6 ms·

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

cucumber3732842 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jltsiren 9mo ago
    Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt. In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.
    - cucumber3732842 9mo ago
      >Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout. Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back. >Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.
      - graemep 9mo ago
        Serfdom was a huge improvement. Serfs could not be taken away from their homes and families. They could own things. They had far more rights.
    - master_crab 9mo ago
      Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt. This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
  - xhkkffbf 9mo ago
    The Quakers in New England in the 1800s were known for (1) being abolitionists and (2) whalers. They often bragged about employing freed and escaped slaves on their ships. It all sounds great when viewed through a narrow lens, but the whale boats had a system of paying the crew when they returned successfully. No whales, no pay. Yes, the Quakers would risk the cost of the ship and the supplies, but they didn't pay for the labor until the end ... and then only when the workers actually succeeded. The plantations had to capitalize the cost of the slaves upfront, a significant cost that often required large loans. Before the Civil War, places like New Orleans were big banking centers.
    - cucumber3732842 9mo ago
      The late 1700s early 1800s British Army and Navy also drove a "famously hard" bargain when it came to the working situation of the former slaves they employed.

cucumber3732842 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- jltsiren 9mo ago
  Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt. In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.
  - cucumber3732842 9mo ago
    >Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout. Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back. >Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.
    - graemep 9mo ago
      Serfdom was a huge improvement. Serfs could not be taken away from their homes and families. They could own things. They had far more rights.
  - master_crab 9mo ago
    Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt. This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
- xhkkffbf 9mo ago
  The Quakers in New England in the 1800s were known for (1) being abolitionists and (2) whalers. They often bragged about employing freed and escaped slaves on their ships. It all sounds great when viewed through a narrow lens, but the whale boats had a system of paying the crew when they returned successfully. No whales, no pay. Yes, the Quakers would risk the cost of the ship and the supplies, but they didn't pay for the labor until the end ... and then only when the workers actually succeeded. The plantations had to capitalize the cost of the slaves upfront, a significant cost that often required large loans. Before the Civil War, places like New Orleans were big banking centers.
  - cucumber3732842 9mo ago
    The late 1700s early 1800s British Army and Navy also drove a "famously hard" bargain when it came to the working situation of the former slaves they employed.