The Two Kinds of Slavery

I just had an epiphany over the weekend with respect to slavery. And it came to me as I puzzle over my Great Reaction notion that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

But, of course, under feudalism they also had slavery: voluntary slavery. It is described in The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. You could go to your feudal lord in Britain in the year 1000 and place your head in his hands and become his bondsman. The lord gave you a bill-hook and three squares for the rest of your life. It was called "head for food."

So there are two kinds of slavery: conquest slavery and voluntary slavery. You can become a slave in the aftermath of your tribe being conquered. Presumably all the adult males would be killed and the women and children sold into slavery. But you can also place yourself into slavery, and say "I give up. Look after me, Master, because I can't take it any more."

Yes, but we are beyond all that, right?

I don't think so. Let's rewrite my Great Reaction maxim like this.

Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to conquest slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; welfare is a return to "head-for-food" slavery; identity politics is neo-tribalism; etc.

I have done a piece or two on welfare that indicates how close it is to slavery. In "A Brief History of Welfare" I note the various stages in England since the year 1000.

• "Head for food" slavery.
• Early vagrancy laws.
• First Poor Law in 1597.
• Workhouses in 1830s: "indoor relief."
• Modern welfare: "outdoor relief."

Let us try to think what happened between each stage. I imagine that in the "head for food" slavery days that there was no social space outside being the vassal of your local lord. And if you caused any trouble the lord had no trouble in dealing with you. But in the Tudor era of the 16th century two things were going on. First, the feudal monarchies supported by feudal nobles were turning into absolute monarchies financed by merchant credit. This meant that monarchs could finance their armies through the credit system rather than the private feudal hosts of the nobles. So the nobles weren't interested in "head for food" slaves eating their heads off that might be useful in the odd little war.

Second, the feudal lords themselves got involved in the money economy and started to "improve" their lands by draining the swamps and trying new agricultural methods: the agricultural revolution. Oh, and also by "enclosing" common lands. This created a "surplus population."

The first Poor Laws at the end of the 16th century were a way to keep the poor out of the cities, and dispersed in the countryside. Each parish had to look after its own poor, and the poor were not allowed to move around. Then, by the early 19th century, there was enough money to build "workhouses" to imprison the poor and put them to work. Was this just "head for food" slavery by another name? You tell me.

But really, the problem of the poor and vagrancy didn't get solved until the Industrial Revolution put the poor to work in factories. Then the landless, starving poor headed for the industrial cities where they got jobs. But here is a question: in the disciplined work of factories are things any different? Workers are extremely disciplined and ordered around, and after a while they start to believe that their employers "owe" them their jobs and benefits as a lifetime obligation. Is this that different from "head for food" slavery? You tell me.

In our age, with its real per-capita income about 30 times what it was two centuries ago, we can afford to throw our hand up with regard to the poor. So the poor apply to their local social-services bureaucrat for welfare and housing vouchers and EBT "cards for food." Is this not a kind of slavery? Do not the modern welfare recipients place their heads in the hand of the social worker in return for three squares a day?

And how different is this from the situation of the average corporate or government worker that works under an informal job-for-life contract? When a corporation or a government "down-sizes" do not the workers feel betrayed? Have they not, in fact, enslaved themselves to their corporate or government master in return for three squares?

This is thrown for me into stark relief with the situation of teenage migrant Chinese workers -- described in Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang -- that have left the farm, because nothing is happening -- for the crazy world of the big city factories, where they learn that it is up to them to get ahead, because they are on their own.

It makes me wonder what the English factory workers of the early 19th century thought about their lives and their work.

In our day we make a big deal about the conquest slavery of the plantations, where West Africans were sold by African chiefs to Brit and Dutch slavers and sent to the Americas.

And we've made a big deal about freeing the plantation slaves and how we owe them reparations.

But we don't make much of a deal of the hundred million Russians that were bundled into slavery in the Soviet Union. And how Mao Zedong enslaved hundreds of millions of Chinese into his slave-state hell. It seems, to our more advanced citizens, that these horrors are just "stuff happens."

But I think that subordination, slavery if you will, is still very much alive today, and for two reasons. First, there are a lot of humans that get off on subordinating other humans to their physical and moral hegemony. Second, there are a lot of humans that prefer to live as subordinates rather than accept the risks of responsibility.

So I think that we should be careful about patting ourselves on the back for "ending slavery." I think there is still a lot of slavery around. We just don't call it "slavery" and we don't call the subordinates in question "slaves."