I'm not an expert on slavery so I'm willing to be dissuaded, but it seems to me that 'leftism' must recognise the use of slavery as a lower form of development than the use of free labour. The latter is better incentived, better educated and more flexible. It, combined with industrial methods can - and to my understanding did - outcompete archaic forms of organization in the 19th century. Enterprises using such forms therefore needed to modernise or die.
I haven't seen it, but I'm aware of it. Please don't try to misrepresent me as having said anything about post-slavery racial policies or their outworkings in the prison system - that is another one in the "bad but different" category that you appear to have trouble with.
Seems slavery by definition is the epitome of "free labour" rather than something in juxtaposition to it. Yes, you have to feed and house slaves, but someone with enough capital can accomplish that with less outlay than any "free" person's wage. Almost by definition, the surplus value one can extract from a slave is far greater than that one can extract from a "free" worker. It would make far more sense to adapt slavery to industrialization than to suppose that industrialization would somehow mandate an end to slavery.
I would say several things: 1. It actually did happen numerous places where people have been and remain slaves in all but name. Colonialism and its remnants has left various people exploited throughout the globe. 2. There are enough people who either because of the realization of the devastation of the Civil War or the spread of Enlightenment philosophy frown significantly on open slavery that people have been relatively chill about allowing open slavery's spread. 3. There are enough people who will willingly adopt the yokes of capitalism and the relative freedom and prosperity they afford without question that enforcing a widespread system of open slavery is not necessary.
There are functional slaves throughout the world making our crap for cheap right now. If you were bused in and can't leave due to your authoritarian government you might not be exactly equal to chattel slavery, but you are damn close. And why did it not continue unabated in the South? Because the slave owners fucked up. Then they spent the next 150 years trying to find new ways to implement that system for their own profits. The moral repugnance that many feel toward slavery is not the same thing as saying that slavery is inherently inefficient. And we've seen some powerful ideologies put into place specifically for that effort, from religious control to racism.
Fair enough, I might need to read some more on this. It's not central to my point in this thread. And the north kicking the shit out of the slave owners was the right thing to do regardless.
Yeah, but all bad things are still bad, and oftentimes the people rushing to remind us that not all bad things are the same are mainly doing so in order to imply that their bad thing isn't bad. Does it? Or is this one of those hipster gatekeeping "I dislike this bad thing on a much deeper level than you do" things? Thing is, I don't care about Putin's monetary policy, or whether it's the Bible or a brain tumour or greed or nationalism that led him to invade Ukraine. What matters to me is that Putin's forces are waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Ukraine that so far hasn't reached genocidal levels mostly due to their own incompetence. And since most Western Nazis seem to be on Putin's side in this conflict, I'm perfectly comfortable saying that Putin is acting like a goddamn Nazi and doing Nazi shit, even if some of the people he's doing it to also happen to be Nazis themselves. (Technically at this point the Ukrainian Nazis probably have to be downgraded to power status, unless they're committing atrocities against innocent people that I haven't heard about yet.) Sometimes, sure. But at the same time, a lot of that "debate" is put forward in bad faith and only exists to muddy the waters on behalf of one side, and I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing those bad actors out. Federal Farmer isn't Captain Kirk and I'm not some alien supercomputer, I'm not letting him overload my brain with nonsense so I shut down or become unable to focus on what's actually important.
Chattel slavery is what eventually happened in “the new world”. That’s when “slave” went from “free worker” to “I own your ass and can do what the fuck I want”. That is not the same thing as what most of the world thinks of as slavery. Both bad. But one is way worse than the other. Anyone arguing differently should take the advice often given to FF and that is - read a fucking book!
Chattel slavery has been recorded back to the first Dynasties of Egypt and the Old Testament which gave specific religious instructions on who could be enslaved and why. Each culture has had different concepts of what the word 'slave' entails, and many had various words for the different forms of forced servitude and labor. In pre-Columbus Americas there is plenty of evidence that slaves were often killed as sacrifices, both in Meso-America (Aztecs, Mexica, Mayans among others) and even among the Iroquois. Same thing in Dahomey in Africa. Even Imperial China, when they buried the slaves of Emperors with their master upon his death. So the concept that I can do whatever I want to my slaves depends entirely on the specific culture and the fact is that we know it predates Antebellum America. What's unique about that system was it's scale, the fact that it was almost impossible to end family based slavery (though other systems did that too), and it was skin color based. Originally Christians believed you couldn't keep Christians as slaves, so once they started converting their slaves that should have ended the practice. That interferred with their profits in the new world so it was changed to be based on 'race.' But even that isn't particularly novel - ethnicity had long been a key factor in distinction in slave codes. Ethnic Han in China had a higher status that others in the Qin and Tang dynasties. Roman citizens had a higher legal standing than the barbarians, and while they could be debt slaves they weren't chattel slaves based on birth. But even then they sent scores of thousands of slaves of both kinds into the gladiator pits, and those men clearly did not have a right to life. Antiquity is far more brutal than the modern age, and while we should be cognizant of the atrocities of the various slave systems in the Americas I think we overstate how uniquely bad it was. Compared to slavery in the rest of the world in the 18th and 19th century? Sure, it was worse, and should be noted as so. Compared to much that came before? Not so much. You blow the dust off any of these ancient works and you can see how horrific the practice has always been, and that it appears to be common throughout most known societies.
It mostly has to do with 14th Douche’s simplistic view of the world and I apparently we both like Dostoevsky.
Transphobia isn't indoctrination though, it's....some other process...probably has "freedom" mashed in there somewhere.
by whom? I mean, I've still made my own way/living a hell of a lot more than any of the self proclaimed libertarians around here...
It's one of those "no middle ground" things, as much ass UA hates that. "Can't I be a LITTLE transphobic? ". No. And no, UA, that doesn't mean you're going to be held down and forced to fuck a transwoman at box-cutter point. You strawman building pig-animal.
Yes. I put cameras in all your houses, and dream scanners in your pillows, and I only gave leftforge the passwords.
