Slavery

Its all in the packaging. We live in enlightened times where slavery is a thing of the past and we look down on societies that still use slavery, but personally I cringe at this complacency and hypocrisy...

Just discovered that the tenant of a house here in Richmond has a house maid from Sri-Lanka. I accepted it that my old boss was importing a house maid from Nepal because he is Punjabi and from a less enlightened culture, but that English people are still doing this seems to fly in the face of our attitude to slavery. My cousin has a gardener and a house cleaner and because menial tasks can be bought cheap (or is that the people who do menial tasks can be bought cheap?)

Now its in the packaging because these people are free. They turn up to work and then after they have executed the free contract, they get pay and are free to live their own life.

But long ago when I first left college I laughed at this. "Free" in so long as you do what you are told by your employer, or otherwise you starve to death, or to avoid death you live on state benefits under the dictates of the state. "Freedom" = joke. The only freedom is when you have more money and capital than you need and can dictate to people who need your money more than you.

To back up our complacency we have a demonic view of slavery. But it is forgotten that slaves (in Rome at least) were given bed and board and had the right to freedom of the city after long service. Slaves didn't need to worry about staying alive as their master guarenteed this: afterall if for no other reason than a loyal slave was hard to replace.

The private sector on the other hand has no interest in the labour force. They get wages dictated by the free market (not by what they need) and out of those wages they have to take responsibility for everything without any security (except in those slightly less backward countries that offer social security).

Now this is not to say that slavery is a good thing, but it is to say that nothing has changed since times of old, only the names, and the rich these days just clutch at different mental props to calm their conscience about basically buying people.

The basic proposition underlying this is the economic point that all wealth begins with slavery, and the basic getting someone to do for you what you don't want to do. Having money gives you time to do what you want to do, at the expense of someone without money. It is disguised by the point that the time of the highly skilled is better spent on skilled tasks than menial, and being skilled their work is worth more. But that is conveniently only looked at half the argument (I wonder why people focus on that half so much ;-). The other point is why should one person have more buying power than another? Do they need more? Or do they want to right to buy other people!

By way of illustration how perverted out thinking has become consider the thought (that I have as well since I come from this culture) that the poor should be grateful for having a job at all. But steady on... the poor already have a job which is feeding themselves it is just that they aren't allowed to do it because all the land has been taken up by mechanised farms. It is not that the poor need a job, they just need access to the productivity of the system and that it 100% wrapped up in the property system not the labour system. So the owners control what the poor can get their hands on so that the poor have to work for the owners. Now why do the owners want this? This is what I have puzzled over in every job I have ever had. Why does this guy want me to work for him? A nice answer is that he was doing the work himself but the orders began to grow and he needed a helping hand (which is the attitude I used to go into work with - basically to help the employer). But gradually I found that employers don't like this attitude - what they seem to want is to be "ordering people to work for them". I don't really understand this psychology yet but it is the sense of 100% control that they crave... which now I write this down is actually implicitly within the concept of "property". It is "my" company and so everything inside it is "mine" also so you don't do what is yours but what is mine, namely what I say, not what you say. Even if what you say is actually helping the boss more than what he says - that is the great test of the nature of this, that bosses will actually shoot themselves in the foot rather than relinquish control (try it if you doubt the analysis here). Even if the boss has hired you to do a job that he can't do himself he still expects you to do what he says even if he knows that he lacks the technical know how to make such a decision. So basically slavery is written forever into the minds of Mankind and it isn't something we can just pretend happens in other countries and times. We are both slaves ourself to someone and at the same time we treat other people as slaves without really thinking about it every day of our lives.