Modern Day Slavery

[TheJoker]

If we were going to describe modern day slaves when it concerns individuals that are enslaved by low wages that are forced to take particular jobs because they are denied anything else, how about would we go about doing that?

How would we describe the modern state of slavery today?

[TheJoker]

Here’s the official explanation of wage slavery:

Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person’s livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.[1][2] It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor. The term pertains to economic exploitation and/or social stratification, with the former referring primarily to an unequal bargaining power between labor and capital, particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages (e.g. in sweatshops);[3] and the latter to a lack of workers’ self-management, which draws similarities between owning and employing a person.[4][5][6] Social stratification thus covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical social environment i.e. working for a wage not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma or status diminution.[7][8][9]

Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states argued that workers were “free but in name – the slaves of endless toil,” and that their slaves were better off.[21] This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves’ material conditions in the 19th century were “better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time.”[22][23] In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” [24]

The description of wage workers as wage slaves was not without controversy. Many abolitionists in the U.S. including northern capitalists, regarded the analogy to be spurious.[25] They believed that wage workers were “neither wronged nor oppressed”.[26] The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass declared “Now I am my own master” when he took a paying job.[27] Abraham Lincoln and the republicans “did not challenge the notion that those who spend their entire lives as wage laborers were comparable to slaves”, though they argued that the condition was different, as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment.[28]

African American wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South.
However, self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century. In 1869 The New York Times described the system of wage labor as “a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South”.[28] E. P. Thompson notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the “gap in status between a ‘servant,’ a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might ‘come and go’ as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right.” [15] A “Member of the Builders’ Union” in the 1830s argued that the trade unions “will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other; labor and capital will no longer be separate but will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women.”[16] This perspective inspired the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 which had the “two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions – the protection of the workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of the future society” when the unions “take over the whole industry of the country.” [17] “Research has shown”, summarises William Lazonick, “that the ‘free-born Englishman’ of the eighteenth century – even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural wage labour – tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop.”[18]

The use of the term wage slave by labor organizations may originate from the labor protests of the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836.[29] The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century to object to the lack of workers’ self-management. However, it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term “wage work” towards the end of the 19th century, as labor organizations shifted their focus to raising wages.[30][31]

Karl Marx described Capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy, by basing it on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented or alienated in a class society). According to Marx:[32]

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.

American financier Jay Gould. After hiring strikebreakers, he said “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”[33]
Proponents of the viewpoint that the condition of wage workers has substantial similarities (as well as some advantages and disadvantages) vis a vis chattel slavery, argued that:
1.Since the chattel slave is property, his value to an owner is in some ways higher than that of a worker who may quit, be fired or replaced. The chattel slave’s owner has made a greater investment in terms of the money he paid for the slave. For this reason, in times of recession, chattel slaves could not be fired like wage laborers. A “wage slave” could also be harmed at no (or less) cost. American chattel slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living from the 18th century[22] and, according to historians Fogel and Engerman plantation records show that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally—their material conditions in the 19th century being “better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time”.[23] This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an economic system different from capitalist wage slavery. According to Mark Michael Smith of the Economic History Society: “although intrusive and oppressive, paternalism, the way masters employed it, and the methods slaves used to manipulate it, rendered slaveholders’ attempts to institute capitalistic work regimens on their plantation ineffective and so allowed slaves to carve out a degree of autonomy.”[34] Similarly, various strategies and struggles adopted by wage laborers contributed to the creation of labor unions and welfare institutions, etc. that helped improve standards of living since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Nevertheless, worldwide, work-related injuries and illnesses still kill at least 2.2 million workers per year with “between 184 and 208 million workers suffer[ing] from work-related diseases” and about “270 million” non-lethal injuries of varying severity “caused by preventable factors at the workplace”.[35]–a number that may or may not compare favorably with chattel slavery’s.
2.Unlike a chattel slave, a wage laborer can choose between employers, but they usually constitute a minority of owners in the population for which the wage laborer must work, while attempts to implement workers’ control on employers’ businesses may be met with violence or other unpleasant consequences. The wage laborer’s starkest choice is to work for an employer or face poverty or starvation. If a chattel slave refuses to work, a number of punishments are also available; from beatings to food deprivation—although economically rational slave owners practiced positive reinforcement to achieve best results and before losing their investment (or even friendship) by killing an expensive slave.[36][37][38]
3.Historically, the range of occupations and status positions held by chattel slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free persons, indicating some similarities between chattel slavery and wage slavery as well.[39]
4.Arguably, wage slavery, like chattel slavery, does not stem from some immutable “human nature,” but represents a “specific response to material and historical conditions” that “reproduce[s] the inhabitants, the social relations… the ideas… [and] the social form of daily life.”[40]
5.Similarities were blurred by the fact that proponents of wage labor won the American Civil War, in which they competed for legitimacy with defenders of chattel slavery. Both presented an over-positive assessment of their system, while denigrating the opponent.[25][26][41]

The term ‘wage slavery’ was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century, but the structural changes associated with the later stages of industrial capitalism, including “increased centralization of production… declining wages… [an] expanding… labor pool… intensifying competition, and… [t]he loss of competence and independence experienced by skilled labor” meant that “a critique that referred to all [wage] work as slavery and avoided demands for wage concessions in favor of supporting the creation of the producerist republic (by diverting strike funds towards funding… co-operatives, for example) was far less compelling than one that identified the specific conditions of slavery as low wages…” Thus, “wage slavery” was gradually replaced by the more pragmatic term “wage work” towards the end of the 19th century.[30]

Some supporters of wage and chattel slavery have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to nature; arguing that hierarchy and their preferred system’s particular relations of production represent human nature and are no more coercive than the reality of life itself. According to this narrative, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the status quo is naively utopian and will result in more oppressive conditions.[46][47][48] Bosses in both of these long-lasting systems argued that their system created a lot of wealth and prosperity. Both did, in some sense create jobs and their investment entailed risk. For example, slave owners might have risked losing money by buying expensive slaves who later became ill or died; or might have used those slaves to make products that didn’t sell well on the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses; sometimes by working hard. It may be the “rags to riches” story which occasionally occurs in capitalism, or the “slave to master” story that occurred in places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom and become business owners, self-employed, or slave owners themselves.[49][50] Social mobility, or the hard work and risk that it may entail, are thus not considered to be a redeeming factor by critics of the concept of wage slavery.[51]

Anthropologist David Graeber has noted that, historically, the first wage labor contracts we know about—whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or Swahili city states in the Indian ocean—were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money, and the slave, another, with which to maintain his or her living expenses.) Such arrangements were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or Brazil. C. L. R. James made a famous argument that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the industrial revolution were first developed on slave plantations.[52]

Analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book On the Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt explained how “whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness”— and so when the laborer works under external control, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”[77] Both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.[78]

[edit] Psychological control

[edit] Higher wages

In 19th century discussions of labor relations, it was normally assumed that the threat of starvation forced those without property to work for wages. Proponents of the view that modern forms of employment constitute wage slavery, even when workers appear to have a range of available alternatives, have attributed its perpetuation to a variety of social factors that maintain the hegemony of the employer class.[40][79] These include efforts at Manufacturing Consent and eliciting false consciousness.

In his book, Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt points out that professionals are trusted to run organizations in the interests of their employers. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to “ensure that each and every detail of their work favors the right interests–or skewers the disfavored ones” in the absence of overt control:

The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.[80]

[edit] Lower wages

The terms “employee” or “worker” have often been replaced by “associate”. This plays up the allegedly voluntary nature of the interaction, while playing down the subordinate status of the wage laborer, as well as the worker-boss class distinction emphasized by labor movements.

Billboards, as well as TV, Internet and newspaper advertisements, consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.

Job interviews and other data on requirements for lower skilled workers in developed countries—particularly in the growing service sector—indicate that the more workers depend on low wages, and the less skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for workers without better employment options and expect them to feign unremunerative motivation. Such screening and feigning may not only contribute to the positive self-image of the employer as someone granting desirable employment, but also signal wage-dependence by indicating the employee’s willingness to feign, which in turn may discourage the dissatisfaction normally associated with job-switching or union activity.

At the same time, employers in the service industry have justified unstable, part-time employment and low wages by playing down the importance of service jobs for the lives of the wage laborers (e.g. just temporary before finding something better, student summer jobs etc.).[81]

In the early 20th century, “scientific methods of strikebreaking” were devised—employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined “harmony” and “Americanism”.[82]

[edit] Lowest wages

In the 21st century Dubai, employers pay low wages to many workers—often less than £120 ($178.83) a month, for a 60-hour work week. Often ‘employment contracts’, if they are given, “are not worth the paper they are written on,” and collective bargaining and trade unions are illegal in Dubai. It all starts in their home countries, often India or Bangladesh, where local recruitment agents promise them high salaries and generous overtime payments. In these workers’ home countries they are charged a “visa” or “transit” fee, averaging 200,000 taka, or £2,000 ($2,980), which in these home countries is supposed to be illegal.

The workers pay the fee because they believe the figures they’ve been promised of future wages. However in most cases, it will take them the entire two-to-three year contract for them just to pay back that fee and break even.[83]

In another contemporary case unions representing teachers in Louisiana have filed a complaint with state authorities alleging that a Los Angeles recruiting firm broke the law by holding more than 350 Filipino teachers in ‘virtual servitude’ in order to hold onto their jobs in five Louisiana parish school systems, including New Orleans’ Recovery School District.[84]

[edit] Stress and degradation

Investigative journalist Robert Kuttner in Everything for Sale, analyzes the work of public-Health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen Hall about modern conditions of work, and concludes that “to be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as mentally.” Under wage labor, “a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy, and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours” while “epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work.”[85]

Wage slavery, and the educational system that precedes it “implies power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption… in spite of… good intentions … [Leadership means] power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his … [and the] order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being ‘the men’ … In a word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy.” For the “leader”, such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader “sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion.”[86] Wage slavery “implies erosion of the human personality… [because] some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows.”[87]

[edit] Materialistic notion of self

Erich Fromm noted that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then when that person loses (or even thinks of losing) what he “owns” (e.g. the good looks or sharp mind that allow him to sell his labor for high wages), then, a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies because that person’s sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when a person’s sense of self is based on what he experiences in a state of being (creativity, ego or loss of ego, love, sadness, taste, sight etc.) with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost, or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail. The state of being, in his view, flourishes under a worker-managed workplace and economy, whereas self-ownership entails a materialistic notion of self, created to rationalize the lack of worker control that would allow for a state of being.[88] [89]

Due to this lack of control, the exploited worker, according to Marx, “puts his life into the object… [and thus] the greater his activity…the less he possesses…[H]is labour becomes an object…[and] the life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force”[90] And since the worker could be working for wages or saving money instead of enjoying life or having fun, (which in a capitalist society often costs money), “all passions and all activity is submerged in avarice…[and] the less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life.”[91]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

[TheJoker]

Now for my definition of modern slavery.

A modern slave is a individual dispossessed of their own independence and sense of self but more importantly from the rest of society at large.

They are forced to work for low wages because they are unable and denied to do any other kind of job or occupation within society.

They may quit a job that they don’t like but once they look for another position to survive off of they are left with only similar jobs that have the same exact conditions of the ones they worked prior. They can choose different masters but at each end they are still reduced to slaves.

The poverty of their occupational income becomes the poverty of their lives.

The sense of forced social identity from their occupations becomes the very existential depression of their lives.

There is of course the modern sense of education which people can utilize to improve their situation if they’re able to but this assumes that everybody has the same equal capacities for knowledge or intelligence. Those who cannot conform or comprehend the standardized demands of higher education automatically become reduced to slaves within every modern society.

In a world of technological, mechanical, and industrial obsession individuals unable to comprehend or conform to the tenets of it’s status quo become existentially considered obsolete by collective society as a whole when it concerns the notions of prejudices where they are seen as useless bottom feeders.

Such obsolete individuals become herded up stamped under the label of poor and given the ultimatum that they can only exist by endlessly laboring away for those with more wealth or power then themselves.

The ultimatum is they can only hope to survive, exist, and live in servitude only.

[turtle]

yes and there will be more… more… more…

[TheJoker]

@turtle

yes and there will be more… more… more…

Indeed. It seems like human societies can’t exist without millions of endless laboring slaves.

You just really got to like the morality and ethics of human cultural societies.

(Specifically the lack of where there supposedly exists some.)

Apparently morality and ethics only concerns themselves with the perceivement of those who are in control of societies because nobody dare questions what the slaves think are “right” or “wrong” when it concerns their own existence. Why would they? They are simply just slaves afterall.

This is the chimaira that no foolish ethical or moral philosopher can escape from no matter how hard they try and the one in which the nihilist laughs behind.

On the one hand the moral or ethical politician will speak of the collective greater “good” yet in the otherhand there exists a whip and gun to which he herds the endless millions of slaves behind into social obedience. The moralists and ethicists delude themselves but the nihilist stands in the background seeing all of reality for what it really is beyond the absurd haze of ideals.

[uglypeoplefucking]

personally i don’t think there’s a whole lot to be said about modern day slavery - it’s one of those things where you can either appreciate what it means to devote your life to menial tasks for subsistence level wages, or you can hide behind privelage and judge those who, on the whims of circumstance, have no other choice.

[TheJoker]

@uglypeoplefucking

personally i don’t think there’s a whole lot to be said about modern day slavery - it’s one of those things where you can either appreciate what it means to devote your life to menial tasks for subsistence level wages, or you can hide behind privelage and judge those who, on the whims of circumstance, have no other choice.

I think it is a fascinating subject to be honest. The history of human slavery from the past to the present is a interesting one I think.

What we see is the lack of morality and ethics in human civilization where supposedly there is that which is posited as existing.

When I discuss the contradictions of both social morality and ethics this subject comes to my mind as a perfect way of illustrating such.

Either morality and ethics exist or they don’t.

When it concerns the tolerant practices of human slavery it appears that both don’t exist even when posited as existing.

What we have here then in all actuality is human beings voided of all morality and ethics altogether. Morality or ethics then becomes all about pretending in some fictitious dog and pony show.

[Abstract]

@TheJoker

If we were going to describe modern day slaves when it concerns individuals that are enslaved by low wages that are forced to take particular jobs because they are denied anything else, how about would we go about doing that?

How would we describe the modern state of slavery today?

Debt; usury.

[Lollipop_King]

Root cause?
Ownership, and its collateral effects.

The entire political and socioeconomic capitalistic system is based on the mythology of ownership.
The system gives you the “right” to property, and defends it for you. In return you must service the system, fight on its behalf and support its structures. Then it rewards you with access to more property and the privileges associated with it.

The world cut up into little pieces and disseminated to the individuals that have proven themselves worthy to the institutions that guarantee ownership.
Disappoint or turn against the system and this “right” is taken away in a heartbeat.
The irony is to be living next to abundance and be starving to death, or to be living next to water and be dying of thirst.

[uglypeoplefucking]

@Satyr

Root cause?
Ownership, and its collateral effects.

The entire political and socioeconomic capitalistic system is based on the mythology of ownership.
The system gives you the “right” to property, and defends it for you. In return you must service the system, fight on its behalf and support its structures. Then it rewards you with access to more property and the privileges associated with it.

The world cut up into little pieces and disseminated to the individuals that have proven themselves worthy to the institutions that guarantee ownership.
Disappoint or turn against the system and this “right” is taken away in a heartbeat.
The irony is to be living next to abundance and be starving to death, or to be living next to water and be dying of thirst.

yes yes yes.

[eyesinthedark]

ok, so, we’ve identified the problem, what can we do about it? i know, let’s not take part in a system that’s rigged against us. how many people would play a game of monopoly, where the banker already owns all the property and can print himself more money at whim? The answer: almost everybody. we should only play by the rules if they serve us, if they don’t, we should begin collectively breaking the rules, now! Nevermind communist or socialist revolution, nevermind government, that’s another scam, a counterfit prolaterian movement, (to borrow that stupid fucking jerkoff marx’s term) a movement funded by the propertied class to molest us even more. if you see something you like at walmart, take it, shoplift it, deprive the capitalist of his property. i don’t fear anarchy because i have nothing at stake and nothing to lose, i’m dirt poor, i have no property, i am this chattel slave you speak of, 'cept i do a piss poor job and i steal.

[Abstract]

@Satyr

Root cause?
Ownership, and its collateral effects.

The entire political and socioeconomic capitalistic system is based on the mythology of ownership.
The system gives you the “right” to property, and defends it for you. In return you must service the system, fight on its behalf and support its structures. Then it rewards you with access to more property and the privileges associated with it.

The world cut up into little pieces and disseminated to the individuals that have proven themselves worthy to the institutions that guarantee ownership.
Disappoint or turn against the system and this “right” is taken away in a heartbeat.
The irony is to be living next to abundance and be starving to death, or to be living next to water and be dying of thirst.

It would seem to me that if one can have a right to the property of the body (or even their own thoughts) then one can have the right to other properties, the problem is rather people being greedy, which is an issue of what some call morals, others might rather call psychology. To say ownership of property is wrong is like (for a more extreme example) saying that it is wrong to have a hand because it can kill someone, when what needs to be corrected isn’t the possession of hands but the psychology behind the use of the hands.

[eyesinthedark]

some good points you brought up joker, i wonder if civilization can even exist without slavery, without exploitation, i don’t think it can, so anarchy it is then, only follow the rules if you’re on an even playing field, fuck they don’t even follow their own rules, so to hell with them, let’s stop worshiping this thing they call… p r o p e r t y… this alien concept can only mean one thing to a poor man, bondage! i no longer believe in property, i believe in possession. who owns that walmart over there, the workers who work and practically live there. who owns the apartment space i live in, me, i’m here every fucking day, the landlord’s (landlord, what is this, feudalism?) probably in china, it belongs to me. primitive people didn’t recognize property, they recognized possession. possession is a ntural sacred holy concept, property is artificial and manipulative.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogypBUCb7DA[/youtube]

[Abstract]

@eyesinthedark

some good points you brought up joker, i wonder if civilization can even exist without slavery, without exploitation, i don’t think it can, so anarchy it is then, only follow the rules if you’re on an even playing field, fuck they don’t even follow their own rules, so to hell with them, let’s stop worshiping this thing they call… p r o p e r t y… this alien concept can only mean one thing to a poor man, bondage! i no longer believe in property, i believe in possession. who owns that walmart over there, the workers who work and practically live there. who owns the apartment space i live in, me, i’m here every fucking day, the landlord’s (landlord, what is this, feudalism?) probably in china, it belongs to me. primitive people didn’t recognize property, they recognized possession. possession is a ntural sacred holy concept, property is artificial and manipulative.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogypBUCb7DA[/youtube]

Oh I didn’t realize you were differentiating between property and possession. Yes I might think that it is silly for a person to think they own something by having been the first to have it, when it has come to be predominantly of another, that does not make even mathematical sense. But then one who has worked hard to build a business I don’t think should have it taken over by those who would change it into something else, and therein it would seem just for them to hold to it such as to keep it as it was meant to be?

[eyesinthedark]

Oh I didn’t realize you were differentiating between property and possession. Yes I might think that it is silly for a person to think they own something by having been the first to have it, when it has come to be predominantly of another, that does not make even mathematical sense. But then one who has worked hard to build a business I don’t think should have it taken over by those who would change it into something else, and therein it would seem just for them to hold to it such as to keep it as it was meant to be?

i don’t know about you, but i like diversity, the end of property would mean the end of large, uniform corporations and more even distribution of wealth and creative control. possession is superior to property in every regard.

[Abstract]

@eyesinthedark

Oh I didn’t realize you were differentiating between property and possession. Yes I might think that it is silly for a person to think they own something by having been the first to have it, when it has come to be predominantly of another, that does not make even mathematical sense. But then one who has worked hard to build a business I don’t think should have it taken over by those who would change it into something else, and therein it would seem just for them to hold to it such as to keep it as it was meant to be?

i don’t know about you, but i like diversity, the end of property would mean the end of large, uniform corporations and more even distribution of wealth and creative control. possession is superior to property in every regard.

It would seem that given a perfect distribution of wealth and what not, there would be no need for trade of anything, but then that is not entirely true because such would facilitate the trade of information, as what is known would then be the only relatively valuable product. In other words learning and studying? Though it is likewise plausible that people would endorse in sharing useless tidbit of information like what they chose to have to drink in the morning and what they are doing every step of the way…The problem it would seem with the attempted execution of such in Russia is that the control of all things was left to the government and thus it became that really they owned things, and thus manipulated with it. Whereas their needs to be a form of equality of possession that is fair and not controlled by any entity that can take it over. i don’t know that such can be implemented given what we know and have at our disposal today, though i am open to suggestions. (then I question what would induce people to learn and study if it had no use given possession already of all that is needed…) but given that such perfect possession is not possible it seems reasonable at least to direct towards more fair considerations of possession. It would be reasonable to do things like permitting companies to be owned equally by all who participate in them…with limitations on amount of possession and or influence on control… but overall care needs to be taken to insure that mobs of action do not form. for example such a business could be lead into a state where the people have a stupid idea that spreads due to social pressure rather than logicality, and thus they end up doing something or voting for something silly, as such it would seem some sort of moderator is needed, something to delay reactions and at least redirect things for reconsideration on the basis of seeming mob-ality, wherein it would seem important for that moderate to hold some form of separation from the mass opinion…IDK

[Gobbo]

@eyesinthedark

ok, so, we’ve identified the problem, what can we do about it? i know, let’s not take part in a system that’s rigged against us. how many people would play a game of monopoly, where the banker already owns all the property and can print himself more money at whim? The answer: almost everybody. we should only play by the rules if they serve us, if they don’t, we should begin collectively breaking the rules, now! Nevermind communist or socialist revolution, nevermind government, that’s another scam, a counterfit prolaterian movement, (to borrow that stupid fucking jerkoff marx’s term) a movement funded by the propertied class to molest us even more. if you see something you like at walmart, take it, shoplift it, deprive the capitalist of his property. i don’t fear anarchy because i have nothing at stake and nothing to lose, i’m dirt poor, i have no property, i am this chattel slave you speak of, 'cept i do a piss poor job and i steal.

This.

Joker, if you’re reading, this is where you want to take your philosophy.

Cause nihilism is just something people talk about on philosophy forums.

[Gobbo]

@eyesinthedark

Oh I didn’t realize you were differentiating between property and possession. Yes I might think that it is silly for a person to think they own something by having been the first to have it, when it has come to be predominantly of another, that does not make even mathematical sense. But then one who has worked hard to build a business I don’t think should have it taken over by those who would change it into something else, and therein it would seem just for them to hold to it such as to keep it as it was meant to be?

i don’t know about you, but i like diversity, the end of property would mean the end of large, uniform corporations and more even distribution of wealth and creative control. possession is superior to property in every regard.

Yah, you don’t actually own any of the things you supposedly own anyways. It’s highly technical, and the payoff of ‘tinfoil hat’ is not enough for me to type it out.

Cool sidepoint: ‘real estate,’ like…80% of the English language, is a Masonic play on words. Cause there is most certainly false estate. Of course… we don’t call it that. That would be obvious.

[uglypeoplefucking]

@TheJoker

@uglypeoplefucking

personally i don’t think there’s a whole lot to be said about modern day slavery - it’s one of those things where you can either appreciate what it means to devote your life to menial tasks for subsistence level wages, or you can hide behind privelage and judge those who, on the whims of circumstance, have no other choice.

I think it is a fascinating subject to be honest. The history of human slavery from the past to the present is a interesting one I think.

it’s fascinating, you’re right - i wasn’t expressing disinterest - i’m not sure why i said it that way - what i mean is that because it is a type of suffering there is a sense in which wage slavery can only be experienced firsthand and cannot be adequately conveyed with words. in particular, those who enjoy the privelages it enables often have a hard time appreciating it for what it is. it is everywhere taken for granted. nonetheless there is much to be said about it, so i retract the first part of my comment.

What we see is the lack of morality and ethics in human civilization where supposedly there is that which is posited as existing.

When I discuss the contradictions of both social morality and ethics this subject comes to my mind as a perfect way of illustrating such.

Either morality and ethics exist or they don’t.

When it concerns the tolerant practices of human slavery it appears that both don’t exist even when posited as existing.

What we have here then in all actuality is human beings voided of all morality and ethics altogether. Morality or ethics then becomes all about pretending in some fictitious dog and pony show.

i love the term “business ethics”. nobody seems to ever notice how oxymoronic it is.

i think what you’re saying is true to a point, but you have to be specific about what you mean when you say they don’t exist. clearly they exist as phenomena - people practice and profess them. they shape the course of events. you’re right however that they are often hypocritical and built upon fictions.

[TheJoker]

@uglypeoplefucking

@TheJoker

@uglypeoplefucking

personally i don’t think there’s a whole lot to be said about modern day slavery - it’s one of those things where you can either appreciate what it means to devote your life to menial tasks for subsistence level wages, or you can hide behind privelage and judge those who, on the whims of circumstance, have no other choice.

I think it is a fascinating subject to be honest. The history of human slavery from the past to the present is a interesting one I think.

it’s fascinating, you’re right - i wasn’t expressing disinterest - i’m not sure why i said it that way - what i mean is that because it is a type of suffering there is a sense in which wage slavery can only be experienced firsthand and cannot be adequately conveyed with words. in particular, those who enjoy the privelages it enables often have a hard time appreciating it for what it is. it is everywhere taken for granted. nonetheless there is much to be said about it, so i retract the first part of my comment.

What we see is the lack of morality and ethics in human civilization where supposedly there is that which is posited as existing.

When I discuss the contradictions of both social morality and ethics this subject comes to my mind as a perfect way of illustrating such.

Either morality and ethics exist or they don’t.

When it concerns the tolerant practices of human slavery it appears that both don’t exist even when posited as existing.

What we have here then in all actuality is human beings voided of all morality and ethics altogether. Morality or ethics then becomes all about pretending in some fictitious dog and pony show.

i love the term “business ethics”. nobody seems to ever notice how oxymoronic it is.

i think what you’re saying is true to a point, but you have to be specific about what you mean when you say they don’t exist. clearly they exist as phenomena - people practice and profess them. they shape the course of events. you’re right however that they are often hypocritical and built upon fictions.

People say that it exists as phenomena yet as a structure in of itself it is so entirely inconsistent,imperfect, flawed, and contradictive that it makes one wonder why it even exists at all as a belief. What is the function of such inconsistent morality and ethics?

Morality and ethics are the most contradictive beliefs out there when it concerns the various deceptions as systematic ideologies.

The functioning in morality and ethics is not about some fictional “good” or “virtue” as it says that it exists for as it concerns it’s own contradictions of tolerating the direct opposite of those concepts will prove but if we study the ideologies long enough both in all reality are actually purely centered around initiated control only.

Both serve to control human behavior only and to direct the activities of people they impose themselves on.

Both seek to condition the human mind and behavior in directed control by those in power doing the conditioning.

Like any other belief morality and ethics is all about faith of convictions in winning over hearts or minds. Mind control? You decide.

So at the end of the day morality and ethics purely revolve around the tyranny of controlled manipulation.

Both are beliefs that prey upon people’s emotions, thoughts, goals, dreams, and aspirations when it concerns the controlled manipulations of their daily activities in a coordinated directed manner.

Enacted pain, violence, and punishment all in the service of manipulated “goods” or “virtues” are used in order to herd the masses into mental and physical submission.

With morality and ethics the threat of pain or punishment serves as a useful theatrical display of psychological warfare.

Once the psychological warfare is put into the practice the population becomes terrorized into mental and physical obedience to which the outcome becomes a controlled manipulative predictable coordination of directed behavioral activities. This is also called social conformity.