Modern Slavery

This is not a story about the third world. This is not a story about human trafficking. This is a story about 3 billion slaves, including you and me.

We do not see ourselves as slaves, and that is part of what keeps us enslaved. When you think about slavery, you think about whips and chains, about brutality and blood, about oppression and fighting for freedom.

But all of these things, in the global world history of slavery, are tiny dots, small fragments of the whole picture. In the 500 year history of the Roman Empire, there are a dozen slave uprisings. Most people, slave or not, would live and die without a slave rebellion in their lifetime anywhere in the Roman Empire, much less near them.

None of the things I mentioned are defining criteria of slavery. The defining aspect of slavery is lack of freedom. How the slave is treated, if he accepts his fate or fights it, how close or far in style of living, health and rights he is from free people are details and vary by time and place. The defining aspect is that a slave is not free.

Freedom

The term “freedom” is a funny one, and its precise meaning changes throughout history. In simplified terms, there are two broad fields into which it can fall — freedom from something (war, hunger, poverty) and from to something (to free speech, to choose your own career, to move, to act as you wish).

In relation to slavery, the distinction becomes more clear: Slaves are those who are excluded from whatever freedoms the free people enjoy.

This is a useful definition to keep in mind, because the exact way in which slavery was realised differs from time to time and place to place. But the element of exclusion, of seperation between free people and slaves, is always present.

Wage Slaves

Back to you and me. The term “wage slave” is not exactly Proudhon and Marx already compared employment to slavery.

We are closer to ancient slaves than we care to admit. In our illusion of freedom, we can go where we want, do what we want and live how we want with whom we want. And all that is true.

Nevertheless, we enjoy our freedom withing a cage. Money is power in the capitalist world, and unless you are in the famous top 1%, there are fairly strict limits on what you can and cannot do, simply due to lack of funds. The more you are bound into consumer society, the tighter the chains, as mortgage, car leases and other obligations force you to stay within the boundaries.

The strongest similarity to slavery is, as defined above, the exclusion. Working people and the elites live by different rules. Where a regular employee gets fired, a well-connected CEO gets a nice compensation package and a new job at a different company. Some people go to jail, some people donate to a charity and are let go. If you allow for a moment the thought that in ancient Rome about 30% of the population were slaves, but in modern America the number is 99%, the similarities become striking.

Sex Slaves

Again, this is not about human trafficking. That kind of sex slavery also exists, but what I want to point out is how many women (mostly) end up in prostitution for reasons of poverty. This does not have to be starvation-level poverty. When Germany introduced fees for public universities, some comments were along the lines of older politicians looking towards increasing the number of young, educated prostitutes. And indeed, student prostitution has become a thing.

Slave Rebellions

We even have equivalents of the slave uprisings of ancient Rome. In South America, to this day left-wing organisations are brutally oppressed. In the USA, the Ludlow Massacre was only a hundred years ago. In Germany, before the rise of the Nazis, left- and right-wing extremists had bloody fights in the streets.

Today, left-wing political parties are regularily undermined politically and through secret services. They are commonly investigated, and anywhere outside Europe, being a union activist is still a dangerous activity.

Manumission

Slavery was not a stable system thanks to brutal crushings of slave rebellions. Just like capitalism today, slavery was stable because it was an accepted social system, questioned only by few.

It was also stable because slaves believed in it, and because manumission existed. That is the Latin term for setting a slave free. The hope of freedom, the chance to become a free man (and ironically in some documented cases, slave-owners by themselves) kept many slaves obedient. Hope is a dangerous thing.

In the same way, our modern system has this carrot. We are fed stories about people rising from nothing to rich or even super-rich. Some by luck (lottery winners), some by fame (artists, movie stars) and some by business (startup founders). We rarely do the math on how high our own chances are to be one of them, especially given that when we read their stories, we are usually already older than they were when they started. That is not to say the carrot is not real — but its function is much more to keep all of us docile than to rise some of us out of slavery.

Conclusion

In Rome, everyone who had a little bit of money could afford a slave or two. That mostly meant people who owned means of production — artisans, land-owners and such.

Today, the concentration of capital has increased so much that 62 people own half the worlds wealth. The means of production are in the hands of very few, and they are the new slave-owners. We are the new slaves. And like in ancient Rome, the system only rarely needs to enforce itself through brutality. Usually, psychology and sheer acceptance suffice.

Free your mind first, understand where your chains are.