>That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
That's also how you get slaves fred, labour laws passed, and so on. Most revolutions started on public squares (and public cafes, and such). And further progress was created by open dialogue, in books and other discourse spaces. Which people thinking like the above wanted to stiffle.
And, no, the "public square" wasn't what brought slavery for example.
It was more the discussion in the "polite"/"good" upper echelons of society, for their own benefit. The same people who run and profited from that racket. And the same, good, rich and aspiration class people who wrote diatribes against gays, or intented scientific racism, eugenics, and other such novelties.
In other words, by the same kind of classes who today dictate what the unwashed masses should talk about and what not, now.
> I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally.
I always cringe when people talk about sweatshops being a thing of the past.
Being held captive and working for $0.23/hour [0] may not be literal slavery, but it's at best a rounding error away[1]. And that's exactly the state of many prisons in the US, or factories and field work in many other parts of the world.
We haven't really ended labor inequality; we've just exported it, and we continue to benefit from the dirt-cheap costs of exploitative labor on a daily basis[2].
[1] Remember that prisoners are usually expected to pay for their own costs-of-living while incarcerated, such as toiletries, and that the prices for these are set by a monopoly seller for the prison.
>There are very few if any societies that abandoned (chattel) slavery and later re-instituted it.
There are quite a few, which goes to show that it's not some whig one-way historical progress. Heck, the European world had abandoned slavery for a millenium and the then re-introduced it en masse in the colonies and in the New World.
But the actual reason societies don't often re-institute something like slavery faster is not some moral advancement, but because other things make more economic sense. You can't sell consumer goods to a society of slaves, nor they make for good workers in more advanced jobs. If those economic conditions change, here comes slavery again.
>It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern.
It's diabolical. The ruling class, who benefitted the most from slavery, have figured out how to use it to keep people from uniting against them. According to them, it was white people who enslaved black people, not rich people who enslaved poor people, and we should all be upset the former and never think about the latter.
> Following pg's example, let us consider the following classic debate topic: "is slavery good?" A plantation owner might find themselves tickled by a lively discussion on the subject, replete with a cornucopia of Enlightenment principles and classical liberalism and such.
Historically, the Southern states (which were politically dominated by slaveholders) outlawed all abolitionist literature because they feared that free discussion of ideas would undermine the system.
> It is perhaps telling that slavery was not abolished through free inquiry or the discussion of ideas.
90% of the work was done through free inquiry and discourse, ranging from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the publishing of books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The attempts to solve the problem violently (e.g. John Brown at Harper’s Ferry) failed.
It was only when the slave states refused to accept the outcome of a free election and started the civil war that violence became necessary.
> The debate is over, and the actual free-thinkers have moved on.
You’ve cherry-picked a specific example that fits that narrative.
> Various aspects of slavery and human trafficking, for all intents and purposes, never entirely disappeared when you think about it. Society abstracted some of these things away in free markets through labor and monetary exchanges for labor.
Anecdote time, slightly related ! Be me, in wealthy western Europe. Walking a Sunday trail, hundreds of people. Taking a break on the side of the trail, looking at a community garden and reading the plaque about which vegetables is being grown, by who: local public "help" centres (read: a public social support program, state-funded, it's a pillar of our society, to help people find jobs and get back on track). The plaque reads that when vegetables are ripe people are free to pick it up (just don't take everything). Was having a nice chat with a random lady up to that point, most likely a bit leftist, nice, then she drops that line "Well, it's free, it's fine, after all it's all being paid for with our money".
On the way back I kept thinking about that and came to the conclusion that slavery could easily come back in less than half a generation. And I am not talking about how work is structured or how our society regulates work and employment and how it's an abstraction. We are always half a generation away from losing our social advancements (English correct wording escapes me at the moment).
Edit: for once I caught the comments before losing the ability to edit so I'll reply here.
> I can't help but to think some meaning was lost in what you are intending to say. What is "it" that the woman was talking about? Is "it" picking the a ripe vegetable from the garden, like the sign says you can?
It's that "it". But the most important thing is in the second part "it's being paid for with our money". The goal of that community garden is not really to feed anyone but to get some people back on track through a regular schedule, group activity and supervised work. Social services are not supposed to produce vegetables or anything that anyone should pay for, a bit like the US prisons that have become free/cheap labor. It's hijacking the original goal. From this I could easily picture a world where people without jobs are forced to get through that system and become free workers tasked to grow vegetables or clean the streets (and it's something that happened in the Netherlands: a public worker whose job was cleaning the street lost his job then got through a back-to-work program in which he was tasked with the same job but for no salary (he was paid - much less - through social support).
> Is "it" the government paying folks to plant and tend the garden for the benefit of the public?
That's how it was framed in her mind but that's not the reason why there are free vegetables there at that place and time.
She's not supposed to get vegetables for free because it's paid with her taxes, she gets them for free because those vegetables are not grown to be sold or make a profit.
> I don't understand this anecdote. What was objectionable about what the woman said (if anything). I'm a leftist and I think its important to recognize that value does not come from nothing, but is the result, one way or another, of labor, which is all she seems to be acknowledging.
She normalized having people working without a salary and not being fairly compensated (or being compensated by whatever price the market set). Plus, people working that garden somehow don't have a choice in choosing that job (growing up vegetables) because it wasn't a job, it was part of a reinsertion program. The fact she pays taxes to finance such programs shouldn't mean we get free labor. That's where she crossed into indentured work.
I'd like to add something else: there are community gardens a few blocks away from where I live. But there's a waiting list to get on it, it's real garden but more for hobbyists and retired people. It's all financed by city taxes through a "green/food/health" kind of program.
But the gates to the garden are closed and the fences are high and fact is it can only be used by retired people who lobbied to get some parcels in the first place.
> So you’re saying there doesn’t exist (and never did) racism nor misogyny, never antisemitism, but it was always a plot of the few powerful?
Nope. In Ancient Greece, basically all non-slaves benefited from slavery, and ultimately they didn't do anything about it. Within their culture, they had the right to do bad things (slavery) to those they defeated in war; their society was structured such that it required slaves, and most not-enslaved people were okay with that… or, at least, few objected enough to try to put a stop to it.
The “oh, but they're actually inferior, and naturally deserve this” arguments came later.
I'm making specific claims, not the general ones you think I am. In Ancient Greece, it was merely the powerful, not the powerful elite, who upheld slavery – even though the word had negative connotations in Plato's time. In England, it was the upper classes that imposed restrictions on voting, and the lower classes who made themselves a massive nuisance until those got progressively relaxed… but it was also a rebellious noble who introduced the House of Commons (for largely self-serving reasons) in the first place. In America, it was mostly slaveholders who argued that slavery was good actually. (I don't know much about US history, though, and you can easily cast doubt on this assertion by showing me a slavery apologist who wasn't a slaver.)
> The ethics of women voting, slavery, and the Holocaust were argued on the same biological basis,
Eventually, yes. But this particular excuse was just one in a long, long line of excuses. It's rare for one group to oppress another on ideological grounds when they aren't getting something else out of it; the “ideological grounds” are a mere farce.
Somewhere around the 1350s (± 20 years; I haven't looked into it recently, and I'm no good with dates), the House of Commons became responsible for deciding taxation, a right the barons claimed for themselves in 1215 with the Magna Carta. The justification for this was three-fold; in order for a tax to be just, it must:
• be demonstrated, by the king (the one who imposed taxes), to be necessary;
• be to the benefit of the community; and
• be approved by the community.
This is, fundamentally, the justification for democracy. This is the logic that says all taxpayers should have the right to vote.
Why, then, was the right to vote restricted to forty-shilling freeholders (landowners with at least 40 shillings' annual rent) in 1430? Well, “elections had been crowded by persons of low estate“, of course. (Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales: The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832-1885, page 11: https://archive.org/details/electoralreformi00seymuoft/page/...)
> For example, if rights were invented by the government, there would be nothing about slavery that was wrong.
Slavery (or it's near equivalent: peasantry) was not considered unnatural for the vast majority of human history, really up until modern era. As horrible as it was, it was also the basis of many feudal economies the world over, and it probably powered societies through the dawn of agriculture, so at least 10k years. Prior to that, hunter gatherer groups also raised other groups and took slaves.
Industrialization had more to do with slavery's eventual decline than any idea that it was unnatural.
This is reflected in the areas where it ended earlier due to earlier industrialization (England, the Northern States of the US) vs where it ended later due to a persistent preindustrial agrarian society (Russia and the American South).
What is inherent in humans is the capacity for empathy and the ability to mentalize about another human's experience. That can lead to a belief that slavery is wrong, but that belief is in battle with the desire to exploit other humans for your own gain.
> different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself.
But this is exactly what I'm disagreeing with: there was widespread and popular opposition to slavery from its invention. To act like "everyone was doing it, everyone thought it was ok" is absolutely just not true.
The people in favour of slavery were largely the wealthy, powerful minority who benefited from slavery.
> The many anti-slavery individuals of the past still largely did nothing for hundreds of years until popular opinion and material conditions changed tides.
This is such a strange statement. "anti-slavery individuals did nothing"? Who do you think achieved abolition?! You seem to think that abolition was some passive force which happened as a result of "changing tides": I, on the other hand, seem to remember that there was a war fought about it (in the US at least).
Furthermore, slavery didn't begin and end in the united states: abolition was achieved in many other places before it go to the US, in fact the US was something of a holdout for slavery in the west.
There were countless slave rebellions, some quite successful, and political action absolutely achieved progress towards abolition in many places around the world.
> But in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the anti-cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making his point clearer.
The "anti-cancel-culture" crowd, by my estimation, makes up the vast majority of positions of power in the US. For god's sake the president routinely decries cancel culture and a large part of his appeal is the fact that he's "un-PC".
> He could have made the same point regarding conformity by citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to
The Stanford prison experiment was a complete fabrication and research fraud. (honestly: you should look up modern information on it. I had kind of thought it was common knowledge that it was bunk, but I suppose it did have a large cultural impact)
> I'd be willing to bet a dollar that there are personality psychology studies that even correlate 5-factor personality traits to moral conformity.
I don't know, but my point is that Graham has clearly picked superficial personality traits that flatter him by associating his idea of himself with his idea of abolitionists. Regardless of whether the idea of "personality types" is valid or not, it's clear that what Graham is doing here isn't.
> Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much of the opinion that there are no underlying personality traits that predict future behavior nowadays.
Again, I would completely disagree.
I don't know what the psychological consensus is, but from laypeople it seems clear that "personality traits are important" is an extremely mainstream view.
> Many slaves were captured and famous intellectuals (Aesop is a famous example) or educated and used as tutors, they were not as modernists assume to be universally ill treated and abused.
> Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life.
No, they did it because they viewed "others" as less than human, or less deserving of dignity and respect, no different than a beast of burden. Slavery predates capitalism by millennia, so viewing others this way clearly doesn't share a causative relationship with capitalism. To contend that capitalism caused slavery is absurd. It's the only economic system in history that resulted in the enduring abolition of slavery. Modern, alternative economic systems still devolve into utilizing slavery to this very day.
You should read Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and The Wealth of Nations, which, in great detail, illustrate the economic inefficiency and moral repugnance of slavery in what we now call capitalism. Slavery was definitely not capitalistic, using your definition, purely from a profit motive perspective. It was horrible at maximizing profits.
The economic philosophy of private property, the quintessential foundation of capitalism, is on the basis that everyone has a right to individual liberty and autonomy (again, Adam Smith).
You should also read George Fitzhugh, the most prominent representative of anti abolitionist plantation owners. He was a staunch anti-capitalist specifically because the moral framework it is built on humanized black people and this sentiment was a primary driver in the abolitionist movement. Capitalists and abolitionists were extremely closely associated during the abolitionist movement.
>Maximizing rights and freedoms on the macro scale means limiting some people's edge freedoms on the micro scale.
No it doesn't. It means preventing others from stepping on universal freedoms of others, which is exactly the philosophical foundations of private property. This is categorically different than limiting freedoms. Preserving individual freedoms doesn't mean limiting them for some selectively.
<quote>In some ways we're moving to something worse than slavery. At least with slaves they were seen as "assets" rather than "temporary rentals". They had to take care of them out of necessity, so their evil had that limit on it.</quote>
Some of us prefer burnout at reasonable pay than being raped, beaten, and denied all freedoms.
> but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create.
Obvious to whom? Definitely not the slave owners. A motivated free person might create more wealth for themselves, but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners.
So why would it sort it self out? It didn't, and hasn't. This change could only have come politically, which is why that was the case.
> Despite all this scholarly work, each generation—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Robin Blackburn, from Eric Williams to Walter Johnson—seems condemned to have to prove the obvious anew: Slavery created the modern world, and the modern world’s divisions (both abstract and concrete) are the product of slavery. Slavery is both the thing that can’t be transcended but also what can never be remembered. That Catch-22—can’t forget, can’t remember—is the motor contradiction of public discourse, from exalted discussions of American Exceptionalism to the everyday idiocy found on cable, in its coverage, for example, of Baltimore and Ferguson.
The sins of our fathers... Just because racism and violence still exist today does not mean we're all ignorant of the sins our ancestors committed and should abolish an economic system that tangentially benefitted. And this is not a modern phenomenon, as he seems to imply. This country was one of the first to abolish slavery. What occurred in this country's brief history pales in comparison to the brutality that came before it.
Slavery is institutionalized theft, organized crime. It is the opposite of free trade and capitalism. Sure, self-proclaimed "capitalists" owned slaves, but that shouldn't impugn the whole system. Please tell me, what other economic system has lifted billions out of poverty?
Chattel slavery underlines the point. What is and isn’t property is decided, arbitrarily, by people. Because property is a social construct.
What is and isn’t someone’s body does not depend on others accepting it has meaning. How it’s treated does. But my body has inherent value to me independent of others’ perceptions of it. This is, at its core, the problem with slavery.
If we reject property being a social construct we reject the fact that the government, a social construct itself, could have legalised and then outlawed slavery. Because if property is inherently meaningful, how can the government poof it away?
> Back in the days of slaves, someone would have argued how slavery isn't that bad because there were more worse things in their past and how slavery was an improvement in the lives of those slaves compared to what they would have had in their home country.
Its not that uncommon an argument to encounter today on the Right.
That's also how you get slaves fred, labour laws passed, and so on. Most revolutions started on public squares (and public cafes, and such). And further progress was created by open dialogue, in books and other discourse spaces. Which people thinking like the above wanted to stiffle.
And, no, the "public square" wasn't what brought slavery for example.
It was more the discussion in the "polite"/"good" upper echelons of society, for their own benefit. The same people who run and profited from that racket. And the same, good, rich and aspiration class people who wrote diatribes against gays, or intented scientific racism, eugenics, and other such novelties.
In other words, by the same kind of classes who today dictate what the unwashed masses should talk about and what not, now.
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