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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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)
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?
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.
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.
I just heard an NPR story about US Steel Corp using chattel slavery less than a hundred years ago. They worked people to death and buried them in unmarked graves.
I don’t understand your point. The most important feature of capitalism is the private ownership of capital. Capitalism isn’t “hustle, fuck bitches get money” or whatever. Money and wage labor goes back to the founding of civilization. It isn’t a new invention.
In the wealth of nations Smith talks great lengths about the labourer being king of the market not the landowners and that with advancement in technology costs should go down except land owners prevent that
The whole system is supposed to favour the labourer compared to Mercantilism where the rich got richer because they owned the production
It also praised the American colonies for open immigration saying they could double their population faster than anyone in Europe and that would double their economy
And we know now that his analysis on the outcome of capitalism is incorrect. Capitalism exists for the private property holders to extract as much wealth and power as possible from their privileged position. That unrelenting pursuit of profit has led to even worse inequality, and is collapsing entire ecosystems. It’s a disaster of an economic system full of contradictions. Those contradictions are now causing capitalism to collapse in on itself.
money isn’t necessary in a library economy, because there’s nothing to purchase. You go to the library for all non-consumable items. The library is incentivized to produce highly repairable and durable goods to reduce waste and minimize demand on the supply line. Consumable goods are gotten at locations similar to a food bank, all members of the community are responsible for producing food for the community.
I think one of the main problems with Smith’s conception of capitalism is that he didn’t account for how huge and pervasive and intrusive advertising would become. He naively assumed that the best product would dominate the market when actually people will buy whatever is thrust in front of the their eyes a thousand times a day.
And of course corporate lobbying wasn’t such an issue in his time.
No, the problem with Smith’s capitalism is that he’s constantly misrepresented
He was descriptive, not prescriptive. He was not an advocate of capitalism, he was explaining it - and if you read the wealth of nations and your takeaway was “Lassie Faire capitalism is a good idea”, reread it
I appreciate your critique but I’ve got to be honest and say that I’m not going to spend any more time in my life trying to justify late stage capitalism. It will eventually be replaced and pass into history like every other economic system, if it doesn’t kill us first. 💣
(only way to get rich is to work more hours than someone else)
In our current system, this is not how you get rich, AT ALL.
Billionaires aren’t people who worked 3 jobs and lived with roommates until they made it. They’re not even in the same class as these people.
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. :|
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I see the perspective. I just think it’s laughable to attempt to push religious moralism as any sort of modern moral allignment because religious morals are ridiculous. If you can’t quote the morals from the bible, you shouldn’t push for people following the morals from the bible. And if you can quote the morals from the bible, you wouldn’t be advocating for them.
Basically, anyone arguing that morals derive from religion is arguing in bad faith.
And if you can quote the morals from the bible, you wouldn’t be advocating for them.
Okay, we wouldn’t advocate for them. If you believe that God is the source of all that’s good, and I mean really believe, you can easily be blinded by that and accept it as your own morality. Same with being raised with it.
Especially that, on surface, for example catholic morality is good. Killing is bad, stealing and being greedy is bad, being violent is bad, being false is bad…we pretty much agree to these things today. The deeper, more sinister things or things that are tied to God are the ones we ridicule today, like questioning God being bad or being homosexual or just different being bad.
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