I see that the conversation has gone beyond types of slavery as practiced in older civilizations. So I also think about a post_Civil War form of slavery: share cropping, in which the owner of the share cropped land took enough profits from the crops, so that the share cropper was left with just enough to subsist on, just as actual slaves were given just enough to subsist on by their masters.
And I'm also reminded of the Tennessee Ernie Ford song, "Sixteen Tons," in which coal miners were paid in company 'scrip' rather than in 'legal tender'. The scrip could only be used at a 'company store'. Hence the lyrics in the song:
Yes, my post on the Vikings, etc. was by way of being preliminary in my mind. Studying and writing about slavery in the Caribbean has prompted me to look at historical forms and current forms and to think about the variations.
Sharecroppers and Okies and the Grapes of Wrath and John Sayles movie Matewan. Re your list of movies: Gladiator is another where the hero is reduced to slavery (and becomes a gladiator, another form of slavery).
Thinking about what seems to me to be the innate nature of humans to, at times, exploit other humans in various ways, I was thinking about the phrase 'wage slave'. Looking up the term online, I came across the Wikipedia entry for the term 'Wage slavery'. In the entry, there is a reference to ancient Rome:
"Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis.[11] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, and engaged in critique of work[12][13] while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism."
This is a fascinating line of thought. What Cicero wrote was: "Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery."
It seems as if he is injecting a class aspect into the term. Working for a wage isn't so bad if there is "artistic skill" involved, but manual labor for a wage is vulgar and a kind of slavery.
I remember reading that Davy Crockett who was a Southerner and owned a slave or two before he went to the Alamo once went to visit a textile mill in Massachusetts. He was shocked, I guess, and said the mill workers were just like slaves.
This puzzled me. And certainly wage laborers in North America today would resent being called slaves. But then if you consider situations of extreme poverty where people (children included) must work for a very low wage just to survive at all, then we move closer and closer to slavery as we understand it. The less you are free to move about, find other work, make your own economic choices, the closer you come to slavery. Under certain circumstances, wage slavery shades into debt slavery, where the worker incurs a debt to the mill or mine owner and is locked into a relationship. Often the debt is never worked off. Sometimes it is passed from generation to generation as in the debt-slavery in the brick-making industry in India. Technically, none of these situations is the same as chattel slavery, but getting closer and closer.
From what I remember having read at one time or another, there were 'class' distinctions among chattel slaves where chattel slavery existed in the US prior to the Civil War; at least between slaves who were 'house' servants, vs. 'field' hands. I could be wrong about this though.
Well, feeling guilty about being lazy, I did a quick search online. One site says there were three major 'classes' of slaves: domestic, skilled, and field slaves. And the site says there were subdivisions within each category. I suspect the slaves were well-aware of the distinctions.
I am reminded of a scene in the John Wayne, William Holden film, "The Horse Soldiers", about a Union cavalry raid into the south during the Civil War. The Union cavalry bivouac at one point on a southern plantation. The wife of the plantation owner and her personal slave maid are the only ones there. The wife. at one point, playing up to the Union officers, uses the phrase "y'all". When the Union officers leave her presence, her personal slave maid chastises her for talking like a field hand.
A quote from 'De Officiis', from a footnote in the "Wage slavery" Wikipedia entry:
" Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery."
Lord, Doug, this as grim as it gets. Of course, we can’t have children learn of such matters. Like that odious little marshmallow DeSantis, we must bury it. Don’t say ‘slave’; don’t say gay; etc. — all this from the party that claims to abhor government overreach. I could puke!
One could argue the slave trade is alive and well, albeit slightly reshaped, but policy supported with current migrant worker programs. We are all complicit, refusing to know, understand or pay for the real costs of the food we eat. By this I'm referring to the human costs; there's the environmental burden too...you're right when you say we should all be more depressed than we are.
Of course sex trafficking continues today unabated...it's the market that needs snuffing...humans need a redesign.
I couldn't agree more. The Kevin Bales video lecture linked in the footnotes is particularly good at pointing out kinds of slavery Westerners are not normally aware of, e.g. generational debt slavery in the vast Indian brick-making industry and the charcoal-making industry in Brazil (Brazil doesn't have much coal so they turn forests into charcoal that's used in the vibrant Brazilian steel industry; a lot of plumbing fixtures in N. America come from Brazil). Both these slave industries generate huge amounts of carbon dioxide pollution. As Bales points out, slave activities are world-wide the third largest source of carbon dioxide. That's third after the U.S. and China, but ahead of every other country.
What a brilliant, far-reaching and insightful expose of history's hidden underbelly! Your comment suggests a fruitful follow-up project: the age-old practice of mental slavery--in its contemporary incarnation, chained to the profitable exploit of the innocuous yet insidious incantation, "carbon dioxide pollution." :)
Hmmm. I have thought about this a lot. The perpetrators seem to be able to turn off parts of their emotional software. And, of course, humans have a talent for getting used to horrible things.
There are artful dodges. One of them is othering, the way the slave-victim becomes usefully different from the perpetrator. Race can be a factor here, but historically religion played a huge role. Christians could easily abuse non-Christians; Muslims had less feeling for unbelievers or infidels; Romans and Greeks enslaved so-called barbarians.
The dodge most familiar to people living now is what you might call compartmentalization. It seems quite easy to lead a woke, eco-ethical middle class lifestyle while buying products and following social practices that condemn other people to slavery or homelessness or other forms of economic discrimination. We concentrate on well-worn local moral issues and ignore the rest. Many West Indian slavers were upright Christians, fondly remembered on their tombstones.
These dodges are normal human behavior not aberrations.
There are also naturally cruel humans who just revel in causing pain and performing dominance. These are the ones I find hardest to understand.
Yes, I think no one wants to see themselves as a victimizer (and why would they?) and yet as you say compartmentalization is one way to dodge that painful truth . . .
Four films come to mind regarding depictions of slavery in the ancient world. Slavery is what one might call a 'sub-text' in "The Ten Commandments". In the film "The Robe", the Greek Demetrius is a slave of a Roman. And, of course, "Spartacus", in which the gladiators were slaves. Spartacus led a slave revolt, known as the 'Third Servile War' (there were two previous 'servile' wars, which were slave revolts). In "Spartacus", Tony Curtis plays a slave. And he also plays a slave of the Vikings in the film "The Vikings'", who is captured from the coast of England.
Thanks, Larry. I saw that Tony Curtis movie long, long ago and had forgotten the plot. Great to be reminded. I actually had a paragraph or two about the Romans and mentioned Spartacus and his revolt, but then realized I was going on too long. Trimmed them out. What was interesting in my recent research was where the Roman slaves came from, Gaul, the British Isles, Africa, etc.
I see that the conversation has gone beyond types of slavery as practiced in older civilizations. So I also think about a post_Civil War form of slavery: share cropping, in which the owner of the share cropped land took enough profits from the crops, so that the share cropper was left with just enough to subsist on, just as actual slaves were given just enough to subsist on by their masters.
And I'm also reminded of the Tennessee Ernie Ford song, "Sixteen Tons," in which coal miners were paid in company 'scrip' rather than in 'legal tender'. The scrip could only be used at a 'company store'. Hence the lyrics in the song:
"You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"
Yes, my post on the Vikings, etc. was by way of being preliminary in my mind. Studying and writing about slavery in the Caribbean has prompted me to look at historical forms and current forms and to think about the variations.
Sharecroppers and Okies and the Grapes of Wrath and John Sayles movie Matewan. Re your list of movies: Gladiator is another where the hero is reduced to slavery (and becomes a gladiator, another form of slavery).
The classic slave was a person captured in war. Modern capitalism has subtler ways of coercing workers.
Thinking about what seems to me to be the innate nature of humans to, at times, exploit other humans in various ways, I was thinking about the phrase 'wage slave'. Looking up the term online, I came across the Wikipedia entry for the term 'Wage slavery'. In the entry, there is a reference to ancient Rome:
"Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis.[11] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, and engaged in critique of work[12][13] while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism."
This is a fascinating line of thought. What Cicero wrote was: "Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery."
It seems as if he is injecting a class aspect into the term. Working for a wage isn't so bad if there is "artistic skill" involved, but manual labor for a wage is vulgar and a kind of slavery.
I remember reading that Davy Crockett who was a Southerner and owned a slave or two before he went to the Alamo once went to visit a textile mill in Massachusetts. He was shocked, I guess, and said the mill workers were just like slaves.
This puzzled me. And certainly wage laborers in North America today would resent being called slaves. But then if you consider situations of extreme poverty where people (children included) must work for a very low wage just to survive at all, then we move closer and closer to slavery as we understand it. The less you are free to move about, find other work, make your own economic choices, the closer you come to slavery. Under certain circumstances, wage slavery shades into debt slavery, where the worker incurs a debt to the mill or mine owner and is locked into a relationship. Often the debt is never worked off. Sometimes it is passed from generation to generation as in the debt-slavery in the brick-making industry in India. Technically, none of these situations is the same as chattel slavery, but getting closer and closer.
From what I remember having read at one time or another, there were 'class' distinctions among chattel slaves where chattel slavery existed in the US prior to the Civil War; at least between slaves who were 'house' servants, vs. 'field' hands. I could be wrong about this though.
Well, feeling guilty about being lazy, I did a quick search online. One site says there were three major 'classes' of slaves: domestic, skilled, and field slaves. And the site says there were subdivisions within each category. I suspect the slaves were well-aware of the distinctions.
I am reminded of a scene in the John Wayne, William Holden film, "The Horse Soldiers", about a Union cavalry raid into the south during the Civil War. The Union cavalry bivouac at one point on a southern plantation. The wife of the plantation owner and her personal slave maid are the only ones there. The wife. at one point, playing up to the Union officers, uses the phrase "y'all". When the Union officers leave her presence, her personal slave maid chastises her for talking like a field hand.
A quote from 'De Officiis', from a footnote in the "Wage slavery" Wikipedia entry:
" Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery."
My response overlapped yours.
Lord, Doug, this as grim as it gets. Of course, we can’t have children learn of such matters. Like that odious little marshmallow DeSantis, we must bury it. Don’t say ‘slave’; don’t say gay; etc. — all this from the party that claims to abhor government overreach. I could puke!
One could argue the slave trade is alive and well, albeit slightly reshaped, but policy supported with current migrant worker programs. We are all complicit, refusing to know, understand or pay for the real costs of the food we eat. By this I'm referring to the human costs; there's the environmental burden too...you're right when you say we should all be more depressed than we are.
Of course sex trafficking continues today unabated...it's the market that needs snuffing...humans need a redesign.
I couldn't agree more. The Kevin Bales video lecture linked in the footnotes is particularly good at pointing out kinds of slavery Westerners are not normally aware of, e.g. generational debt slavery in the vast Indian brick-making industry and the charcoal-making industry in Brazil (Brazil doesn't have much coal so they turn forests into charcoal that's used in the vibrant Brazilian steel industry; a lot of plumbing fixtures in N. America come from Brazil). Both these slave industries generate huge amounts of carbon dioxide pollution. As Bales points out, slave activities are world-wide the third largest source of carbon dioxide. That's third after the U.S. and China, but ahead of every other country.
What a brilliant, far-reaching and insightful expose of history's hidden underbelly! Your comment suggests a fruitful follow-up project: the age-old practice of mental slavery--in its contemporary incarnation, chained to the profitable exploit of the innocuous yet insidious incantation, "carbon dioxide pollution." :)
Odd, too, how fascinating the horrifying is . . .or maybe that's just me (I can hope so, but I suspect not).
Oh, I do agree. For the watcher. The difficult thing is to imagine yourself into the subjectivity of the victim.
Or, as well, even more difficult to imagine oneself as the perpetrator . . .
or at least their subjectivity might be more accurate . .
Hmmm. I have thought about this a lot. The perpetrators seem to be able to turn off parts of their emotional software. And, of course, humans have a talent for getting used to horrible things.
There are artful dodges. One of them is othering, the way the slave-victim becomes usefully different from the perpetrator. Race can be a factor here, but historically religion played a huge role. Christians could easily abuse non-Christians; Muslims had less feeling for unbelievers or infidels; Romans and Greeks enslaved so-called barbarians.
The dodge most familiar to people living now is what you might call compartmentalization. It seems quite easy to lead a woke, eco-ethical middle class lifestyle while buying products and following social practices that condemn other people to slavery or homelessness or other forms of economic discrimination. We concentrate on well-worn local moral issues and ignore the rest. Many West Indian slavers were upright Christians, fondly remembered on their tombstones.
These dodges are normal human behavior not aberrations.
There are also naturally cruel humans who just revel in causing pain and performing dominance. These are the ones I find hardest to understand.
Yes, I think no one wants to see themselves as a victimizer (and why would they?) and yet as you say compartmentalization is one way to dodge that painful truth . . .
Four films come to mind regarding depictions of slavery in the ancient world. Slavery is what one might call a 'sub-text' in "The Ten Commandments". In the film "The Robe", the Greek Demetrius is a slave of a Roman. And, of course, "Spartacus", in which the gladiators were slaves. Spartacus led a slave revolt, known as the 'Third Servile War' (there were two previous 'servile' wars, which were slave revolts). In "Spartacus", Tony Curtis plays a slave. And he also plays a slave of the Vikings in the film "The Vikings'", who is captured from the coast of England.
Thanks, Larry. I saw that Tony Curtis movie long, long ago and had forgotten the plot. Great to be reminded. I actually had a paragraph or two about the Romans and mentioned Spartacus and his revolt, but then realized I was going on too long. Trimmed them out. What was interesting in my recent research was where the Roman slaves came from, Gaul, the British Isles, Africa, etc.
And I just remembered "Ben-Hur", in which Charlton Heston's character, Ben-Hur, is taken into slavery by the Romans.
Of course. That one, too. A galley slave.