Modern Slavery

Cliff Cobb

[Reprinted from Quicksilver (the publication of the Henry George School of Social Science,
San Francisco, California, Spring, 2000]

When Henry George wrote Progress & Poverty in 1879, he devoted an entire chapter to the relationship between monopolistic patterns of land ownership and chattel slavery. He was writing to an audience for which the battle over slavery was still a fresh memory.

He argued that the denial of land-rights was simply another form of bondage. Anyone who is dependent on another human being for survival because he or she does not have access to a lair share of socially created value is a de facto slave. It would be more accurate to call this condition quasi-slavery, since control is neither total nor imposed by law. This form of slavery is hard to perceive in American society because it is indirect rather than overt in fact wage slavery has come to seem so normal to us that we regard ourselves lucky if someone will place us in short-term bondage by giving us a job. The idea of genuine economic freedom is so far from our experience that most of us cannot even Imagine it.

In much of the rest of the world, the level of economic domination is more total than anything most of us are used to. This situation often crosses the line from quasi-slavery to genuine bondage.

Although formal legal slavery has been outlawed throughout the world, it is still informally sanctioned in many places. According to Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, a recent book by Kevin Bales, slavery is far more common even in Europe and the U.S. than is commonly recognized. There are thousands of imported children and teens working as household slaves in Paris, London, New York, Zurich, and Los Angeles. There are industrial slaves in Pakistan, agricultural slaves in the Caribbean, and sex slaves in Thailand. Bales estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in the world by his relatively strict definition of slavery: "the total control [through violence] of one person by another for the purpose of economic exploitation." Bales therefore believes there are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade." that is a conservative estimate. Others have proposed that there are as many as 200 million slaves in the world today.

Bales offers a simple explanation for slavery, in contrast to the racially-based slavery of the 19th century (which still exists in Mauritania), humans now control other humans on the basis of "weakness, gullibility, and deprivation." Those who are enslaved are invariably those without other economic choices. In some cases, this means that individuals set themselves or a family member into contract slavery. In other cases, a person may borrow from a landowner and fall into slavery by not being able to repay the ban. In fact, debt slavery remains the most common form of bondage. Finally, there are those who are denied the means of subsistence on any land and are easily lured into prostitution or into work settings from which there is no exit. For them the "choice" is between starvation and slavery.

A major difference between chattel slavery of the 19th century and the new form is that slaves no longer represent a large investment. They are cheap. Slaves may be purchased for as little as $25 or $50 in some countries. As a result, when modern slaves get sick or lose their usefulness, they are often just executed so that another can replace them. Prostitutes are often kicked out of a brothel to die alone when they are tested positive for HIV.

Now that slavery is no longer based on a formal relationship in which some people have legal title over others, trying to stop the practice through formal, legal means is pointless. This amounts to bailing water rather than looking for the leak.

In the long run, only policies that provide the means of earning a livelihood to all people will bring about an end to slavery. Socialists thought they had found the solution in public ownership arid "cooperative" enterprises. But even if their intentions were good, the result was a gulag that stretched from Eastern Europe to Indochina. There are still millions of state-owned slaves in China. White one might say that was not "true" socialism, even small communes have failed to provide positive examples of the equality and cooperative spirit that socialism was supposed to bring about. "True" socialism as a practical matter is just domination by another name.

The genuine alternative to socialism is not the system we ordinarily call socialism, but an entirely new social order -- a geocracy. It would be based on private ownership of all land, combined with public collection of the value generated from it. This would spell the end to poverty by forcing (through the market) the owners of large tracts of idle urban or agricultural land to turn those parcels over to other people who would use them productively. There is more than enough honest work for everyone on earth to do, but that is masked by an economic system that denies large numbers of people a chance to make use of the resources that are hoarded by a few.

We should be troubled. We have not come as far from the days of slavery as our proud self-image would have us believe. Read Kevin Bates book if you have any doubt about that. But read Progress & Poverty if you want to understand the true remedy.

POSTSCRIPT

For those who want to follow up on this issue, you might read an article by Charles Jacobs, research director, American Anfi-Slavery Group, on the Internet at www.progress.org/archrve/slave01.htm. Information about the AASG can be found at www.anti-slavery.org.