5 ms·

Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1] Before I was convinced that slavery wa

Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1] Before I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past, how awful to find out this isn't true. 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6515858-slave-girl https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6515858-slave-girl

PeterStuer 8mo ago
Why would a criminal organization that trafficked you into a place where you have no legal recourse ever stop exploiting you?
- cucumber3732842 8mo ago
  Same reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability, etc. Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it. I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.
  - mapt 8mo ago
    Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more productive in the long run - that's part of the economists founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own, ceter paribus. Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.
    - alpinisme 8mo ago
      These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil. Is the argument that it would have come back if it were really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition? I’m not trying to directly engage the question whether slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
      - estearum 8mo ago
        And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either. It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically, religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.
        graemep 8mo ago
        A similar pattern in the UK, bar the war. There was use of military force to suppress the slave trade but not actual war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
      - cucumber3732842 8mo ago
        >These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil. These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating. If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves). This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice. >Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition? That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot). >It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history. It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited. Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.
throw_m239339 8mo ago
Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.
- segmondy 8mo ago
  children? how about adults? After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya. https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-slave-market-in-libya https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-sl...
  - throw_m239339 8mo ago
    I'm well aware of Libya and its open air black slave markets, don't worry, an absolute disgrace what happened in Libya, and we could talk about Syria too and how The Yasidi were enslaved by Daesh...
- a_better_world 8mo ago
  Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of our adult population is "under correctional control." Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20nearly%20two%20million%20people,U.S.%20economy%20(Bronars%202024). https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...
  - tinfoilhatter 8mo ago
    I'm against for-profit prisons, but equating people who commit crimes and end up in prison and are forced to work as part of their sentence, to people who have committed no crimes is a bit ridiculous.
catigula 8mo ago
The West has largely snuffed the horror of slavery in its sphere but outside of that it's the wild west. There are horrifying things to read if you go down that rabbit hole.
cobri 8mo ago
According to International Justice Mission [1], 50 million people are trapped in human trafficking. 1: https://www.ijm.org/ https://www.ijm.org/
- anothereng 8mo ago
  and most of them are in muslim countries.
  - tinfoilhatter 8mo ago
    Source for this? This just reads as blatant xenophobia...
    - tweetle_beetle 8mo ago
      Looked this up out of curiosity and came across a non-profit which produces reports on the topic and seems to be the basis for the Wikipedia article on modern slavery. According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, 7-8 of the top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence of modern slavery have a majority religion of Islam (Mauritania has disputed figures about religious prevalence with Christianity and Islam at similar levels). And none of the countries in the top 10 lowest prevalence have a majority religion of Islam. Prevalence here is used to mean estimated number of people in slavery per 1000 population. However, the absolute figures for total people affected are proportional to the size of the country, as you would expect, with North Korea and Russia topping the list. And if you look at driving factors, the US is the leading importer of products at risk of being produced by slavery by an order of magnitude. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/ https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/
    - wileydragonfly 8mo ago
      Are you unfamiliar with the tenets?
stronglikedan 8mo ago
> I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past Unfortunately, it's the opposite. There's more people in enslaved situations now than ever before in all of human history.

PeterStuer 8mo ago

Why would a criminal organization that trafficked you into a place where you have no legal recourse ever stop exploiting you?

cucumber3732842 8mo ago
Same reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability, etc. Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it. I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.
- mapt 8mo ago
  Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more productive in the long run - that's part of the economists founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own, ceter paribus. Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.
  - alpinisme 8mo ago
    These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil. Is the argument that it would have come back if it were really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition? I’m not trying to directly engage the question whether slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
    - estearum 8mo ago
      And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either. It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically, religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.
      - graemep 8mo ago
        A similar pattern in the UK, bar the war. There was use of military force to suppress the slave trade but not actual war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
    - cucumber3732842 8mo ago
      >These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil. These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating. If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves). This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice. >Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition? That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot). >It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history. It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited. Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.

throw_m239339 8mo ago

Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.

segmondy 8mo ago
children? how about adults? After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya. https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-slave-market-in-libya https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-sl...
- throw_m239339 8mo ago
  I'm well aware of Libya and its open air black slave markets, don't worry, an absolute disgrace what happened in Libya, and we could talk about Syria too and how The Yasidi were enslaved by Daesh...
a_better_world 8mo ago
Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of our adult population is "under correctional control." Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20nearly%20two%20million%20people,U.S.%20economy%20(Bronars%202024). https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...
- tinfoilhatter 8mo ago
  I'm against for-profit prisons, but equating people who commit crimes and end up in prison and are forced to work as part of their sentence, to people who have committed no crimes is a bit ridiculous.

catigula 8mo ago

The West has largely snuffed the horror of slavery in its sphere but outside of that it's the wild west. There are horrifying things to read if you go down that rabbit hole.

cobri 8mo ago

According to International Justice Mission [1], 50 million people are trapped in human trafficking. 1: https://www.ijm.org/ https://www.ijm.org/

anothereng 8mo ago
and most of them are in muslim countries.
- tinfoilhatter 8mo ago
  Source for this? This just reads as blatant xenophobia...
  - tweetle_beetle 8mo ago
    Looked this up out of curiosity and came across a non-profit which produces reports on the topic and seems to be the basis for the Wikipedia article on modern slavery. According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, 7-8 of the top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence of modern slavery have a majority religion of Islam (Mauritania has disputed figures about religious prevalence with Christianity and Islam at similar levels). And none of the countries in the top 10 lowest prevalence have a majority religion of Islam. Prevalence here is used to mean estimated number of people in slavery per 1000 population. However, the absolute figures for total people affected are proportional to the size of the country, as you would expect, with North Korea and Russia topping the list. And if you look at driving factors, the US is the leading importer of products at risk of being produced by slavery by an order of magnitude. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/ https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/
  - wileydragonfly 8mo ago
    Are you unfamiliar with the tenets?

stronglikedan 8mo ago

> I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past Unfortunately, it's the opposite. There's more people in enslaved situations now than ever before in all of human history.