tl;dr I am racist for saying slavery still exists—that when ICE deports undocumented workers to their deaths for not having their papers in order, that is a form of slavery.
Long post coming up. Only read if you’re interested, obviously.
So I have this friend. He’s a very unique guy. He’s a boomer, but I often forget that he’s a boomer. He’s a politician who’s won a bunch of local elections, but I’ve known him for about three years, now, and he’s never complained about my Marxist politics. Still, he seems to believe in bringing all kinds of people together to accomplish political goals, and he doesn’t really care what their politics are. If he can get conservatives to work with him on an environmental issue, for instance, he’ll go for it. But I’ve never seen him punch left, ever. He’s a Democrat, but he’s critical of the Democrats, to the point of talking about leaving the party.
Anyway, he invited me to a zoom meeting of some local activists yesterday. (If anyone remembers, I’m the guy who was bragging a month or two about starting a small local leftist group—we’re still around and still talking, but we haven’t done any cool shit.) I strongly suspected that the meeting was going to be lib shit, and I told him so, but he still told me to come, so I did. There were six other people there, including my friend. Two of them were millennial women in the coast guard. They were in uniform at the meeting. One of them was black, the other was white. Three others were white boomer women. There were a bunch of red flags, here, but I told myself I had only come to listen and not cause trouble. I also told myself that there are historical instances of the military radicalizing.
They started talking about their plans to subject the local police to racial bias training. They were planning to spend $11,000 to bring people in from halfway across the country to basically tell the cops to stop murdering black people. (My words, here, not theirs.) The cops would not be forced to attend, of course. The two women in the coast guard described themselves as federal law enforcement officers. I was ready to just leave, at this point, but then my friend asked me to tell everyone my thoughts on the matter.
And so I told them. I was elected just over a year ago to a small government committee that has some budgetary oversight over the sheriff, which means that I shudder sometimes have to meet with that guy. He told me, a year ago, that he had turned over two inmates at the county jail to ICE because they couldn’t make bail and didn’t have their papers in order. What had then happened to them he couldn’t say. This horrifying event has governed my opinion on the matter ever since. (I became an ACAB guy before George Floyd thanks to this as well as the subreddit.) (I am also the only person on that committee who always votes down the sheriff’s budget proposals.)
I didn’t say “abolish the police,” even though that’s what I believe. I told this group that the problem is that different countries exist, that some people don’t have their papers in order and are in danger of being deported to countries that have been destroyed by the CIA, that workers today are enslaved, but that they experience a different form of slavery.
I was nervous telling them this because I honestly didn’t want to get told off by a black woman. But she didn’t complain at all! She even seemed on the verge of tears when I told them the story about the sheriff. It was one of the boomer white women who told me that I couldn’t talk that way, that it was hurtful to refer to describe modern working conditions as slavery. And I was like—okay, it’s not exactly the same as the antebellum south, but it’s still pretty fucking bad. People have no control over their lives. Millions of Americans are getting thrown out of their homes. And these two people were deported by the local cops. How is that not slavery?
I also somehow brought in colonialism, European serfs being driven off their communal land to become workers, as well as the witch hunts, the Age of Discovery, and the enslavement of Africa, all of which began at around the same time, five hundred years ago.
I’m a white dude, so at some point this boomer woman somehow implied that I can’t talk about slavery because I’m not black. I was like, I’m half-Jewish and part Irish, so there’s plenty of slavery in my background. (Older Jews always talk about how “we built the pyramids,” even though there’s no record of Jews being involved in their construction or even existing at the time at all, but race is a social construct and all humans are genetically very closely related, so there must be some slaves of some kind in my background somewhere.)
If she had pushed me on the matter, I would have said that Britain had enslaved Ireland, particularly with reference to the famines of the 19th century which took place there, and that I think a lot of Irish people would back me up on this matter—but she didn’t push it. Irish indentured servants were also only one step above black slaves in America and only began to be considered “white” when some of them started becoming cops, at least according to David Roediger.
But I didn’t get to that. At this point, what do they do? They just moved on like I hadn’t said a word. They began talking about the senate runoff in Georgia. Neither of the coast guard women seemed angry at me at all. They asked my opinion on the matter. I told them I didn’t know much about it (because I can barely bring myself to care about electoral politics anymore), but that I had heard that Warnock was a socialist or a Marxist or liked Castro or something, which I thought was cool. I told them that Ossoff was a corporate stooge who (I believe) is not campaigning on a Green New Deal or Medicare for All and is likewise being funded by the worst people on Earth.
After that, I was interrupted by something and had to switch off my mic / camera. When I came back, the meeting seemed to be over.
So comrades. Am I the asshole? Is it hurtful to refer to modern working conditions, particularly for undocumented workers in the USA, as slavery? (In a Marxist sense, no, it is not exactly the same, but like I said—it still sucks.) Or was this bourgeois weaponizing identity politics to stop me from discussing radical politics?
Edit: thanks for all the awesome comments. Next time I’ll bring up the 13th amendment and focus on solidarity rather than the possibility that my ancestors were enslaved.
I agree with you. I have actually read though that slavery in the antebellum south originated in wage labor in 15th century Europe, and that eventually chattel slavery was abolished in the Civil War because the leaders of the south had failed to sufficiently develop their economy. Roads and railroads and factories were almost nonexistent in the south before the war; after the war, they became much more widespread. Basically, the northern bourgeoisie viewed the south as holding back their moneymaking potential, but the southern bourgeoisie had this strong feudal vibe, where basically slavery was NOT all about making money—because "chattel slavery" was actually less profitable than wage labor, even if chattel slavery itself basically built the USA and was still immensely profitable. This might be a vulgar Marxist / economic determinist take on this issue so I'm open to other perspectives.
I thought about playing the game described here to show to the liberals present how it is impossible for workers to escape wage slavery. You can use paper and scissors instead of bread and knives. I've played the game a few times with people and it works incredibly well.
https://libcom.org/library/great-money-trick-robert-tressell
Yeah that might be true, that's interesting. But I do think that's another thing - American chattel slavery casts such a huge shadow over American society that its hard to even recognize how common slavery has been throughout human history. Especially when American chattel slavery has been noted as such an exceptionally brutal form of slavery compared to other forms. I think this also muddies the waters when trying to discuss slavery as an economic system, since many Americans really only see the social and racial aspects of the system.
I've always wondered about this - why is it that slavery, as an economic system, is less profitable than wage labor? I never wrapped my head around that.
At least as it pertains to chattel slavery in the antebellum south, I think it has more to do with the habitual mismanagement of the slaveocracy. They didn’t reinvest their profits into developing infrastructure or factories because that would have led to the kind of emancipation that happened up north. This is why I think the south has more of a feudal vibe—it wasn’t all about the money for them. (You can even see some of the feudal roots of southern culture if you check out a book like “Albion’s Seed.”) But the northern bourgeoisie was hungry for more cash, and knew they could do better in the south than the white aristocrats, so they pushed them out of the way.
When it comes to slavery versus wage labor generally, I suspect the latter is better for capitalism because it allows the buildup of a consumer base and also pushes workers to participate more in (and therefore identify more with) capitalism. We can sort of pretend to be little asshole bosses every time we buy a commodity or go out to a restaurant. But even this model has been in trouble for some time, as profits cannot be maintained without keeping wages low and therefore depressing demand (and also propping it up with increasing amounts of seemingly unsustainable debt.)