Rendering Unto Caesar: The Essence of Slavery‏‏

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

People who have lived their entire lives in a slavish existence have no experience of what it means to live freely. If someone were to tell them that what they call freedom is actually quite unfree, they might respond with strong emotions. Their reaction could be so severe that they kill or injure the individual who delivers the message. They might go so far as to claim religious persecution and have the messenger brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. In a previous time and place, the messenger would be strapped to a pole atop a pile of flaming fuel or tacked to an artificial tree.

If you ask a chattel slave about slavery, he might speak of brutal punishment and loss of friends and family. If you ask a wage slave about slavery, he might speak of meager compensation and cutthroat competition. If you ask a chattel slave owner about slavery, he might speak of the innate inferiority of the laboring race. If you ask a wage slave employer about slavery, he might speak of the fear of labor organizers and the need for out-sourcing. None of this gets to the essence of slavery because it considers only surface phenomena.

Plato described the essence of slavery as an artificial system of deception. The chattel slave is deceived into fearing punishment. The chattel slave owner is deceived into controlling people. The wage slave is deceived into practicing cutthroat competition. The wage slave employer is deceived into sending his work to a more despotic domain. All of them are stuck in an artificial trap of slavish existence. Where Aristotle debits slavishness to human nature, Plato firmly places the blame on social structures that condition people to think and act in a narrow way.

What does this have to do with politics today? There is no slavery here and now. The problems of coerced and forced labor have all been solved by the miracles of modern science. Do you really believe that or do you see some room for improvement? A recent Time magazine article on labor conditions in India do not agree with that assessment. India is a hotbed of American and European outsourcing.

Links: Plato's famous cave analogy. Nilanjana Bhowmick on labor conditions in India.

Comments

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

You say that like all slaves don't have the option to kill themselves and be free from slavery. Nothing is forced, ever, nothing. Everything anyone ever does is their own free choice. Now, they may be made to feel like they have no other choice, they may be coerced into believing that there is only one option, but there is always another option. To say someone forced you to do anything denies your own free will. Sartre (who populised this idea) was in a freakin' Nazi POW camp and still saw it as his decision to be there; after all, all he has to do is make a run for it and *boom* he's dead; he doesn't even have to kill himself, someone else will do the hard work for him.

So is there really much difference between "do this job or I will whip you" and "do this job or you won't have anywhere to live or anything to eat"; I mean, the first dude has something eat and somewhere to live.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

To say someone forced you to do anything denies your own free will...

Sounds like slavery to me...what exactly are you disagreeing with?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

erm, all of it. I'm saying that you can't be forced to do something, whilst you're saying it's necessary for slavery, so if you're agreeing with me then you're either saying you were wrong with your first comment or that slavery has never existed. Perhaps you need to re-read my comment.

Or do you deny free will? In which case then we're all slaves.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

I deny slaves have free will. I thought that was the basic definition. Are you saying slaves were never forced, they were there by choice?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I need to be very careful here to make sure that I don't get perceived as pro-slavery, as some people like to simplify complex discussions. So that's my caveat, I'm not saying slaves deserve it or that slaves owners aren't bastards.


Are you saying slaves were never forced, they were there by choice?

That's precisely what I'm saying. Any time you're somewhere and you're not trying to kill yourself, you are there by choice. There is always another option, just because you don't want to take it doesn't mean you're not making a decision not to to take it. When they were captured, they could have fought back to their death. When they were transported they could have starved themselves to death. When they're working they could give their owners reasons to kill or sell them. There are many decisions that a slave can make that will change their situation; by pointing out that all the other options are worse you only point out the power of the coercion.

I'm quite happy to use the term "forced", but the actual slave is no more forced than the wage slave, well perhaps by degree, but no differently definitionally.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

When do you use the word forced then? Is there any situation where anyone is forced to do anything?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

That's a metaphysical question. If you mean forced as in "there was no other option" then no, no one is ever forced to do anything; everything that happens to you and around you in your life is a result of your choices (and truly, the choices of others, but the way you experience the world is a result of your choices). If by forced you mean "made it extremely difficult to do otherwise" then yes, we're forced all the time. Many are forced to work because rent and food cost money and they don't want to be starving and homeless (I'm not, because I live in the first world where we have things like welfare, so I'm forced to work because I don't want to be living in a hovel eating small amounts of bad food).

To be fair, you don't have to agree with me on this; it's certainly not agreed upon by people who discuss these matters professionally. This is just my opinion, albeit a common and strongly supported opinion. I coined a phrase that encapsulates the philosophy: "we have fundamental freedom, but radical responsibility". This means that you are always free to make another choice; if you're locked in Buffalo Bill's basement you can either put the lotion on the skin or get the hose again - you're not being *forced* (in the strong definition 1), you are being *coerced* to make yourself purty for a woman suit. If you don't want the hose, but you also don't want to be tanning your own hide, then you just stop eating. Plenty of people sew their mouths shut every year; it's an option. If you bash your head against a wall hard enough enough times, it's likely that you'll cause yourself enough damage to die*. These are options. If you can kill yourself, then you have the power to escape the situation. Therefore, if you are still in the situation then it's your choice. I'm focussing on the kill yourself option because it's most apt to this scenario, but I have another scenario that I use when explaining this concept. Take a man, who has a dependent wife and three dependent kids. He may feel *forced* to go to work to pay for his family; he may feel *trapped* in his life. But those thoughts mean he is denying his own free will. If you hate the job you have to do to support your family then ditch your family and quit the job, it's pretty simple. Now, that will (IMO) make you a dog and a lowlife and I wouldn't want you to be my friend, and a lot of society will treat you the same, but just because the other option is *worse* than the current one, doesn't mean you're not making a choice to stay stuck in your shitty life, you can go and be free, if you wanted. Which brings me to the flipside; radical responsibility. Every situation you are in in life you are in because of choices you made. The man can't blame his wife and kids for making him work a shitty job, as he's the one who a) made the choice to have the family and b) made the choice to stick around and do the right thing. In this way, the slave can't blame the captor because the slave is *choosing* to remain living in that situation.

To many people (most actually) this comes across as really depressing and they can't handle all the existential angst that comes with it. But if you choose to embrace the sublime qualities of existential angst (doing things like confronting your own death and understanding the absurdity of your own existence) then you can be freed from it. Understanding that at any point in time YOU have the ability to change the situation, no matter what, is very empowering I find. Obviously I don't want to kill myself, but I know it's there as an option if I ever need it. Obviously, I don't want to shirk my responsibilities, but it's always there at an option, provided I'm willing to pay the price. If I'm not willing to pay the price well then that's *my choice*; it is my exercising of my free will.

(too big, cont below)

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Again, I don't mind if you disagree with me, this is a question without answer, but hopefully now where I'm coming from makes sense, if it doesn't let me know and I'll try again (this is a pet topic of mine, obviously, I've coined phrases :P) If you think I'm wrong then I would like to hear why and what you think is better in its place (there are plenty of other valid options, not having free will at all is something I can entertain in an intellectual discussion, I just can have it in my personal life).



*or give yourself a brain injury; now, there's where my discussion becomes a bit weaker as I require my actors to have agency. I believe you can force a new born to do things, I believe you can force a severely disabled person to do things, but a healthy human of sound mind? Nup, there's always an out.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Also, if I'm going to use an asterisk as it's supposed to be used in denoting a footnote, I probably should stop using them for emphasis, that's confusing as I look at it now :P

[ironhawke.livejournal.com]

I'm clear on your definition of free will in the ultimate sense. The phrase "Someone putting a gun to your head" is usually taken to mean "I'm being forced to do X or Y." While in a typical sense this is absolutely true, as someone with free will you're fully capable of say "Fine, pull the trigger." To do otherwise is to accept that you're making the decision to live or to die, which in spite of the extremity of it, is still a decision.

However, in a more pragmatic sense, there are many, MANY situations in modern day industry where coercion, force, and manipulation is rampant. I happen to be a subcontractor for DirecTv and the shit they put us through is absolutely unbelievable. Long hours, daily pressure and a general attitude of "You jump through every hoop, or we'll cut you off."
While I personally accept that I continue to work for these jackenapes by choice and not force, I don't expect others to see things quite so starkly and that the sense of forced workplace conditions is a very real things for millions of people around the globe.

I think the distinction between a "forced" slave and a "wage" slave is ultimately (as you said) a matter of degree and a difference in definition of the level of force employed. Someone being "forced" to work overtime, or work on holidays cannot possibly be considered comparable to someone being "forced" to work at the end of a whip.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yes, I never wanted to say that wage slavery is the same as actual slavery, but we are in a period of strong corporate powers (not quite 1890s but on the way) where an employer can start putting unreasonable expectations on an employee (like working weekends without penalty rates for example) under the threat of losing their job and all the problems that go along with that. Whilst that doesn't affect their free will, it does inhibit their agency, which is actually what we probably should be talking about here.

Agency is the ability of a conscious being to act in the world; when your employer puts conditions on your employment that are outside the job you agreed to do (yeah, I'm gonna have to get you to come in on Sunday), they are limiting your agency. This is the same thing that happens to a slave, albeit to a much different degree.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

When you refer to chattel slavery as "actual" slavery, you deny the actual degradation of other forms of exploitation.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I didn't like that description but couldn't think of another way to make myself understood. Chattel slavery works well, thanks.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that slaves did resist and violently so quite often. Then the nobles and lords sent in the soldiers to slaughter everything larger than a matchbox and that put a lid on it for a generation or two. Why do you think the South was so much more militarized than the North?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Exactly. They were exercising their free will. Those who were killed in such rebellions were no longer slaves.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Good point. A slave who violates the "natural law" of the absence of free will must be eliminated. The psychiatric analogy is the elimination of the the thinking patterns of those who are dissatisfied with the current status quo.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Nat Turner is still an icon of resistance to Redneck despotism.