Concept and Perception of Slavery

What sort of slavery are we talking about?

There's chattel slavery, the sort of slavery we saw in the Americans under European rule and in the United States. But there are also milder versions of the institution which date back long before the roots of capitalism were set in place.



Chattel slavery has always been, to my knowledge, the result of economic opportunity. I wouldn't say capitalism directly, instead I would sight the economic reliance on cheap labor as the driving force behind chattel slavery.

If anything, liberalism has helped undercut slavery. Enlightenment ideals played an important role in emancipation in the US, for example.



Slavery is without doubt not an American phenomenon, if you are referring to the country the United States. Even chattel slavery is not particularly America; more African slaves were taken to Brazil than anywhere else during the Atlantic slave trade. More went to the Caribbean than the 13 colonies.

And slavery doesn't seem to be an ideological issue, either. Again, the practice is ancient, many thousands of years old, and has a variety of faces. In some places, slavery was punishment for certain crimes and for debt, having nothing to do with race.

Just thinking out loud here:

I suppose any society that places economic gain before all other things is potentially "OK" with slavery.

In the case of a despotic system, of couse the society's wishes would have little impact on the issue of slavery....until it reached some critical mass and a revolution broke out.

Absolutely. Where money making is the bottom line all manners of abuse and cruelty are seen as proper, justified and even necessary.

I think you should crack a history book here. Slavery is NOT an american phenomenon, and has been practiced for millennia, long before what we now call "capitalism" came into existence. It has been implemented by humans universally (within all types of economic and political frameworks), and it is still around even today in some places.

I read somewhere that it is estimated that there are more slaves now than in any other time in history...just as another interesting fact, Cornwall where i live in the 18c coastal villages where uninhabited because of the fear of barbary pirates invading and taking the locals as slaves...

Slaves, I think everyone should have one, then, no matter how stupid and incompetent your are, you always have someone you can look down on. I suppose one of the reasons slavery lasted as long as it did in the southern states is this very therapeutic side of slavery, still these white s--t heads display the confederate flag and pronounce the south will raise again, well, no Hank jurior, it won't-------------lol!!

I beleive we are confusing 'slavery' with 'bad luck'. If the man who was born without the ability or the fortune to buy a lavish house is a slave, then am I a slave because I got stuck in traffic this morning and, by the time I got to Dunkin Doughnuts, couldn't get my favorite pastry?

Contractual freedom gentlemen...:sarcastic:

Yes...I love hearing things like "we are all slaves to corporate america!", or "we are the slaves of the elite in this evil system of capitalism!" (not saying that it was said like that here, but you hear it all the time). This type of use of the word "slave" if anything just trivializes the horror of real slavery. Also, nobody forces you to live in evil capitalist society or to buy the products of corporate america. You can still move to Canada if it's so bad, and live in a hut in the forest in total freedom!

Even moving to Canada will not remove you from reliance on corporations. The term "corporate slavery" does not reduce the horrors of the institution of slavery in the Americas. That has it's own history. Corporate slavery, the absolute reliance on corporations for nearly all goods and services by the vast majority of the population, is quite real. Maybe it's a good thing to have corporations maintain such immense influence upon our lives. Personally, I think it's terrible, but you might not and that is a fine debate. But the debate about whether or not the developed world relies upon corporations, well, that is no apparition.

No one is forcing you to rely upon the products of corporations...enough said.

Exactly right Pangloss,
The fact that it is inconvenient, and it certainly is, for a person to live without consuming the products of corperations, does not mean that that person is a slave to those corperations. If ever the police are involved in forcing a person tp purcase said goods, that is anothe rmatter; then we are slaves. Until then, we are doing what we choose to do, freely.

The corporations have power and influence because we, as consumers, give it to them with our "vote" of purchasing what they produce. Sure, they do get legal benefits, and the government is engaged in certain policies which promote corporate monopoly power (like the special capital gains tax). But ultimately, we consumers give them the power.

There is not a corporation in existence that gained power by forcing people to buy their products...they looked at consumer desire and created products that they knew people already needed or wanted, and then they fully convinced us with marketing. The illusion is real, but we all have the power to buy-in or opt-out.

I'm a slave to the rhythm....who can deny it..

Just because we want to do what we are doing does not mean that we are free to do otherwise.

The police need not be involved if no other option exists but to go without. Unless you are lucky enough to be reasonably wealthy, you are bound to utilize corporations whether you want to do so or not. And chance are that the accumulation of said wealth required the use of corporations.




To a large extent, I agree. The responsibility is on the consumer to stand up against the corporations, but let's not ignore the immense difficulty of throwing them off. That "vote" results in a mass election - dissenters are forced into the pen. As the ancients pointed out, democracy is not always freedom.



And fully convinced us with the marketing. Think about this for a moment. Billions of dollars each year are spent on marketing to children; if they are young enough to ask, the child is being marketed to. Corporations intentionally condition consumers to want, and need, their goods and services. Environment can restrict freedom, after all.

And no, we do not all have the power to opt-out. Some of us, yes, but not all of us. I imagine you are capable of thinking this one through on your own. Even if you believe that the vast majority of us have this option, you know better than to say that all of us have this option at this very moment.

Of course corporations convince people with marketing-- just like any good salesman, they tell us why we need their product, and they sell it to us. But that doesn't mean we have to buy it. Convinced is not the same as coerced. You can condition consumers all you want, and every corporation attempts to do so, but you will only be successful if the consumers collectively decide that they like, want, and maybe need your product, for whatever reason. Big corporations got to where they are because of this consumer satisfaction. Other potential big-corporations-to-be, or past corporations, went out of business, not for lack of attempting to condition consumers, but for their failure to address the real wants of the consumer (or to continue addressing them). A current example of this is the decline in US auto company power...they have been failing to read consumer desire as accurately as the asian companies.

You can argue this all day long, but corporate power does not exist due to some corporate slavemaster role. It is there because the desire for whatever they are selling is the slavemaster of the person who buys their goods. People are addicted to drugs as they are addicted to corporate goods. This does not mean that drugs are the master in some master - slave relationship. A drug, like a corporation, simply exists in our society because it satisfies the desires of the people. If people decided "we don't like drugs", or "we don't like corporate brands", they would no longer exist. The corporation does not will itself into power. It gains power by exploiting the desires which have already been created by the members of a society--the marketing convinces you that their product is the best on the market to help you satisfy this desire. It does not create the desire, and further, the desire is not something a thinking person cannot combat.

Maybe you are one of those people who would support a lawsuit against McDonalds because its patrons, by the fault of McDonalds' products, damaged their health by eating Mcdonalds' food? Do you think network "news" is really just glorified entertainment news because these corporations have some bad plan to give TV watchers entertainment instead of real news? Or is it because they know that we would much rather be entertained by a couple of partisan hacks ripping each other's throats out, than by understanding real current events? People can think for themselves you know...most people just don't want to!



No, I don't. If you truly wanted to avoid giving any support whatsoever to corporations, you could do it. No one is stopping you from buying a small patch of land out west and hunting and gathering for your food, without corporate interest. Some people do this; we usually call them hobos or mountain men, until they go nuts and turn into "una bombers" (Ted Kazinsky lived this way of life for years). Corporations make it cheaper and easier for you to get the things that you want. They are not good or bad, they just exist because we want them to exist. Any corporate CEO or marketing exec. would have been taught the same in business school, and they would have spent a lot of time determining the interests of consumers before launching a new product or business. Consumers make or break the business.

So you would like to be free to do what you don't want to do? I prefer to be free to do what I want to do...I guess I'm strange.

Generally, I think you are confusing the market, or other people, for corperations. Unless you plan to only use things that you can make yourself, which, as you said, most people cannot do, there is no way to avoid being dependent on some person who has what you want. It matters little whether its a large corperations or a mom-and-pop grocery. According to you, anyone who buys some item is a slave to the entity that sold him that item. Personally, I think you just have a healthy distaste for modern consumer society, which I agree is pretty ugly. That does not make us all slaves though, not in any meaningful sense of the word. Moreover, until there is a total monopoly of some good, which is only possible in a free market if that monopoly's brand of good is almost universally preferred, there is always a choice. A company has no responsibility to act as you like, nor do you have any responsibility to buy their products.

i am tired of people blaming coorporations for everything, i am not a conservative, far from it, but a coorporation is not by definition evil, and they do not want you to be mindless zombie slaves. take Wal Mart for example, as one of the few companies that would stand a chance of imposing a monoculture or a completely controllable populace, would it be in Wal Marts best interest? No! coorporations are a direct result of capitalism, but by keeping competition low, they can maintain stability while still keeping prices low enough that the consumer benefits. so when you blame american coorporations for the destruction of our culture, you are blaming the wrong person, and you need to turn that blame to the nearest mirror

I just wish Wal Mart would fix the wheels on their carts. I tire of that constant thump-thump... I really do.

So we see "coporations" as a form of slavery? This is a awfully broad interpretation, I must say. There is not only choice to avoid them, but also the very loose association that patronizing them somehow equates to degradation, pain or loss of will.

I see this connection, but I find it far too spurious to concur.

What I am missing so far within the context of this thread is an agreed upon definition of slavery.
It seems to me that the answer to all other questions about slavery depends on a clear defintion. I'd say if we stretch it far enough, we are all slaves.