Saturday, November 30, 2013

The evolution of slavery

Here's a statement from this post:

"A friend in Mexico wrote me an email recently about McDonalds taking advantage of the young by paying them minimum wage there. I asked, is anyone else there willing to employ them for more or would they be completely jobless and more broke without that job?"

I just saw 12 Years a Slave. Combined with the above statement I'm reminded of this post quoting David Loy:

"One might argue…that there are good corporations….The same argument can be made for slavery, there were some good slave owners…. This does not refute the fact that slavery was intolerable…. And it is just as intolerable that today....transnational corporations are defective economic institutions due to the basic way they are structured."


Same argument used by slave and capital owners. Why, we give them work, clothing, shelter. What do they have to complain about? It's just the capital owners, due to progressive laws that forbids actually slavery, have 'evolved' the concept into wage slavery, keeping workers impoverished and in need to buy the very cheap products their slave labor produces. Meanwhile the factory workers overseas get even less, in unsafe working conditions because they don't have such laws there, and when they die in fires it's like "that ain't our responsibility." Yes, perhaps without those jobs, like without actual slavery, those folks might be worse off. So that's a valid reason to enslave them, literally or with poverty wages? Take this shit job or die? Great humanitarian sentiment.

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