Slavery: still a thing

There's more slavery now than at any time in human history, according to this UN task force.

It makes you wonder, of course, that if our capitalism depends on slave markets... is it really capitalism?

Someone please help me to understand...

Yes. Capitalism is private ownership over the means of production. Slavery serves capitalism very well, even if it didn't invent slavery.
- One could argue that if the workers themselves are the means of production, slavery is extra capitalist.
- let's call it neo-slavery 💫
- If a CEO finds out that he can get slaves to do the work for free instead of spending money on it they have an obligation to the shareholders to do what makes the company the most money.
- That’s a simplification
  Mercantilism had private ownership of production
  Capitalism is pay based on hours worked (only way to get rich is to work more hours than someone else)
The private economy is the main source of the rise, while state-enforced labour counts for one in seven cases of modern slavery, the report adds.
I wonder if mandatory military service counts for "state-enforced labor"
What we have isn’t capitalism, capitalism only works until you add people
- True capitalism has never been tried!
How are there high income people in slavery, that doesn't make sense to me
- The UN sponsored report uses a pretty liberal definition of slavery to include things like wage theft (which forces workers to stay at a job until they're fully compensated), sex trafficking, and domestic servitude where the servant's documents are confiscated so that they can't flee.
  However, there's still a hell of a lot whips and chains slavery in Africa and South East Asia. Those slaves serve the excavation and manufacturing industries.
Okay, this may come off as unemphatetic but I love the fact that slavery doesn't give a shit about your sex or wealth. Like, the percentages are almost fully equal, save for actual low income that is almost double what the other percentages are. Other than that, all are equal in the eyes of slavers.
Shit's wild. What's also wild is that these numbers still exists...especially when thinking about Americas or Europe. :|
- That's what you got from those graphs?

Everybody:

Isn't using children for slave labor immoral?

Hershey, Nestle, Mars, selling chocolate to Americans:

But is it against the law, though?

If you buy anything grown almost anywhere, it is with slave labor or near-slave labor. So many of the crops grown in the US use child labor and labor for very very low wages, low enough that it may as well be slavery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41vETgarh_8&t=1

Fucking love key and peele

I like this format.

look at my lips : not illegal

you're hurting my eardrums...

I like that Lemmy is a small enough community that I know exactly which post and which comments in that post this is about. 🤣

is like spying on kids

You think the US is bad try 10 years of forced labor in a Russian chemical factory with little protection from the chemicals.

Also U.S.: Don't worry, all will be forgiven if you are able to get our space program off the ground! 📎

It's technically not slave labor since prisoners usually get paid (less than minimum wage, but still counts).

Is it immoral? Don't they "owe a debt to society"?

But society isn't profiting from the labor. It is private businesses, right? There is such a thing in the US as communal or public service as sentence for a crime I am sure but from what I gathered prison labor is not that.
I'd be morally okay if a certain amount of hours of public service would be part of a sentence for crimes which left a debt to society. Such as tax fraud or destruction of public property etc.
- Fully agreed. Stuff like, you have to work for the government park corp and clean up parks as your job for the next year is a form of sentencing I could agree with. I don't agree with random company 400 getting to use you as a slave being your sentence.
Uh yeah so uh
That green leafy thing
If you inhale it
FIFTY FUCKING YEARS BUCKO
and other totally arbitrary justifications for putting a drastically skewed selection of your citizens into enforced labor
- So the problem is that those people shouldn't be in prison, not that prisoners should be expected to pay a debt to society.
Yes it is immoral, they should be rehabilitated instead
But society also needs to fix its dystopia because some crimes where committed out of necessity for example stealing food when you'd otherwise die and their was no way of getting free food
Crimes of necessity don't need to he rehabilitated because people are forced to commit them due to their current living position
Edit:
https://lemmy.ca/comment/5348520
This comment also applies as well

Lol the person that posted this is probably using an iPhone which is made with slave labor in China. Stop acting like USA is the only country using capitalism to get cheap products. So many of you on Lemmy are crazy about bashing the US when every first world country is 100% in the same boat.

Uneducated and trying to spread propaganda to hate a single country when you're all guilty as fuck. Your clothes your electronics your beauty products all made with suffering and yet y'all hypocrites still need your Nikes and shitty iPhones/pretty much any electronic let's be real. This is exactly what the rich fuckers that run the show want...idiots like OP.

For ome reason many people on Lemmy specifically act like this I've noticed which is perfect for their agenda to make us all hate each other based on where we live as if we had a choice where we were born and as if we could even really do anything about the corruption that's just right out in public. None y'all wanna be the Martyr so stop acting self righteous.

I think people are allowed to say that slavery is bad even if we benefit from slave labor. It's not like shit is labeled, and even if a product is free from one form of slavery there are still so many types across the world it would take a global effort to get rid of them all. Isn't it better to at least acknowledge the problem?
China is capitalism with beastly grin
The OP doesn't have to live in USofA
The OP doesn't have to have glass brick
We're making fun of USA and pointing things like this out because Muricans always tout themselves as some beacon of freedom and democracy and whatnot. The land of the free my ass.
Oh no! Anyway....

US constitution is not a moral or criminal or other type of code for all cases of light. It does not forbid, for example shoplifting or driving on red light.

You could have worded this better, and I'm not a legal expert, but I think you mean: the U.S. constitution doesn't make claims about morality. It gives penalties for doing certain actions.
Sure, but that's beside the point.
- The only crime listed out in the constitution is treason.
  The rest of it is explaining the roles and duties of the various branches of government, and the supremacy clause says that the Constitution, the federal legal code and any treaties are the Supreme laws of the land.
- So what’s the point?
Private citizens enslaving people is illegal because it is forbidden in the constitution. Only the government is allowed to enslave people now, as punishment for crime. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Damn, TIL. You just planned my weekend, thanks for the tip!

This is not specific at all to the U.S. and the overwhelming majority of rational adults should be able to see that it's a good thing for society to be able to legally remove members who pose a clear risk to the safety and function of it. Whether or not the 13th Amendment is administered fairly is a different conversation^1, but the false equivalency this post makes between legal imprisonment and chattel slavery is a fallacy.

^1 It's not.

This isn't about removing people from society. It's about the practice of using them to perform free labor.
- rehabilitation please

They're are a few problems saying that prison labor is a continuation of slavery in the US.

The largest demographic in prison is white men.

Prisons don't make money. Corpos that run the prisons, or the phones, or use prisoners as cheap labor do profit, but that money mostly comes from the State, the prisoners themselves, and the prisoner's families.

Prisoners have legal rights.

Nobody is born incarcerated.

I'm not trying to defend that clause in the 13^th. But equivocating all forms of slavery and forced labor is a common white supremacist tactic to minimize the particular evils of racialized chattel slavery in the US.

All races, all people, all nations, have had slavery and been slaves at some point themselves

David Barton (A Christian nationalist and fake historian)

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/01/evangelicals-american-politics-tim-alberta-book-excerpt-00129319

There is a pretty good conversation about this in F.D Signifier's video: "Fuck the police"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyEwOxp_Iyw (The conversation is about the 1:03:00 mark)

The largest demographic in prison is white men.
Funny that you'd bring up white supremacist tactics right after throwing this one out there. Like, how can you bring up statistics to defend the justice system and just ignore 13% of the general population having a 38% share of the prison population?
Plenty of American slaves also had rights, even as slaves.
The more you know.
Prisons don’t make money
That's just untrue. Private for-profit prisons were a multi-billion-dollar industry for too long.
Also, they made enough money to bribe judges to sentence more people to longer terms so they could make more money.
Private prisons promised to be 'more efficient' and cost less per prisoner than public prisons, but typically their pattern of operations was to cut costs as much as possible and still charge the taxpayer more per prisoner than public prisons- and it got so out of hand that at one point it cost the taxpayer more per year to incarcerate a criminal than it would have to send him to Harvard for that year. Also under private prison administration, no effort was made at all to rehabilitate prisoners- their business was really based on recidivism, it was very much in their interest for prisoners to re-offend and end up back in prison.
Convict leasing on top of that is plain slavery, and the prospect of money to be made leasing ~~convicts~~ slaves for labor has corrupted America's justice system, particularly in confederate states, ever since the 13th Amendment was penned.

No constitution, only what is moral…

Theocracy, then?

- No, the constitution is holy! Like the Bible! And like the Bible, we'll only use the bits we like, and we'll obfuscate the bits that undermine our greed.
- You could make a federal law. It’s a hell of a lot easier.
- You can consult with experts in this field: French and communists
Lmao
Yep, stone the gays, super moral /s
- Juuuust to be the devil's advocate buuuuuut... Morality is subjective. Thus, from perspective of person believing that homosexuals are the scourge of the earth and the absolute evil just lying in wait to jump on "normal" people, it is moral to remove said scourge from the earth.