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.
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.
let’s call it neo-slavery 💫
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)
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”
What we have isn’t capitalism, capitalism only works until you add people
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.
I like this format.
Fucking love key and peele
look at my lips : not illegal
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.
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 for 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
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
It’s technically not slave labor since prisoners usually get paid (less than minimum wage, but still counts).
No constitution, only what is moral…
Theocracy, then?
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No, the constitution is holy! Like the Bible! And like the Bible, we’ll only use the bits we like, and we’ll obfuscate the bits that undermine our greed.
Name a document harder to update than the US Constitution.
And at least with the Bible, Christians, pathologically yet mercifully, pretend the awful stuff in it just doesn’t exist.
deleted by creator
Lmao
Yep, stone the gays, super moral /s
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.
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.
