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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Slavery, in general, is mostly useful for low-skill labor-intensive industries. The amount of rote, menial labor needed or wanted in society has been on a downward trend for centuries.

Slavery could have held on a little longer, but there’s a reason that even in the Islamic world where slavery is regarded with a wink and a nod you have to go pretty deep third world to find lots of slaves doing things that aren’t sex work. One bulldozer with a trained operator is more efficient than literal dozens of slaves with shovels.

Weird how sweatshops, prison labor, and human trafficking are still things then.

Imprisonment in the US costs 10s of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year ($133k/year in California). Making them stamp license plates cannot be enough to make economic sense. I'm pretty sure it is a large net loss. But then it would be a bit larger of a net loss without the forced labor.

As I understand it, a lot of prison labor is in agriculture and food production.

Yeah but... that's with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.

Ask yourself. If there were no rules. You could own a slave. Human chattel. Do whatever you want. Do you really not think you could make money from that?

Yes, the default niche for non-third world slavery in the 21st century, like actual slavery, is sex work. There's a few other niches where it hangs on, but they're niches. There's a few unfree domestic servants and a small number of unfree people working in sweatshops, but by and large the hondurans making sub-minimum wage in a meatpacking plant in a company town in deep rural areas chose to be there and could easily leave and get another shitty job if they want, and most of the indonesian children making sneakers are there because their parents want them their and not because their bosses force them to be. Yes these people face unfair labor practices, but it's not slavery- they choose to put up with it. Even the Bangladeshis in Qatar building world cup stadiums aren't really slaves; they're paid labor which gets a shitty deal by first world standards.

Prison labor is probably the largest category of unfree labor in the modern, even semideveloped world, and it doesn't make any economic sense, it just gives prisoners something to do other than fight each other and try to smuggle in drugs, and lets the rest of us feel better about making them be productive. Most heavy labor slavery is deep third world because machines just make more sense for the kinds of tasks that slaves can do.

I thought there was still some agricultural slavery for labor-intensive crops in areas with very low HDI. Cocoa a fairly major example, I believe. I do agree that for most factory jobs that 'slavery' is an exaggeration, and people just don't understand how shit subsistence agriculture is as an existence to compete against making phones and sneakers

Yes, in deep third world countries there’s slavery in agriculture and mining. Cocoa in west Africa, for example, uses slaves(disproportionately children). The Congo has slaves in its mines. But the kind of labor slavery which needs huge slave strata is, well, a feature of very low HDI deep third world countries. Notably Central America, an impoverished region which produces very similar cash crops to west Africa and likewise features high corruption levels and limited government control, doesn’t have much agricultural slavery.

I don't know a ton of specifics around Cocoa but my understanding was that it was particularly resistant to automation which is why there hasn't really been any agribusiness trying to tackle it.

This sounds a lot like like having a powerful well cultivated and devoted ally, but instead he sucks at things, and resents you, and will probably betray you if he sees the chance.

Listen... do you want to own a slave? There are a lot of subs out there that would be willing. Just find one that's ok with being cultivated and fin-dommed.

Yes. there are "still rules" but you'll find that you can get them agree to ignore the bad rules, and that the good rules are good for your relationship and their cultivation anyway.

If you find that there is a job you want them to do that they don't want to do- this is a strong sign that you are using an inefficient tool for the job anyway. Their cognitive misalignment with your will is a legitimate efficiency loss.

Probably not as much as you think. Remember that this slave is going to need basically constant supervision and will never work harder than the bare minimum. What are you going to do, fire him?

Yes, you could, but the question is "how much?" You need to spend your money on satisfying the basic physiological needs of your slave, on preventing them from escaping, on forcing them to work.

And this work has to somehow be both simple, so your slave can't screw it up and force you to spend even more of your money, and lucrative, so the whole operation makes sense economically.

And the whole operation has to scale.

Human trafficking is mostly aiming at sexual slavery, prison labor is horrendously economically inefficient and mostly exists because you have to do something with them rather than for the output, and sweatshops are mostly employing free people who can quit their job and go get a different, equally shitty one.

Oh ok cool. Thanks for clearing that up. I mean, you didn't really make any logical argument or cite any sources but you're here on the internet so I'm sure you're a trusted authority figure. I trust you. All those southerners selling slaves at high prices were just idiots I guess. There's just no use for a free labor source, might as well just kill them all.

On another note, do you have any advice on where I can hire a good gardener? I've been paying a Mexican guy, but I feel weird paying a guy who's obviously here illegally. I'd like to hire an American, but the going rate is way too high and there's just no way I can afford that.

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You have not given any sources at all either.

And which part of their argument was illogical?

And "slavery is our competed by not enslaved people for legitimate labour" does not mean that slaves are worthless. For start, some people are into torture and rape.

You can disagree politely, or you can be a snide, sarcastic jerk. You chose the latter. Don't do that.

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