't pay them enough to feed and shelter themselves, it's not slavery.
According to the law.
As long as we let capitalism define slavery in its own terms it's "making people work for you and not paying them."
Once you pay them it's not slavery anymore.
But if we separate the real crime from its incidental costume what we have is something more like - slavery is making other people miserable to enrich yourself, forcing other people to do work, in order to survive, that they would not be likely to want to do if they were free to choose, and it's work that because they do it, the owner/employer becomes more prosperous. In the legal terms for slavery, the misery is decreed to be financial.
But how hard is it to imagine someone working in a factory, where the air is poison and the wages aren't enough to live on let alone save for later, where the body-damaging and mind-numbing effects are the responsibility of the worker, not the owner?
Or imagine a place that has no other way to make a living, where not working in the only employment available means starving. Not technically slavery, and yet the opportunity for slavery-like conditions is obvious. And the benefits to someone who can run those places of employment to their own benefit, at the expense of the people who work there and especially of those who don't, how different is that from owning slaves?
It is precisely this different, that the law very clearly defines slavery as making people work for you and not paying them; therefore, when people are free to not work for you, even if it means starving, and when they do work for you if you pay them, even if you don't pay them enough to feed and shelter themselves, it's not slavery.
According to the law.
