There’s more slavery now than at any time in human history, according to this UN task force.
It makes you wonder, of course, that if our capitalism depends on slave markets… is it really capitalism?
Someone please help me to understand…
Yes. Capitalism is private ownership over the means of production. Slavery serves capitalism very well, even if it didn’t invent slavery.
One could argue that if the workers themselves are the means of production, slavery is extra capitalist.
Which is why the founders of anarcho-capitalism argued for “voluntary slavery.”
I think I just lost some braincells.
let’s call it neo-slavery 💫
If a CEO finds out that he can get slaves to do the work for free instead of spending money on it they have an obligation to the shareholders to do what makes the company the most money.
The only reason corporations aren’t doing chattel slavery in the U.S. right now is that they’re legally barred from it.
I just heard an NPR story about US Steel Corp using chattel slavery less than a hundred years ago. They worked people to death and buried them in unmarked graves.
That’s a simplification
Mercantilism had private ownership of production
Capitalism is pay based on hours worked (only way to get rich is to work more hours than someone else)
(only way to get rich is to work more hours than someone else)
In our current system, this is not how you get rich, AT ALL.
Billionaires aren’t people who worked 3 jobs and lived with roommates until they made it. They’re not even in the same class as these people.Yeah, capitalism was drawn up to prevent that
Turns out that people with money/power will influence laws to their own benefit
I don’t understand your point. The most important feature of capitalism is the private ownership of capital. Capitalism isn’t “hustle, fuck bitches get money” or whatever. Money and wage labor goes back to the founding of civilization. It isn’t a new invention.
So did private ownership
That wasn’t what Capitalism was about
In the wealth of nations Smith talks great lengths about the labourer being king of the market not the landowners and that with advancement in technology costs should go down except land owners prevent that
The whole system is supposed to favour the labourer compared to Mercantilism where the rich got richer because they owned the production
It also praised the American colonies for open immigration saying they could double their population faster than anyone in Europe and that would double their economy
I think one of the main problems with Smith’s conception of capitalism is that he didn’t account for how huge and pervasive and intrusive advertising would become. He naively assumed that the best product would dominate the market when actually people will buy whatever is thrust in front of the their eyes a thousand times a day.
And of course corporate lobbying wasn’t such an issue in his time.
We have term limits for governments but not for corporations
Their ability to last indefinitely allows them more control than anyone thought possible
And no matter what system you choose; they will act in self interest that will allow them to expand/erode the system to benefit themselves
No, the problem with Smith’s capitalism is that he’s constantly misrepresented
He was descriptive, not prescriptive. He was not an advocate of capitalism, he was explaining it - and if you read the wealth of nations and your takeaway was “Lassie Faire capitalism is a good idea”, reread it
I appreciate your critique but I’ve got to be honest and say that I’m not going to spend any more time in my life trying to justify late stage capitalism. It will eventually be replaced and pass into history like every other economic system, if it doesn’t kill us first. 💣
Smith can talk all he wants, that doesn’t make his analysis correct.
He wrote the book on capitalism
The system literally came from that book
And we know now that his analysis on the outcome of capitalism is incorrect. Capitalism exists for the private property holders to extract as much wealth and power as possible from their privileged position. That unrelenting pursuit of profit has led to even worse inequality, and is collapsing entire ecosystems. It’s a disaster of an economic system full of contradictions. Those contradictions are now causing capitalism to collapse in on itself.
deleted by creator
Started strong, then jumped right off a cliff with this argument. Just wrong about everything in the last sentence, pretty impressive.
You really should read Wealth of Nations
We don’t live in a capitalist society, it’s important to note because the “dream of capitalism” is impossible to achieve
I have. Your definition is just bad, bro.
So you know capitalism paints that landowners are bad and the labourer as essentially
Claims the labourer should be the one that gets the money
Claims money should be given out based of effort
But you think giving money out based on effort is a bad definition for it
That’s right?
The private economy is the main source of the rise, while state-enforced labour counts for one in seven cases of modern slavery, the report adds.
I wonder if mandatory military service counts for “state-enforced labor”
How are there high income people in slavery, that doesn’t make sense to me
The UN sponsored report uses a pretty liberal definition of slavery to include things like wage theft (which forces workers to stay at a job until they’re fully compensated), sex trafficking, and domestic servitude where the servant’s documents are confiscated so that they can’t flee.
However, there’s still a hell of a lot whips and chains slavery in Africa and South East Asia. Those slaves serve the excavation and manufacturing industries.
What we have isn’t capitalism, capitalism only works until you add people
True capitalism has never been tried!
Ancaps actually believe this
Let’s see how it works for Argentina.
“Anarcho-Capitalism” sounds like a 4chan attempt at political theory.
Okay, this may come off as unemphatetic but I love the fact that slavery doesn’t give a shit about your sex or wealth. Like, the percentages are almost fully equal, save for actual low income that is almost double what the other percentages are. Other than that, all are equal in the eyes of slavers.
Shit’s wild. What’s also wild is that these numbers still exists…especially when thinking about Americas or Europe. :|
That’s what you got from those graphs?
Everybody:
Isn’t using children for slave labor immoral?
Hershey, Nestle, Mars, selling chocolate to Americans:
But is it against the law, though?
If you buy anything grown almost anywhere, it is with slave labor or near-slave labor. So many of the crops grown in the US use child labor and labor for very very low wages, low enough that it may as well be slavery.
I like this format.
Fucking love key and peele
look at my lips : not illegal
you’re hurting my eardrums…
I like that Lemmy is a small enough community that I know exactly which post and which comments in that post this is about. 🤣
is like spying on kids
Also U.S.: Don’t worry, all will be forgiven if you are able to get our space program off the ground! 📎
You think the US is bad try 10 years of forced labor in a Russian chemical factory with little protection from the chemicals.
It’s technically not slave labor since prisoners usually get paid (less than minimum wage, but still counts).
Is it immoral? Don’t they “owe a debt to society”?
But society isn’t profiting from the labor. It is private businesses, right? There is such a thing in the US as communal or public service as sentence got a crime I am sure but from what I gathered prison labor is not that.
I’d be morally okay if a certain amount of hours of public service would be part of a sentence for crimes which left a debt to society. Such as tax fraud or destruction of public property etc.
Fully agreed. Stuff like, you have to work for the government park corp and clean up parks as your job for the next year is a form of sentencing I could agree with. I don’t agree with random company 400 getting to use you as a slave being your sentence.
Uh yeah so uh
That green leafy thing
If you inhale itFIFTY FUCKING YEARS BUCKO
and other totally arbitrary justifications for putting a drastically skewed selection of your citizens into enforced labor
So the problem is that those people shouldn’t be in prison, not that prisoners should be expected to pay a debt to society.
You misunderstand.
I’m pointing out how, when prisoners can be monetized, laws will be invented to maximize profit.
List of U.S. politicians and how much they are being paid by for-profit prisonsI’m not misunderstanding you, I disagree with you.
Yes it is immoral, they should be rehabilitated instead
But society also needs to fix its dystopia because some crimes where committed out of necessity for example stealing food when you’d otherwise die and their was no way of getting free food
Crimes of necessity don’t need to he rehabilitated because people are forced to commit them due to their current living position
Edit:
https://lemmy.ca/comment/5348520
This comment also applies as well
Lol the person that posted this is probably using an iPhone which is made with slave labor in China. Stop acting like USA is the only country using capitalism to get cheap products. So many of you on Lemmy are crazy about bashing the US when every first world country is 100% in the same boat.
Uneducated and trying to spread propaganda to hate a single country when you’re all guilty as fuck. Your clothes your electronics your beauty products all made with suffering and yet y’all hypocrites still need your Nikes and shitty iPhones/pretty much any electronic let’s be real. This is exactly what the rich fuckers that run the show want…idiots like OP.
For ome reason many people on Lemmy specifically act like this I’ve noticed which is perfect for their agenda to make us all hate each other based on where we live as if we had a choice where we were born and as if we could even really do anything about the corruption that’s just right out in public. None y’all wanna be the Martyr so stop acting self righteous.
I think people are allowed to say that slavery is bad even if we benefit from slave labor. It’s not like shit is labeled, and even if a product is free from one form of slavery there are still so many types across the world it would take a global effort to get rid of them all. Isn’t it better to at least acknowledge the problem?
- China is capitalism with beastly grin
- The OP doesn’t have to live in USofA
- The OP doesn’t have to have glass brick
We’re making fun of USA and pointing things like this out because Muricans always tout themselves as some beacon of freedom and democracy and whatnot. The land of the free my ass.
Oh no! Anyway…
US constitution is not a moral or criminal or other type of code for all cases of light. It does not forbid, for example shoplifting or driving on red light.
You could have worded this better, and I’m not a legal expert, but I think you mean: the U.S. constitution doesn’t make claims about morality. It gives penalties for doing certain actions.
Sure, but that’s beside the point.
The only crime listed out in the constitution is treason.
The rest of it is explaining the roles and duties of the various branches of government, and the supremacy clause says that the Constitution, the federal legal code and any treaties are the Supreme laws of the land.
Amendments are part of the constitution, that is the reason they exist, to amend the document. Hence this meme referencing the 13th
The amendments aren’t like laws, there’s no punishments written in them however they’re directives to what the government can and can’t do. For example the 13th amendment restricts the use of slavery in US jurisdictions with the exception of punishment of crime.
Like I said the only crime listed in the Constitution is treason, everything else is about how the government is supposed to run and what limitations it has.
So what’s the point?
Private citizens enslaving people is illegal because it is forbidden in the constitution. Only the government is allowed to enslave people now, as punishment for crime. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Damn, TIL. You just planned my weekend, thanks for the tip!
This is not specific at all to the U.S. and the overwhelming majority of rational adults should be able to see that it’s a good thing for society to be able to legally remove members who pose a clear risk to the safety and function of it. Whether or not the 13th Amendment is administered fairly is a different conversation^1, but the false equivalency this post makes between legal imprisonment and chattel slavery is a fallacy.
^1 It’s not.
This isn’t about removing people from society. It’s about the practice of using them to perform free labor.
rehabilitation please
Theres an argument to be made that by extracting a useful measure of work from them and mitigating the costs of jailing them it reduces the drain of an effective criminal justice system. But of course capitalism takes it to an absurd place where for profit prisons influence judges to impose harsher sentences and it becomes a corrupt shitshow.
There is a lot of ways it could be implemented ethically, but they would cost more and benefit the powerful less so they wont do it.
Yes, you can use slaves to offset the cost of their upkeep. That argument sucks.
I said ETHICALLY voluntarily entering into their work programs that offer a reduction in sentence or better conditions is not slavery.
ETHICALLY it’s not volunteering if it’s coerced, and I can’t think of many things more coercive than the promise of more prison.
Its not the promise of more prison, its an offer of less prison. The difference between coercion and incentive. The issue is if a sentence of 5 years would become a sentence of 3 courts start making the sentence 7 so they get 5 years of work or if they degrade prison conditions intentionally to force inmates towards the work programs.
It also would hinge on the “work” being something worthwhile and skill building, not just assembly line work for big corporations looking to save a buck because inmates are cheaper than machines.
Its not the promise of more prison, its an offer of less prison. The difference between coercion and incentive.
No. There’s a distinction but not a difference.
For profit prisons are less than 10% of all prisons. Police unions are the threat.
They’re are a few problems saying that prison labor is a continuation of slavery in the US.
The largest demographic in prison is white men.
Prisons don’t make money. Corpos that run the prisons, or the phones, or use prisoners as cheap labor do profit, but that money mostly comes from the State, the prisoners themselves, and the prisoner’s families.
Prisoners have legal rights.
Nobody is born incarcerated.
I’m not trying to defend that clause in the 13th. But equivocating all forms of slavery and forced labor is a common white supremacist tactic to minimize the particular evils of racialized chattel slavery in the US.
All races, all people, all nations, have had slavery and been slaves at some point themselves
David Barton (A Christian nationalist and fake historian)
There is a pretty good conversation about this in F.D Signifier’s video: “Fuck the police”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyEwOxp_Iyw (The conversation is about the 1:03:00 mark)
The largest demographic in prison is white men.
Funny that you’d bring up white supremacist tactics right after throwing this one out there. Like, how can you bring up statistics to defend the justice system and just ignore 13% of the general population having a 38% share of the prison population?
Plenty of American slaves also had rights, even as slaves.
The more you know.
Prisons don’t make money
That’s just untrue. Private for-profit prisons were a multi-billion-dollar industry for too long.
Also, they made enough money to bribe judges to sentence more people to longer terms so they could make more money.
Private prisons promised to be ‘more efficient’ and cost less per prisoner than public prisons, but typically their pattern of operations was to cut costs as much as possible and still charge the taxpayer more per prisoner than public prisons- and it got so out of hand that at one point it cost the taxpayer more per year to incarcerate a criminal than it would have to send him to Harvard for that year. Also under private prison administration, no effort was made at all to rehabilitate prisoners- their business was really based on recidivism, it was very much in their interest for prisoners to re-offend and end up back in prison.
Convict leasing on top of that is plain slavery, and the prospect of money to be made leasing
convictsslaves for labor has corrupted America’s justice system, particularly in confederate states, ever since the 13th Amendment was penned.
