Slavery Part 3 - or is it development?

After months of sweating on this, I'm going to put a post up, mostly because I said I would, and it's stopping me from writing other things. But I don't think it is the whole picture and I don't necessarily think it is correct either. There is more terrain to cover.

After this I promise I will give slavery a rest...
...for a while.

Ready? Got your hiking boots, thinking cap, and a thermos of hot tea?
Let's go.

There are three main moral perspectives on slavery in literature, philosophy and politics.

Either: 

1) Slavery as a social structure is morally justified. 

Standard reasons include:

a) There is a natural human hierarchy where some are leaders and others followers, and down the continuum the of followers are the slaves. This structure is usually defined by those in power in order to keep the status-quo.
b) Slaves are specifically defective individuals from a weak genetic line. It is the moral responsibility of the (evidently superior) slave owner to prevent them from starving to death in abject poverty.
c) Slaves somehow deserve their fate, whether from being a bad person (convicted criminals used in road crews or handling heavy metals); or from evil in a previous life (hello to some 1 billion Hindus and 400 million Buddhists); or because it's just God's will that they should suffer (hi to 2 billion Muslims and up to another billion fundamentalist & sectarian Christians).

This moral argument is a dead end: a self-referential moral system that states"I'm the boss because I am better" - where 'better' is the construction of those who hold power. This has been the dominant position for the largest slabs of recorded human history. In fact, the core of the whole social structure is dominance & submission. The dominant enforce submission, to the extreme. There is no argument, no dissent - unless you wish to challenge the dominant population and thus steal their dominance - and their slaves. This is what got Abraham Lincoln into such hot water.  Morally... neurochemico-morally... slavery structures are built into the core of individuals and groups who operate in this dominance & submission mode, and they cannot conceive otherwise.

Or

2) Slavery is inherently wrong.  

If you read the BBC's helpfully extracted sections of the Declaration of Human Rights (1948), it tells you what is right. Slavery is not.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" (Article 1) and that "no one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms" (Article 4).

This argument is morally sound but pragmatically impossible, at least in the current world. The closest we have come is in long-contaminated indigeonous populations, to whom slavery simply would not have occurred. I believe Polynesians didn't go in for slavery very much. Nor did Innuit. It's a little harder to find internationally connected populations who didn't at least tolerate slavery or its continuum of appallingly-indebted-servitude. A belligerent population of Louisiana circa 1900 held it together for a while in solidarity against slavery. Scandinavia in the late 20th century also gave it a shot. And there are many others - often short-lived (less than a century) and engaged in a war (literal or trade) with slave-running neighbours.
The modern frustration with this argument is that it skates close to communism, which is still a bit on the nose after the Cold War

3) Slavery is not really morally justified on a case-by-case basis, but the overarching structure of human societal hierarchy more or less requires slavery. 

To eliminate it is
a) too hard;
b) would would result in the destruction of particular valuable industries (hi to the world's 50 most powerful corporations),
c) threaten the core structure of civil society and result in anarchy and chaos (hi to anyone I've forgotten in India or China); or
d) jeopardise the personal fortunes of the very wealthy and powerful in any particular environment who hold the status quo intact. (hi to anyone in power)

This is not a moral position, but a pragmatic one. Stick your fingers in your ears and say "Lalalalaaaaa" and maybe the problem of child shoemakers in Cambodia will go away.

Or - think about it for six months and then subject your blog readers to the first chapter of a thesis - like this!

Each of these views assume that there are degrees of freedom to human actions, which may not be there due to a particular type of framing.

I am particularly interested in the idea of distasteful but pragmatic slavery. 

In my last post, I skimmed over how slavery has had - and continues to have - untold economic and technological benefits over the last 500 years. It has been core to trade and development. Many brilliant economists have also noticed this. I will only touch on the work of two. Then I promise I will get to the point.

Economist 1: Michael Spence: Five Steps from Slavery to Corpulence

Michael Spence won the 2001 Nobel prize for economics for his theory about globalisation and manufacturing. One part of his proposal was that a nation's production profile identifies its place in a nice clear sequence of 'economic development'. In other words, the stuff a country makes can tell you its progress on the path from the Dark Ages to the Cyber Age. Here's a summary - assuming the absence of war and corrupt totalitarian regimes, of course.

1. Remote rural subsistence populations live in the most abject poverty of all. If for some reason, cholera and malaria start to recede and children start surviving, these areas become more and more populous.
2. Manual-labour-intensive global manufacturing companies set up factories (or opaquely-owned subsidiaries with factories) in places where people live in overpopulated abject poverty. People work in sweatshops for 18 hours a day, making shoes and soccer balls and clothes. Children are preferred workers because they do fine hand-work. This triggers the companies to build shipping and transport infrastructure, to get the goods out of the production zone.
3. Bit by bit, along with infrastructure growth, the production systems get more sophisticated. Light industry develops: toy manufacturing and plastics extrusion. Automotive manufacturing moves in at this stage. More jobs are available; prosperity increases; a local demand for some goods arises (people can finally buy themselves shoes!). Workers might unionise a bit. The garment companies are gradually pushed out.
4. Some time later, as local demand starts to gain momentum, and visitors start coming, the physical environment gets cleaned up. Sewerage and stormwater systems are built. Chidren can stop working and go to school instead. Service industries flourish (restaurants, nail parlours, tourism) and retail becomes a substantial segment of the economy.
5. Later again, technology and finance picks up. Bit by bit, all manual manufacturing gets pushed out. The area becomes a net consumer. We call it "Developed" or "First World". People get fat and aspire to be investment bankers.
    

 

 

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Spence's argument says that Europe and America accomplished this progression during the 400 years of Triangular Trade. Post WW2, Asian nations are being watched for how they develop. Nations which started early with garment manufacture (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan) progressed to cars within 30 years, and after another 20 years are now technological and financial powerhouses. Vietnam started later. Now it is losing its garment industry but is established a tourist destination and a car manufacturing centre. Bangladesh, which was a warring mess until about the 1980's, now has a strong garment industry. Both are developing on a much faster timeline. They are 'converging' on the established Asian centres.

(I have to mention China but it doesn't really fit. It is a multispeed and non-transparent complex entity in its own right, with both cyber-age and dark-age sections present in a single city at any given time. Even so, there seems to be convergence: there are very poor communities progressing through the steps above faster than their 1990s predecessors did.)

Now that Vietnam is progressing towards labour laws, it's the Bangladeshi garment workers who live like slaves. When they eventually start to buy shoes and possibly unionise, presumably more sweatshops will move to Turkmenistan, Nepal, or any of the more politically stable and less corrupt nations in the bottom third of this list.

Here's the rub.

This story requires that the rejected industries go somewhere else to abuse human beings. 

(One perspective is that it's an improvement for poor people in the rural subsistence or immediately-post-violent-totalitarian-regime locations where these labour-intensive industrues go. A sweatshop job is a good one. The pay reliably prevents starvation. 
Sitting on my couch in my comfortable modern house, I am not in a position to comment.)

Economist 2: Piles of Money Just Want to Get Bigger

Earlier this year, a French economist called Thomas Pikkety published a book which has had the political-economic world shaking in its boots a little. He apparently started out looking for data from the 20th century to empirically support either communism or capitalist democracy - and found neither. What he found is that capital (ie a pile of money) would normally just accumulate (i.e. the rich just get richer, and the gap between rich and poor just gets bigger and bigger) unless disrupted by an external force. The two forces he found are arbitrary redistribution (e.g. World War 2) or rampant and largely chaotic economic growth, in which Old Money can fall, and New Money can grow to a noticeable size (e.g. 1975 - 2008). After thousands of pages, Pikkety very gently almost-proposes that the most fair, equitable, humane, reasonable thing to put into policy, for the sake of the 5 billion really poor people on this earth, is to globally, unilaterally, and very heavily, tax the outrageous wealth of the 2 to 20 million very rich and redistribute it to everyone else.

I have not read the book yet.

I have read some reviews of the book. It really peeved the hard-line capitalist folk at the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian has social welfare tendancies and liked it much more. Everyone says it is well written, and packed with analysis of lots of data before it starts discussing any theory or personal  ideology.

I - like probably every other curious and loosely political person in the English and French speaking worlds - am planning to read it sometime in order to be up-to-date. It has the same transformative vibe Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book.

Pikkerty's book was good timing for the quality of socio-political discussion, which had been deteriorating. He proposes that our close-held or much-reviled political ideologies are, and always has been, profoundly empirically wrong (in the style of "Hey, cutting off your earlobe might prevent insomnia").

What if something else is actually behind the emergence and persistence of global slavery?

Earlier in this post, you may have noticed the following fragments dropped and left behind. I will pick them up, and put this out there without any cross-references, and say my thought. (Someone else may have said this but I haven't found them.)

I propose that slavery is not an action, it's not a choice, it's not a degree of freedom for anyone participating. Slavery is a symptom of a flawed framing system.

 Slavery is an emergent property of the complex global socioeconomic systems which pre-eminate property, capital and power. 
Where you have 

• standard dominance-and-submission modes of human relationships, and 
• financial wealth is key to being dominant, 

then slavery or de-facto slavery will eventually emerge.

Earlier I said:

• "The core of the whole social structure [surrounding, permitting and proliferating slavery] is dominance & submission."
• "This argument [that slavery is fundamentally wrong] is morally sound but pragmatically impossible"
• "[Spence places slavery in]....a nice clear sequence of 'economic development'"
• "[Pikkety's model] really peeved the hard-line capitalist folk..." 

My last post proposed that income inequality is broadly equivalent to slavery, and that we (ie anyone who has time and resources to read this blog) are benefiting from the fruits of that long-distance slavery.
I pored over this and looked for examples and counter-examples at any scale. I picked one of each here. My referencing is weak again. Sorry.


Since the 1970s, anthropology has been describing some leftover indigenous cultures globally which have quite different framings for property and capital.

• An anthropologist-adventure writer went on an adventure horseride among Mongolian tribes, and described in detail the rules around property, and these rules keep propertly 'loose' rather than 'tight'. I wish i could find the name of the book but I can't.
• When you meet a stranger or a neighbour and they give you a gift, you need to return an equivalent gift, because being in debt to anyone is too heavy a burden to carry.
• If a stranger asks you for something that you have, you give it, because they would not ask if they didn't need it. Likewise if you see that somebody needs something (especially food, water, shelter, healthcare for them or their animals), you give freely without being asked. 
• There is no word for thankyou. If it was a trade, both sides are happy and nobody is in debt. If it was a gift, next winter you may be the one needing help.
• There's not much point in large amounts of property anyway, because the Mongolian tribespeople are almost all nomadic.
• One who takes too much - ie needs too much help - is feeble-minded and a bit pathetic. Townspeople, landowners, and people who cannot move because they have too much stuff, are more like plants than people.
• Anthropologists and Aboriginal elders have been trying to explain their framing of property and time for many decades. I love reading this stuff too. (Hey, I love reading most stuff.)
• People belong to land, not vice-versa. 
• Personal property is not a useful construct. If you need something, you take it and carry it until you don't need it, then you put it down. No point carrying extra weight when moving a nomadic camp.
• Tribal territory is marked by water catchment, and authority is shared between tribes the benefit of the land, not the convenience of the human beings. The waterway is the core of the land, not the boundary. Much to my delight,Victoria's contemporary waterway management is returning to this framework.
• Objects hold impermanent value. When people are hungry, food is extremely valuable, and trade habits reflect this
• Time is not necessarily chronological, but based around episodes, stories, and patterns of things which happened in what we think of as the past and may or may not be repeated in what we think of as the present. (l did tell you that you'd need hiking boots and a thermos and a thermos of tea!).
  In language, chronology is a bit silly because the story is the story. If you are living a story (eg. angry childhood, or excessive generosity to neighbours, or adultery, or war) then you know how it is going to end. Might not be you, might be your kin. Everyone knows the story. Dreamtime isn't ancient legends, or the equivalent of Christian parables, or fairytales, it's a roadmap through the present. And stories of greediness or running slaves do not normally have a good ending.

While English-speaking "society" seems very homogeneous when moral philosophers, marketers or talkback radio participants start talking, there is enormous diversity between human beings and between families of human beings. Family lines hold patterns about framing and human behaviour, and I've been fascinated with them for a little while. I can't reference this except what is already in the public domain because this is some reasonably distasteful stuff about actual human beings.

• At the small scale, there are some families where being rich is very important: part of their framing, part of their meaning. Within the family, wealth is your measure of success, and your place in the hierarchy.
  Surprisingly often in these families, there is one family member or branch which never 'made it', and sometimes that family member ends up on the slavery continuum, serving the others. She (because it's most often a wife or a daughter) might bring food around to the elderly parents-in-law every day, and she will be relentlessly criticized and humiliated every time. She may be made to do the cleaning where the paid cleaner failed, she may be a childcarer, she will almost certainly burn energy running errands. She may be physically abused, and will certainly be verbally and emotionally abused. The family keeps it all secret - except when, for example, the court case goes public, or a golf caddy dies  or a victim speaks out These families also employ paid workers: maids, nannies, drivers etc. The rich and dominant do not normally abuse their employees in anything like the same way.
  The slave's only way out is to become rich in her own right. This is rare. If she does get to be rich, she will dominate and abuse the next generation's 'failure'.
  Poor and middle-class families with dominance-and-submission frameworks of relationship may also hide a slave. They also do horrible things. These do not always make it to the papers.
  This problem is not found in families where relationships are based on frameworks other than dominance. (They have other patterns of problems.)

So, smartypants, what's the way out? How can we re-frame slavery out of the world?

 Here's my plan. I don't know if it will work. I don't think many people will follow me except those who are already doing this.

1) Don't pre-eminate wealth or property.
Find some other construct which is more important than wealth or property. Examples include:

• Aesthetics and refinement (art, design, music, food, sculpture, the breeding of koi or the discussion of lost time in six epic volumes.) Such people and families rarely go in for full-scale slavery.
• Honour and pride -> risky because pride is quite close to superiority, which is dominance's half-sibling.
• Duty, responsibility, your sacred task to another vulnerable entity.
• Virtue and goodness -> also risky, also close to superiority. Might need to temper virtue with modestly.
• A specific multi-generational task, such as holding onto ethnicity or religious identity. If belonging and being 'who you are' is a lot of effort, wealth can be important but this task is pre-eminent.  (hi to busy religions such as Mormons, observant Jews, anyone who's done a Hajj, and eco-warriors protecting forests and oceans and such. Good plan, by the way.)
• Something random, like dragging giant statues across an island to look out over the water. (I have been wanting to use Carl's experiment in a blog post for ages! This is my excuse!)

2) Don't get sucked into dominance and submission. Don't obsess with promotions. Don't go into competition with the Joneses next door. Don't strut past the homeless guy, feeling too important to look down at him. Spot the feelings of superiority and inferiority creeping into your brain, and step on them them with the hiking boots that you're probably still wearing.

You can take the boots off now, by the way. I'm done. Got nuthin' else. My writing-about-slavery tank is empty.

As I said at the start, I don't necessarily think I'm correct and I know this is not the whole picture. I hope it was a little food for thought, though.