This is to be a multi portioned response to a complex question regarding the nature of labor, servitude, and liberty. I will be making several entries to address a simple question that I think many people would expect to be condensed into a simple one sentence answer and provide rich detail and context that might elaborate on the complexities of a seemingly simple concept. I am doing this because I feel that in an effort to oversimplify things to address a large volume of issues, the simplest issues have been overlooked. To the best of my ability, I will answer:
What is Slavery?
When considering the question, which may appear simple on its face, I am left to consider the very complexities of the nature of labor. Slavery, according to popular and societal definition, places the emphasis on labor provided with no wages granted. This is also to say that labor is forced or expected without exception. The key emphasis on slavery is that the work is not optional and provides insufficient reward or incentive. Is the simple absence of option the entirety of the definition or is there something worth considering about the nature of the reward system in place.
In current American society, there is the expectation that monetary emoluments are dispensed because of one's willing contribution to another party's goals or ambitions. For an employer to offer employment in a full-time status, there should be enough compensation to maintain an adequate standard of living and the freedom to terminate employment on behalf of the employee. While there are contractual obligations that one might be under, this is typically the expectation of the exchange of time and labor for compensation. Failure of an employer to meet fiduciary expectations or allow accommodations for liberty are considered to be the slippery slope of forced servitude.
This whole model is contingent on the expectation of a first world society and based on a system of private ownership, personal liberty, and a universal currency system. Without these societal mechanisms, there would be an entirely different concept of slavery as it exists. It is difficult for the modern American to conceptualize slavery existing or in absence of such a structure in place. No one considers slavery to exist in the state of nature, such as one’s need to labor in some way to nourish the body. No one pays a person to feed themselves, nor are they ever free of such an obligation. It is easy to take for granted that a biological imperative operates by a different set of rules than by a system of complex law, governance, and commerce.
Slavery, by its nature, forms as a result of a social contract that people engage in for the desire to provide a higher quality of life for themselves. We can enjoy a wider array of foodstuffs, entertainment, and medicine, on the basis that we exist as a society. In that regard, humans have a tendency to hierarchically divide themselves, and by the nature of that hierarchy, some may and do live a higher quality of life. Even if no one was enslaved to another, it might be considered an injustice that one group enjoys a better quality of life than another. It could be a reason no more complex than proximity to a body of water and ease of transportation. What does inequity have to do with slavery? In a sense nothing, and more sensibly, everything.
Throughout the course of history, it has been proven demonstratively true that military and technological might is the determining factor in one society being subjugated by another. In that subjugation, slavery arises out of the interests of one party on the top or the hierarchical pyramid making demands of a larger yet defenseless party of the pyramid. This arrangement, despite its obvious lack of fairness, has endured throughout human experience for one reason or another. The primary reason is that too many people are dependent on slavery. The second reason is that slavery is inherent in the fact that people are forced into agreements they did not choose. The third reason is that people possess empathy yet can find ways to disregard such a basic human feeling. The final reason is that humans fall into patterns, and the institution of slavery fits into yet another of humanities' alarming patterns.
I will pass on giving obvious criticism of the history of slavery from Roman conquest to European imperialism and focus on the world in which we live. I will do this to assert that the distinction that is made between free labor and slavery is more synthetic than people are willing to allow themselves to acknowledge in a general sense. There are always those among us who find themselves able to detach themselves from traditional preconceptions. I am offering the possibility that slavery exists all around us, but many are unwilling to see it as slavery, because of these synthetic distinctions that people make to justify unjust systems. I am also offering the possibility that slavery does not exist in any fashion, and that quality of life is the only meaningful distinction that we can observe.
No one chooses to be born, and no one chooses to require other humans for mutual survival and wellbeing. The supposed liberty that accompanies modern existence is merely an increasingly complex society and a more obfuscated list of possibilities. Since a person has more choices than ever of where to dine, doesn’t mean that the choice wasn’t already made on some level. We assume freedom and liberty on the assumption that we can make a decision among options, and that decision falls on the concept of free will. We cannot fathom that we made the choice beforehand, because we are not conscious of all the determining factors leading to that decision. Even in a coin flip, the weight of the coin, the acceleration due to gravity, and the force we throw the coin, are all based on a system of rules that people cannot truly deviate from. How can people choose to provide labor when labor is already chosen by the universe for its inhabitants? Be it God, or the cosmos, we are only actors on the stage, we still cannot write our roles.
When I get down to brass tacks, it becomes apparent that the matter becomes more a matter of when a person becomes beholden to another person. This occurs without a formal institution of slavery. The boss, the politician, the judge, the officer, the authority figure, the CEO, etc., become writers of someone else’s destiny, and the determining factor in another’s quality of life. This can become the stem in the unwholesome plant that is injustice. It is when one party utilizes the pain and suffering endured by another party to increase their quality of life that a person cries unto the heavens that the universe is treating them unfairly. This doesn’t mean that the relationship cannot be symbiotic, but that the symbiosis has turned into parasitism. Not only does it become the case that one party is bitter with injustice, but another party is rife with anxiety over their fears that they are dehumanizing other people to enjoy a better quality of life.
I have argued that no labor is slave labor on the grounds that choice is a synthetic distinction made for people to claim agency in their actions. I have argued that since we don’t choose, we simply act with thought behind it, that we are operating under the same set of conditions no matter how we arrive at whatever labor we engage in. Humans, whether acting on the orders of another human or of their own interests are laboring for their survival. If you cleaned your garage, or someone else told you to clean your garage, and you cleaned your garage; what is the distinction? Some people even prefer to be told to do things to avoid making such decisions of their own volition. The most important factor in that example is the conditions in which you clean your garage. Was sufficient time granted for slow and steady work? Were you given breaks? Was the temperature tolerable? Were you asked to accomplish the task on an empty stomach? The definition of slavery then shifts to not whether you were asked, demanded or decided to do the labor – but how the conditions of the labor were met.
