On Slavery (part four)

in #slavery5 years ago

ON SLAVERY (PART FOUR)

Debt

Along with war and conquest, the imposition of debt stands as one of two major causes of slavery and servitude. Some would probably argue that debt is a natural and inevitable part of any society involving interactions between individuals with differing whatever. While it’s true that any society can only function so long as people recognise and meet ongoing obligations toward one another, the amount of debt that exists in the world today is way out of proportion of anything required to maintain a prospering, egalitarian society. It is instead diagnostic of a market system that has become decoupled from reality.

Much of the pursuit of profit now has little to do with making physical products intended to solve real problems, but instead has moved to the abstract world of financialisation in which Wall Street and its equivalent in other countries collude with governments to create and manipulate complex forms of debt. Major companies no longer derive their profits principally from selling actual products. Instead they float their shares on the stock market, borrow cheap money from the government, buy back their own shares and thereby gain a boost in the paper profit of the company.

This move into abstraction is not without consequences, for there are real downsides to this expansion of debt. Any investigation into how banking works will reveal that banks don’t actually lend out money others have deposited, but instead create money ‘out of nothing’ whenever anyone meets the criteria of being worthy of a loan.

Actually, money is not really being created out of nothing. Rather, wealth is being snatched from the future in order to pay for goods and services here and now. This practice is fair enough when the wealth snatched from the future gets into the hands of those who really can build a better tomorrow. But in reality it too often ends up being used for short-term profit that ultimately causes long-term harm. Banking is a complex system in which people bring about the creation of money out of debt (and of course it is predominantly the poor who need to take out loans) and then, thanks to the negative and positive externalities of market capitalism, the debt and money separate, with the upper classes extracting the money while the poor get burdened with the debt. Are there exceptions to this rule? Yes, but then one can also find exceptions to the ‘survival of the fittest’ rule that drives evolution. Nevertheless evolution is fact and the consequences of this kind of inequality are fact.

How impactful is debt? It’s relative...

How much it matters that you are in debt really depends on how likely it is that you will encounter somebody more powerful than you who can demand repayment. This means that, for the most powerful player of all, debt is of no consequence whatsoever because the day of reckoning will never come. As Alan Greenspan once pointed out, “the US can pay any debt it has because we can always print money”. Or, to put it another way, the US can endlessly snatch wealth from the future without fear that a mighty one will one day come along demanding repayment (of course this rests on the assumption that the country remains the dominant power in the world).

AD94169F-FD71-4AA6-88C2-C6723EE8FDEA.jpeg

(Alan Greenspan. Image from ‘The Survival Manual’ by Mark Braund and Ross Ashcroft)

But for weaker players, it’s a different story altogether. Consider the words of President Obasanjo of Nigeria:

“All that we had borrowed up to 1985 or 1986 was around $5 billion and we have paid back so far about $16 billion. Yet, we are told that we still owe about $28 billion...because of the foreign creditors’ interest rates”.

By 2004, the developing world was having to pay $20 in interest repayment for every dollar received in foreign aid and grants. The result was crippling austerity and the creation of highly vulnerable people ripe for exploitation by predatory corporations. And austerity is not just a third-world phenomenon. Even rich countries had to put up with it following the last great speculative bubble (in sub-prime lending as you may recall). But, in keeping with the idea that the powerful escape the consequences of bad societal decisions while the weak must bare the cost, the CEOs who lead the way in reckless speculation got away with it for the most part, riding off into the sunset with breathtakingly large pensions and severance packages, while the poor had services cut and good, secure jobs taken away and replaced with gig work stripped of many hard-won benefits.

As debt grows and its harmful consequences fall predominantly on the vulnerable, such people become more desperate, more prepared to do anything to delay the day of reckoning. As Kevin Bales, who is an expert in human trafficking, explained, “the question isn’t ‘are they the right colour to be slaves?’, but ‘are they vulnerable enough to be enslaved?’. The criteria of enslavement today do not concern colour, tribe, or religion; they focus on weakness, gullibility and deprivation”.

How many are slaves today?

Slavery has not been abolished. It still exists to varying degrees. That slavery continues to this day cannot be doubted (any human rights organisation will correct you with evidence if you believe otherwise) but how much of it there is depends on how you define servitude. According to UN estimates there are roughly 27 million slaves in the world today. However, another organisation called the Walk Free Foundation has put the total at more like 46 million. They are mostly bonded labourers or debt slaves in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

But could the numbers be higher still? Think back to the notion of debt bondage and selling oneself into slavery, which we touched upon in part one. What, fundamentally, is the difference between selling yourself to one master for life, and being in a position where you must constantly make your labour available for hire, toiling away for minimal reward while others gain most of the rewards being generated by workers like yourself? Doesn’t that just show a continuum of exploitation from abject slavery to indentured servitude to wage labour? Yes, one could argue that the conditions of wage labour is preferable to outright slavery (at least in a lot of cases) but you cannot really call either condition ‘freedom’. After all, if to be free is to work for oneself and to gain most of the rewards from a job well done (and also to carry the costs of not doing your work competently) then precious few can claim to be truly liberated from the bonds of servitude. For as Federal Reserve expert G Edward Griffin said:

“No matter where you earn money, its origin was a bank and its ultimate destination is a bank...This total of human effort is ultimately for the benefit of those who create fiat money. It is a form of modern serfdom in which the great mass of society works as indentured servants to a ruling class of financial nobility”.

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(G Edward Griffin. Image from wikimedia commons)

If Robinson’s argument is valid, the true number of slaves in the world today would be counted in the billions.

CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this series a question was posed: Is the popular portrayal of slavery’s end incorrect? We have seen how slavery did not just get abolished with the passing of an Act, creating a gulf between the un-free past and the liberated now. Rather, escape from slavery has been a long process that has made only modest progress in breaking the bonds of servitude and, in some cases, none at all. Progress toward freedom is so slow because, at its very root, market capitalism contains the socioeconomic structures that have given rise to exploitation since the Neolithic period: Systems that justify competition, self-interest, hierarchy and inequality, perpetuating scarcity and profiteering from the growing environmental and social fallout of negative externalities by exploiting the vulnerabilities lower class people and developing nations feel under such circumstances.

Yes, to some extent progress has been made. But not as much as we are lead to believe by apologists for capitalism and certainly nowhere near enough compared to what is technically possible. For example, much is made of the apparent reduction in abject poverty around the world (a condition most likely to result in exploitation). But what’s not appreciated is that such results are obtained by using an infeasibly low threshold for an absolute minimum wage. On the other hand, were we to use the ‘Ethical Poverty Line’ devised by Peter Edward (set at about $7.40 a day), then 4.2 billion people or 60 percent of the world remain in an impoverished state, ripe for exploitation.

Or consider that it would cost about $30 billion a year to end world hunger and that the 1800 billionaires in the world could provide such provision for 200 years and still have roughly $500 million each. It is disgusting that malnourishment and other forms of deprivation that are completely unnecessary continue to exist. The reason they persist is because market capitalism profits from servicing the problems they generate, and really has no interest in bringing about an end to scarcity because assumptions of scarcity are fundamental to how this competitive system works. If you add up all the deaths caused by various negative externalities ultimately traceable to market competition’s root socioeconomic orientation, capitalism has killed more people than all of the 20th century’s despots combined, and has enslaved more people than any other system in history.

REFERENCES

“The New Human Rights Movement” by Peter Joseph

“The Creature From Jekyll Island” by Edward G. Robinson

“Modernising Money” by Joseph Lietar

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I keep asking myself why billionaires, who in 2017 had their best year to date adding around 1.5 trillion dollars to their combined wealth, cant seem to mange their so called philanthropy. Then I realized once I had come across Bitcoin that there needs to be a system in place to facilitate fairer distribution of wealth because the human element corrupts as we can see from the current state of affairs.

Thanks for sharing, I will check out your page and give you a follow. Keep spreading awareness!

You are most kind, thank you!

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