Slavery Never Ended | Poal: Say what you want.

1.4K

•

Slavery was ended through economic advances, not religious ones.

Slavery never ended. It flourishes today, and it is more prevalent than it was ever at any time in history. You experience a form of slavery today with worse terms, relatively, than most of the Hebrews experienced. There was a robust system of law governing the treatment and ownership of 'slaves' in ancient Israel, including limitations to the number of years a person could be enslaved (I believe it was 6). For example, an Israelite farmer with ten children experiences two sequential years of crop failure, putting his whole family at serious risk. He offers one of his children to his neighbor as a slave in exchange for the help to get through the season. That child must be given certain conditions including food and shelter and even education, and the term of slavery is complete in 6 years, or whatever.

Compare that with today, in which to get an education your parents will sell you to the bank with the lowest interest rate to finance your degree. You'll pay the creditor for 30 years. To get a home, you'll take on a mortgage with a life of up to 30 years. Oh, but you CHOOSE these right? You have MARKETS to select among alternatives! Therefore you're free! Even just in terms of taxation alone, most people earning median incomes can expect somewhere around 8 years of their labor to be for the government. 8 YEARS worth of working for income which you will never see - it goes right to the government. That's one-fifth of most people's working lives which is obligatory work for someone else. Hebrew slaves could only be owned for 6 years. So what's left over out of your income will go to the other members of our system of creditors....but there's 26 bagel types and 18 types of coffee at Starbucks and I CHOOSE!

Slavery didn't go anywhere. There are just more highly elaborated levels of slave ownership - the business model diversified and wrapped itself up in linguistic and financial abstraction. Slaves evolved into mobile labor, and they began to be talked about in the terms of humanism, where you have certain basic rights that the enslaver must tip their hat toward in order to prevent uprising. With the industrial revolution, cities form which essentially become local, vertical habitation for manufacturing labor, attracting the people's children to them like the promise of housing/education/food would cause an ancient Israelite to give their child to the opportunities afforded by their neighbor.

Perhaps you think I'm being a bit dramatic, but I'm not. There is so much historically bad thinking about the concept of slavery, and about this troubling word freedom.

I believe the reason most people think there has been some actual categorical movement out of slavery is just because the way humanity relates to the environment itself has changed (reflected in technology). The world was more agricultural for the duration of time we think marks 'pre-abolition'. Rather, more of the population per capita were involved in agricultural activities as simply a matter of course, and so the work of more slaves was bound up with the physically laborious sort we imagine in literary depictions.

The industrial revolution changed all of this, and is largely responsible for the formation of that dichotomy between 'free work' and 'slave work', the latter which continued to go on only in agriculture, whereas we think wages (substituting for the slavermaster's requirement to provide food and housing) are the hallmark of 'free work'. This was particularly salient in the new American economy because now the 'old world' had a brand new baby to watch the pre-Industrial 'barbaric' form of slavery grow up in (what with their reliance on large farming operations in the American south and the Caribbean).

I say that the terms of your slavery are worse today exclusively for the reason that they can be, because the slavemaster's were successful (via dialectical materialism and the intellectual class) at convincing mankind that it [slavery] no longer exists, except in the narrowest definition ("there's a slave trade in Libya!"). The terms of your slavery are worse because nobody believes anymore that they exist - you've inherited the revolution of the American project. Although the work may have been harder (life in general was) a few millennia ago, at least the truth was surface-level, and there could be no obfuscation about the terms of the slave relationship. Today, we live in a virtual reality that is a product of humanist, Enlightenment-era thinking that elevates every man, in his own mind, to a level which precludes them from seeing their slavery. They can pick their coffee and bagels, and share their opinions online.

Law cannot apply where an object or relationship is not regarded as existing.

Think of it like this. Instead of class distinction being eminently clear, as in the slave-owner pair, you let the slaves of society play a game amongst themselves to win their appearance of freedom. The slave-masters are not seen. The slaves see each other, and the 'house niggers' having the highest absolute amount of this concept called 'net worth' (the highest amount of possessions with the least debt) are the freest slaves. This is all fine and dandy until the slave-masters begin to pull down the curtain, where by the 21st century a few generations of America's future are entering their mid-20s with negative net worth and fragmented abilities to build wealth. In fact, part of the realization that is causing these very recent paroxysms in culture is just the dawning realization that slavery never ended.

EDIT: To state the obvious, nobody is arguing that there isn't a form of slavery which we'd call hellish and immoral, and which can be distinguished from the category I am speaking about (which regards the idea of freedom more generally), but the 'evil' of these forms derives mostly from physical violence as opposed to the nature of the relationship itself. Nobody is arguing that coerced slavery (as in being physically kidnapped and forced to work at gunpoint) is strictly equal to modern slavery. The point of the post is that with the Industrial Revolution, slavery (like all other things) evolved, and most significantly so in the way we talk about it.

> Slavery was ended through economic advances, not religious ones. Slavery never ended. It flourishes today, and it is more prevalent than it was ever at any time in history. You experience a form of slavery today with worse terms, relatively, than most of the Hebrews experienced. There was a robust system of law governing the treatment and ownership of 'slaves' in ancient Israel, including limitations to the number of years a person could be enslaved (I believe it was 6). For example, an Israelite farmer with ten children experiences two sequential years of crop failure, putting his whole family at serious risk. He offers one of his children to his neighbor as a slave in exchange for the help to get through the season. That child must be given certain conditions including food and shelter and even education, and the term of slavery is complete in 6 years, or whatever. Compare that with today, in which to get an education your parents will sell you to the bank with the lowest interest rate to finance your degree. You'll pay the creditor for 30 years. To get a home, you'll take on a mortgage with a life of up to 30 years. Oh, but you CHOOSE these right? You have MARKETS to select among alternatives! Therefore you're free! Even just in terms of taxation alone, *most* people earning median incomes can expect somewhere around 8 years of their labor to be for the government. 8 YEARS worth of working for income which you will never see - it goes right to the government. That's one-fifth of most people's working lives which is obligatory work for someone else. Hebrew slaves could only be owned for 6 years. So what's left over out of your income will go to the other members of our system of creditors....but there's 26 bagel types and 18 types of coffee at Starbucks and I CHOOSE! Slavery didn't go anywhere. There are just more highly elaborated levels of slave ownership - the business model diversified and wrapped itself up in linguistic and financial abstraction. Slaves evolved into mobile labor, and they began to be talked about in the terms of *humanism*, where you have certain basic rights that the enslaver must tip their hat toward in order to prevent uprising. With the industrial revolution, cities form which essentially become local, vertical habitation for manufacturing labor, attracting the people's children to them like the promise of housing/education/food would cause an ancient Israelite to give their child to the opportunities afforded by their neighbor. Perhaps you think I'm being a bit dramatic, but I'm not. There is so much historically bad thinking about the concept of slavery, and about this troubling word *freedom*. I believe the reason most people think there has been some actual categorical movement out of slavery is just because the way humanity relates to the environment itself has changed (reflected in technology). The world was more agricultural for the duration of time we think marks 'pre-abolition'. Rather, more of the population per capita were involved in agricultural activities as simply a matter of course, and so the work of more slaves was bound up with the physically laborious sort we imagine in literary depictions. The industrial revolution changed all of this, and is largely responsible for the formation of that dichotomy between 'free work' and 'slave work', the latter which continued to go on only in agriculture, whereas we think wages (substituting for the slavermaster's requirement to provide food and housing) are the hallmark of 'free work'. This was particularly salient in the new American economy because now the 'old world' had a brand new baby to watch the pre-Industrial 'barbaric' form of slavery grow up in (what with their reliance on large farming operations in the American south and the Caribbean). I say that the terms of your slavery are worse today exclusively for the reason that they *can be*, because the slavemaster's were successful (via dialectical materialism and the intellectual class) at convincing mankind that it [slavery] no longer exists, except in the narrowest definition ("there's a slave trade in Libya!"). The terms of your slavery are worse because nobody believes anymore that *they exist* - you've inherited the revolution of the American project. Although the work may have been harder (life in general was) a few millennia ago, at least the truth was surface-level, and there could be no obfuscation about the terms of the slave relationship. Today, we live in a virtual reality that is a product of humanist, Enlightenment-era thinking that elevates every man, in his own mind, to a level which precludes them from seeing their slavery. They can pick their coffee and bagels, and share their opinions online. *Law cannot apply where an object or relationship is not regarded as existing.* Think of it like this. Instead of class distinction being eminently clear, as in the slave-owner pair, you let the slaves of society play a game amongst themselves to win their *appearance* of freedom. The slave-masters are not seen. The slaves see each other, and the 'house niggers' having the highest absolute amount of this concept called 'net worth' (the highest amount of possessions with the least debt) are the freest slaves. This is all fine and dandy until the slave-masters begin to pull down the curtain, where by the 21st century a few generations of America's future are entering their mid-20s with negative net worth and fragmented abilities to build wealth. In fact, part of the realization that is causing these very recent paroxysms in culture is **just the dawning realization that slavery never ended**. EDIT: To state the obvious, nobody is arguing that there isn't a *form* of slavery which we'd call hellish and immoral, and which can be distinguished from the category I am speaking about (which regards the idea of freedom more generally), but the 'evil' of these forms derives mostly from physical violence as opposed to the nature of the relationship itself. Nobody is arguing that coerced slavery (as in being physically kidnapped and forced to work at gunpoint) is strictly equal to modern slavery. The point of the post is that with the Industrial Revolution, slavery (like all other things) evolved, and most significantly so in the way *we talk about it*.

(post is archived)