Trying? Abolished? Sigh. Words. Slavery never left. Put all the pretty paint you want on those bars. It’s the change of perspective that comes with wisdom. Use that power well.
Reminder that slavery was never outright abolished in the US, the constitution explicitly allows slavery as punishment for a crime which is why private for-profit prisons are a thing in the US.
Humans get powerful and don’t see the point in power unless they can abuse people
This has always been the case. Look at immigrant exploitation, the truck system, sharecropping, child labor, exporting work to undeveloped countries to exploit unregulated labor forces there.
It was always about bringing back slavery without calling it slavery.
And it will always be so long as we let them keep trying.
Violence is not the answer until the hour that it is.
Our only hope is to become a strong union country. Without collective power we’ll never reign in the greed of the billionaires
Really, we should be advancing beyond the 40 hour work week and into a 50, or even 60 hour work week.
Progressive history nerd with an “aKshUlLy” for you to consider:
Slavery was never abolished, it was moved. There are more slaves in the world today than ever before and the US (among others) is funding it. Our stores are full of goods made by slaves. It’s worse now than when slaves were just farmhands because those old high paying factory jobs were still a boon for the domestic worker. Those are slave jobs overseas now. A foundational economic pillar of stable, unionized labour was removed and never replaced.
So certainly, stagnant wages and everything is costing more and giving us less. Our current spiraling situation for workers at home is deplorable and getting worse, a true dystopia. But slavery is another kettle of fish. There’s a scene in Roots, the miniseries from the 70s about slavery. When we get to the aftermath of the civil war in the south, a governor told the nervous former slave owners that like peter rabbit trying to get into the garden, when the farmer puts up an obstacle, you just find a way around it. For a time, that meant chattle slaves simply become indentured slaves, working to pay off costs they can never quite catch up on. Once that was abolished, we just laundered our slavery through international borders. Out of sight out of mind for the average American. It’s the same people doing the same thing, it’s just a shell game. The oppression of the working class is intersectional as fuck with slavery, has the same root cause, and evolved along side slavery, but the human suffering experienced by actual slaves is much worse than the typical underpaid worker, so for me, I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. But this is just symantics.
