Some of My Best Friends Are... Slaves!

I have a confession to make... I am a slave. My next door neighbors are slaves, the people across the street, and my best friends are slaves. I have yet to find a “free” person anywhere (and believe me, I have traveled the world). Perhaps the last “free soul” I met was Krishnamurti, but that was forty years ago, and he is no longer with us!

Some of my neighbors are slaves because they have visible chains around their necks, hands, and feet. They’re chained to their mortgages! I can see their desire and their debt weighing them down as they drag themselves to their place of employment every morning. 

While it’s still dark and grey out they clamber into their shiny metal boxes. When they return home in the dark and grey of night, they look glum. Those are the “lucky ones,” of course, the ones who still have “employment” (a rapidly vanishing commodity – at least, in the Western post-industrial world ).

In the distant past, when I was a teenage slave – as I said, I am one of them – you toiled in a factory, in an assembly line, in a processing plant. The conditions of which were barely better than those at the turn of the 20^th Century (except for the eight-hour day). 

Granted, there were some begrudging concessions made along the way to labor unions and “safety” regulations. But on the shop floor you’d breathe in all the carbon monoxide and all the toxins of the “industrial process,” and then, on the short breaks allowed, you ran to the “rec” room to soothe your lungs with more smoke from as many cigarettes as you could possible inhale. Only then did you feel a little better, but only until you returned to your work station (and that wasn’t a fancy cubicle with a big color screen to play Solitaire on and do your shopping online – as it is today!). People I knew lost fingers, sawed off their hands... I was lucky not to be in their shoes!

Who or what a slave is today depends on your definition of the word... More specifically on what movies you’ve seen. We tend to want to see “history” as a novel (History is already a “convenient fable”), as a pageant of dramatic events with no real consequences (on real people). Slavery as practiced in the last 400 years, and especially the last 200 years in the Northern Hemisphere, would make a Roman cringe (and they weren’t afraid of a little blood, mind you, like we are today!).

My biggest dictionary (Webster’s modern college “lexicon”) defines a slave as: “A human being who is owned as property by another and is absolutely subject to his will.” My Random House version states: “A person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant (a person bound to service without wages).”

For expediency, we can probably “agree” on Noah Webster’s definition. Coincidentally, Mr. Webster was an Anti-abolitionist, he may or may not have been a slave owner, but his relative Daniel Webster (the politico and also “Founding Father” of the Thirteen Colonies) certainly was!

Little to quibble about as far as a definition goes. What’s the key word in both definitions? If you said “property” you’d be right! (I love having intelligent readers!). Keep that word in mind as you read on...

Old Habits and Modern Tastes (the Reversal of Values)

Nonetheless our “repugnance” of slavery is a relatively new-found “value” – part of a “reversal of values” that begun to impress itself on the population at large in England around 1783 with the Abolitionist Movement. And, this “reversal” in the values of Western Civilization, from the Greek and Roman ideal, was a meager start (as I mentioned, slavery in 500 B.C. was qualitatively very different than the bondage Blacks endure in the 18^th to 21^st Centuries). As we’ll see, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions...

The Slave Trade Act of 1807 was a milestone, yet it did next to nothing to slow the trade in human beings coming out of Africa. It was simply not enforced (even in 1838 when slavery was outlawed) – it’d slow down profiteering. In fact, the Act was quite useful for the “princes” of slavery – it got them off their buff to seek “new markets” beyond the African/Arab monopoly that covered the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Eventually, by the mid-19^th Century, those “new markets” included China (“coolies” became a prime export, despite laws against it, probably as a direct result of the Qing Dynasty’s (1644-1912) decline following their resounding defeat in the Opium Wars).

Old habits die hard and new tastes take time to catch on... Our habits tend towards the parasitic – towards living off of others. Modern tastes have not repudiated that tendency, but rather increased it – we do less work because we “live off” of others who do – and agriculture is not the only example.

My contention is simple, given historical trends and the materialistic lifestyle of a Globalized world, there’s more slavery today than there has ever been... And, I’m not talking just about the so-called “third world.” As I said, I see the slaves parading before me all day. Lest we forget that in Europe, as opposed to the Colonies, serfdom was well entrenched by the Middle Ages. Slavery then took on the form of “indentured servitude”; i.e., Debt! In the 17th and 18th Centuries, tens of thousands of such slaves (mostly White) were sent to the Colonies to “pay off their debts.”

Human Beings as Chattel

This historical anomaly – property – as something “belonging” to an individual is something striking and very modern. Today, no one questions why property has more “rights” than a human being. We don’t question how a legal fiction like a “Corporation” is legally a “person.” As if by the miracle of spontaneous combustion, inanimate things acquire more legal rights than a human being. Another ugly trend, which tends towards slavery...

But the confluence of property and human beings, as property being more valuable than human beings and in the end interchangeable, is a dastardly “legal fiction.” The pretzel logic that makes a Corporation more important than a single human life is not surprising given our materialist culture and bent of mind. Yet, once a person becomes synonymous with property (especially in law), then we have extended the glorification of egotism and avarice just a tad beyond any proportion – well into ad absurdum really. But I’ll get back to that odd development and quirk of History in my next blog.

This led me to do some thinking... a decidedly dangerous activity (in fact, one could say that it’s so frown upon today that hardly anyone does it any more). The laws that regulate modern society are usually legislated statues (as we call them in America), and these take on a common form (they’re boiler-plates!). Ninety per cent of these statues govern property. The main purpose of these laws is to make it easier for the rich to accumulate property and to protect it.

Therefore, we are indeed living in the “Age of Property,” and if this is so, then we’re also living in the “Age of Slavery” – when human beings are nothing more than chattel in the eyes of the law (what else are people in this materialistic world if not simple automatons?). And we’re not at the end of this cycle, but rather about half way through it... From here on in, humanity will continue to lose value, and that value will be transferred to lifeless objects denominated “property.” Something to look forward to, eh?

The Root of Our Dystopia

According to the United Nations (UN) there are approximately 50 million slaves in the world today (2011 – their numbers must rise so fast each year that they can’t keep up with them!). According to their institutional wisdom this is due to the fact that most of the “slave population” stems from about ten nations which still have slavery “in their books” (it’s legalized). Then the UN tells us that there are 30 million (mostly young girls) involved in “human trafficking” – a legal grey area. What else can these poor girls be but sex slaves? Why don’t they just say so?

Easier said than understood... What can you say about “institutional wisdom”? Thank God I can still do arithmetic. Summing up, I can see that as far back as 2011 there were officially 80 million slaves in the world. This number is probably closer to 100 million in the countries where it’s legalized (the UN is notorious for under counting everything – especially the number of starving human being on this globe!).

In light of the facts, one must ask some inconvenient questions. Slavery is such an insidious thing that it sometimes boggles the mind. It escapes both imagination and our clear understanding of it. What is sinister about it is that the direct “cause” of Slavery is well known – it’s Capitalism stupid!

I may sound like an old-fashion Abolitionist, but with the huge increase in slaves one has to wonder what one can do. Slavery is certainly a huge economic issue – free labor for the few skews the economies of many countries (as it has always done). It’s certainly far more important today to end slavery than it was back in the period between 1780 and 1860!

The number of slaves today far exceeds any historical level – even in the Deep South of pre-Civil War America (the largest plantation on earth at the time) – especially as a percentage of the population. In 1860 there were 31,183,582 Americans of which 3,953,761 were black slaves (12.6% of the population). By 1900 there were 10 million Black slaves in the U.S.! (Yeah, I know that’s quite a few years after the “Emancipation Proclamation,” but that little ditty didn’t free a single slave!). And in spite of “legislation” to the contrary, these men and women were worse off than their forefathers who were legal slaves (“sharecroppers” was the euphemism for slaves even into the 20^th Century!)

The difference today, of course, is that the slave population is much younger than it was then – the work in the sweatshops is done by children and young women. In those countries to which our vaunted and beloved Corporations have flown off to, in order to avoid those pesky “labor laws” and thus continue the 500-year practice, have all “legalized” slavery to accommodate the profitable trade in human beings by multinationals.

How “Free” Are We?

Yet, even such an obvious fact escapes us because we’re not mindful of how things are interrelated. We never think consequences through to their ultimate effects in the real world. We live in a world of intellectual abstractions and we never get to the nub of things. Historically, our alleged “freedom” in the “pursuit of happiness” was nothing short of rapacious consumption (trade from far-flung Colonies supplied exotic goods to markets in Europe and America in great quantities – on the backs of the slaves that made the “Middle Passage”). Therefore, our “freedom” to consume is the direct cause of Slavery.

The problem, ultimately, is that the mere existence of Slavery, and its ongoing spread, proves only one thing: no one has Freedom – either economic or political freedom. If a single Pakistani girl is oppressed, we all are...

Knowing what we know, why are people under the impression that they are “free”? What evidence do they have to support such a wild assertion? The surprising thing is that the people who consider themselves the “most” free, who believe their existence (and even the government they live under) is one of “ultimate freedom,” are the least free... (Small children and Americans come to mind – well, they’re the same thing, aren’t they?).

It only stands to reason that both sets of “individuals” are the folks who have done the least to win any rights or freedoms for themselves, yet are the most vociferous in demanding them. (Temper tantrums aside, it doesn’t mean they may exercise those rights in fact). When they grow up and they find out “Freedom of Speech” (or any other “right”) is as extinct as a dinosaur, maybe they’ll reconsider...

Slaves With Credit Cards Enslaving Others

What is the extent of our “pursuit of happiness"? In the Age of Slavery (in our wanton Consumerism) what is it that we really crave? Ultimately, we only want for “things” to continue as they are – a vain hope, naturally – we want to continue consuming without thinking, without responsibility, without “effects” (at least, those immediate effects which would make us wise to how our actions hurt other people – including ourselves!). Let’s take a mundane example from real life to see how slavery is death to the slave (or, at the very least, ongoing torture!).

When you buy Nike tennis-shoes (or an iPod, or any other Corporate commodity) the fact that you’re perpetuating the slave trade simply doesn’t enter your mind... Slavery is death – people involved in that trade do not survive long (their life expectancy is very short – in 1900 England or America a factory worker or sweatshop worker (again, mostly young women) had a life expectancy of 25 years. By 1925 it was still 25 years. Ending the life of someone in their prime is nothing short of murder (plain and simple). Yet, how many factory owners were ever tried for murder in the 20^th Century?).

What is the life-expectancy of a slave in 2015? No one knows. China and Pakistan, two countries with legalized slavery have high life-expectancy statistics (75 and 67 years, respectively), but their slave populations are estimated to be less than 2% (by the UN). If you believe that, I have a nice red bridge I want to sell you. Damnable lies and statistics are not going to give us the whole story here... Only intuition will.

How exactly were the plantation and then later the factory system any different than a concentration camp in Nazi Germany?

Well, of course, the answer is obvious – the former were Blacks and the later Whites! But beyond that aleatory distinction, there’s no difference.

And if Jews who survived as prisoners in those Nazi camps were compensated by German Corporations for their brief stay, why aren’t Blacks (and poor Whites) not compensated by U.S. Corporations for the concentration camps they maintained – not for the few short years of the Third Reich – but for over 250 years in the North and in the Southern states of the United States?

Oops! Don’t bring reality into it... we’re in denial about Racism in America... We have a “black” president so everything is Kosher now... Millions of black slaves were killed, but we don’t want to deal with the real Holocaust!

The same Oligarchs that benefited from Slavery are still the elites of today... White males still hold all the wealth they stole from the labor of Blacks and they’re still thumbing their nose at Justice...

But back to our plight... for the present, unfortunately, always nudges out the past. When we purchase a Corporate product – especially those consumer products that tend to be “personal” apparel and such, we’re propping up slavery. In other words, we’re paying to maintain a slave trade!

As we already learned, slavery is murder (although it’s worth repeating). And when you buy those $200 Nike shoes it’s as if you just put the barrel of a gun to the temple of a little Pakistani girl (about 8 or 10) and pulled the trigger yourself, in cold blood!

Maybe, under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t shoot a kneeling girl of eight, with half her fingers missing, if the gun were placed in your hands. But since you’re not there, and slaves and their misery is kept from your purview by thousands of miles, then it’s fine... But if the only way you could “get at” those shoes in the mall was by taking a gun in hand, then that’s what you’d be doing – murdering that little girl. And for a lousy pair of tennis shoes that won’t last you a single running season!

In fact, buying one lousy pair you’re actually killing not just one little girl, but all the girls in that “factory.”

Forget that it’s “legal” to purchase slave products, or that the whole consumer culture made possible by Slavery is condoned by the mass media. That anemic excuse isn’t going to save you or I. Instead, I’d be worried about a different set of “laws” – the law of Karma. We’ll all have to pay for those crappy shoes when the time comes... it’s what happens every time we purchase something from slave owners!

It bewilders me how people can be so flippant about such facts of life... unless, of course, they believe those Nike shoes are being manufactured by fairies or Santa’s helpers. They must! How else can they buy them in good conscience? Or do humans lack anything like conscience anymore? Where else do these products come from? They know darn well they come from Pakistan, China, etc. – it’s on the bloody label! Well, we all know where they come from – and who makes them – ignorance is no excuse.

Tit For Tat And There Goes The Quid Pro Quo!

That little Pakistani girl was willing to not only sacrifice her childhood, but her fingers to make that shoe for you. Well I’m willing to sacrifice not buying that Corporate shoe, so she won’t have to lose any more fingers – and none of her fellow slaves need to either – that’s the real quid pro quo!

As far as I’m concerned, if it’s not made by unionized American workers (or their local counterpart, be it European or wherever I live), I’m not interested in purchasing it, thank you!

I may be a slave in fact, but I’m no longer a slave to fashion and I’ve ceased being a logo “worshiper.” I’ve gotten over the worship of Moloch...

While I’m on the Abolitionist soapbox I thought I'd throw this out there too... Folks only have “a priori judgments” about most things, especially anything of an economic (political) nature. And who’s the genius who’ll argue that slavery doesn’t exist – that it’s a figment of my imagination? I’d like to hear from a defender of Slavery as to why it’s a good thing for me to buy products produced by slaves...

And, I’m not speaking of “mental slavery” either, for if I were, then that would reduce the entire human race to the level of bleating sheep – 7 Billion and counting!

40 Acres and a Mule...

Slave stories... I have plenty of them... and songs too. After all, I am a slave. Forty acres and a mule... I’m still waiting...

They tell me I’ve been “emancipated,” that I have “human rights.” I’m told I have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In theory that may be a quaint sentiment. But sentiments are less substantial than feelings, and when compared to hard reality... well, what candle do you want to hold up? As long as my “happiness” resides in and depends on the accumulation of assets, in the acquisition of greater amounts of “property,” I’m pledging my allegiance to Slavery.

We all know how far that goes... and where that path ultimately leads. One has rights as long as one can buy them! Words and abstract theories don’t change anything “on the ground.”

Emancipate Yourself From Mental Slavery...

In this, our dark, Materialistic Age, there are slaves far worse off than I. My neighbors, my friends, they are slaves to more than one master. Can you imagine anything more ornery?

In the old days there was only the Man. Usually represented by the foreman – the big, ugly bully with the whip and the shotgun. Now my friends are slaves to ugly, empty people in Armani suits. They’re slaves to a financial institution and their taxing government (in more ways than one). Additionally, and more directly, they have their employers – O.K. that’s the financial institution that owns the company they work for. And that’s piled on to a list of “bond holders” the size of which is directly proportional to the number of individual pieces of “stuff” they have purchased on their credit cards.

As Garvey and Marley have long told us... “None but ourselves can free our minds.” There is more than physical slavery to keep us in bondage. There’s mental slavery to overcome too.

My friends are kept in bondage by a simple lie... That’s mental slavery! They actually believe they “own” a house – even when in their mortgage contract it explicitly says the opposite. They believe they own the cars they’re paying off. I simply tell them: Be patient, when they downside again, or outsource your chair, you won’t own that stuff anymore. Instead of “owning,” you’ll be “owing.”

No one wants to hear that! I shudder to think we’re in the 21^st Century already and slavery is more rampant than it has ever been. A mounting pile of inconvenient facts always obstructs our delusion, doesn’t it?

Well, there are many lessons to be learned from our earlier historic experience. And, the further back in time we go, the more we learn, for the picture is clearer the farther one goes to the source. A lot can be learned from what Egyptology has always labelled a “Slave State” – Ancient Egypt.

The first thing to glean from their alleged example is that slavery is not all that it’s cracked up to be... except for the 1% (or more accurately today, the 0.001% - the 2,000 families that owns what the 99.999% worked for!). Yeah, I know, there are folks with paper stocks issued by financial institutions (like Goldman Sachs), for which they paid good money, as well as heaps of codes to electronic transactions, who believe they “own” something... After I stop laughing at the suckers, I’ll tell you something even more unbelievable...

What if I were to tell you that there was no such thing as Slavery in Ancient Egypt (as defined by Webster’s and your Funk & Wagnall’s)? What would you say then?

To be continued...