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John Quiggin's avatar

I don't think this kind of binary works. For example, where would you place conscripted soldiers? How about those who enlisted voluntarily, but are then subject to military discipline including punishment for desertion? At least in theory, indentured apprentices are in the same position as indentured labourers. And so on.

By trying to take the position that any form of unavoidable labour is slavery, you risk ending up in line with the Southern advocates of chattel slavery who said that Northern workers were "wage slaves" or even with people like Nozick who claim that income tax constitutes enslavement.

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ken taylor's avatar

Your article is great. All of the comments are spot-on. My family descended from Cromwell's rounding up of the Irish and forcing them into indenturetude. (Note exactly a real word but it expresses my sentiment.) But just as a note, since you brought the history of slavery into the mix. Slavery, traditionally were spoils of war, or in the case of indentured, sometimes sending off {enslaved} prisoners. Philosophy bear, I think is Australian and was colonized as a penal colony, and I have limited knowledge about Australia.

But in US slavery became something different. It wasn't about blacks being chattel slaves--it was about a race being enslaved over skin color. Blacks that were free were still enslaved by legal suppression. It was apartheid crafted to make indentured, former indentured, and any poor white person to be legally superior.. The civil war in that sense freed all blacks from being chattel but did nothing to make the color of their skin of the freed black people "as free as" the white skinned people who may have been of lesser educational or economic well-being. No matter how economically low or educationally insufficient a white person in America may be he proclaims himself as superior to the most well-educated or economically successful black person. By proclaiming the black "race" (not a race) a "slave" race, whites dfo not see having been indentured as "unfree" and a black whose family may never have been enslaved cannot ever be free of the stigmas of having been a bonded person. This becomes a complicated mess when attempting to grant "equal" legal protections to blacks who no matter how equal a black may become it can be viewed as equal only because the law hasn't given him an "unfair" access to equality.

So what to do? I don't know. But perhaps Madison (& later Lincoln & later Elijah Muhammad) were right Black and white Americans can never be free together within American borders. Whites view black equality as threatening and granting equality to blacks as lessening their own freedom. Blacks continue to feel harassed and treated as if they are not equal. Somehow American freedom has been built on a concept of rationed freedom, as if one man's freedom deprives another of his portion of freedom.

I don't understand it...but there it is...the proclamation of a distinctively unique freedom that measures chattledom by color and proportioned limits upon freedom which has made the American subject to being thoroughly chattelized,

Jefferson's declaration sounds good on paper, but it was always limited in practice to who could have what amounts of freedom.

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