What We Keep

You know what I wonder. I wonder where one group of people gets off thinking another group of people are sub human and not worthy of the same rights. I mean I just don't understand how you can even have a brain and think that.

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telesilla.livejournal.com

As a white disabled dyke married to a Black bisexual woman, I wonder that all the time.

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*snorts*

Well I'm white (course Irish and they didn't like us coming off the boat either) and hetro but I live in the south and I'm telling you history class used to drive me fucking insane. I would have been hung for treason had I lived in Civil War times and lived in the south. Course my dad is from the North so maybe I'd have ended up there.

Hmmm.

What confuses me even more is that history continues to repeat itself and we never learn from our mistakes.

From as far back in Biblical day to the current mess on almost every continent there are groups of people treated less than human based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and sometimes just because they exist and it's like a vicious circle with no end. I think that's why this verse is disturbing but addictive because it could so very easily happen.

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I have several Irish muses (am half and half myself) and the first thing one of them said when I read all this 'verse was "Fucking Cromwell." *snort*

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*giggles* My dad is French Irish and my mom is Welsh Irish can you say TEMPER.

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I'm a mix of Irish, English, German, and Russian. I'm going to invade your country, steal your potatoes, and make them into vodka.

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Hey now hands off my potatoes. We already had the potatoe famine once damn it!

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That was kind of my point. ;) (That would be the Irish blood...)

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guard-the-cards.livejournal.com

I think that it's actually very easy to see how it happens. When you think of in this verse, the positive things that come from beliving in the system (slaves doing what you want, having attractive people who you will do your every will sexually, not having to pay heavy fines) you would quickly adapt to it.

In a more modern argument you can say that for people who have very little, or who have issues with believing in their own self worth, the idea of thinking you are above a certain group does a lot for you. My grandfather was poor, uneducated, and white, but at least he was better then the "fags and n-ggers". These prejudices allow for moral superiority, especially when those groups are either making headway in life (moving up the social ladder, being accepted in public), or when their own group is being held back (mass lay offs or considerable change in the status Quo)

The same thing is done in the dehumanization of the enemy. Russian during World War One was our ally but quickly after we turned them into our enemy by manipulating fear of what a lot of American's feel strongly about, their way of life which had just been vastly improved. By playing into this, the government was able to create the "Red Scare" which went away again after Germany betrayed the USSR and then the USSR turned to our side. Soon after again the government changed people's minds and had them hating and fearing the "Ruskies" or "Pinko Commies".

Now back to the "A Kept Boy" verse, when you look at people who have had maybe two or three generations (or how ever far back Slavery pt 2 was) and being told that you are not only to care for a slave but that the slave is yours, that by virtue of their or their parent's fiscal irresponsibility they would otherwise be a burden on society you could see how easily someone could delude themselves that they were called upon to care for this person. Even though debt, which is a whole lot easier to fall into then skin colour, is the only difference.

Basically it is that we can not be right if someone else isn't wrong, we can not be good if someone else isn't bad.

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My whole problem though is who made them God and said they were better. I mean how did they get to be better. Obviously they're not but they have placed themselves above everyone and they look down their noses.

Maybe it's because I don't think I'm better than the next person that I can't wrap my brain around it.

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guard-the-cards.livejournal.com

Its always the group in power, could be brute strength (as US settelers over Native Americans) could be economic (The way we keep people in the ghettos) could be a system that is formed by only those who can afford it being in there, and thus not arguing for the rights fo the people who elect them, but instead for those who give them the money to be elected (The US government)

Heck it could even be because some watery tart threw a sword at you. Just so long as others belive you are in power, or you have the means to back that power, which normally means might, economic status and some sort of body other then yourself that claims you have the right to do so.

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dragovianknight.livejournal.com

I don't understand it, but I think we see a reflection of it in our own world, among the people who think the poor "deserve" it, because clearly poverty is caused by some character flaw.

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Yes of course because it's always easy to blame someone else.

I think sometimes we look at the very few people who don't care and want the handout and say okay everyone does. I had a girl working for me that wanted to work but she had two kids and if she wanted to keep her insurance through the social services she couldn't work but so many hours and of course with kids you couldn't afford not to have insurance so she wound up having to quit.

We make it almost impossible for people to better themselves it's very frustrating to wittness much less live.

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I would say it's more ethical to keep slaves and treat them well. If you work on the basis that there will be slaves, and they will be treated badly by most, then it's better for you to give some as decent a life as possible. It doesn't strike me as being like the fur market, where if you buy some, you're encouraging trade. I'm not sure why - I'm rushing out the door, I'll think on that more later - but it seems like people are becoming slaves out of circumstance, not so much because the market pushes for more.

So if you can't reduce the number of slaves that there are, you can at least reduce the number that are treated really, really badly (while working towards removing slavery full stop.)

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dairwendan.livejournal.com

As I see it, the ethical problems in the AKB universe are these -

If a large enough movement of people obligated to own slaves pay the fines instead until there is no demasnd for slaves, then eventually the practice will stop. The final denominator is always money and eventually when Commerce finds that they are paying for slaves but cannot sell them, the practice would stop.

The same would happen if a large enough movement decided to live poor.

However, in the time it takes for this to come about, probably years, there are still many people stuck in the slave system. And, as the demand lessens, the overpopulation of slaves in the system would cause them to be treated even worse that previously. Less space, less food, less care, etc.

Also, once the slave system was abolished, there would be huge numbers of slaves like Jensen, who wouldn't know how to do anything else. Where would they go? Would they live on the street? They have nothing, no families, no friends, no possessions, not even clothing. How would they survive? If they were taken in by abolitionists or former masters, and they continued to perform their former duties for room and board, or even a little pay, wouldn't they basically still be slaves?

There would be enormous unresolved debt once the option of selling someone to get out of debt was removed and most likely there would be a resulting depression, leaving even fewer people who migt have the resources to pay a slave for their services.

Commerce and any other slave related institutions or companies would no longer have a reason to exist, so that would be another large number of unemployed people, dragging the economy down further.

It would take a toll on the entire population, and the ultimate outcome would be unknown. Undoubtedly though there would be much suffereing, and probably death from starvation, neglect, health problems going untreated, suicide and murder.

Could society survive such an upheaval?

Or is it better to own as many slaves as one can afford and treat them with dignity and respect, doing your best to influence others to do the same, and hope that eventually enough of those obligated to own slaves would come to see them as people and admit the immorality of the system, and dismantle it is a slower, more controlled way. First strengtheing the adherence to laws concerning the treatment of slaves and removing them from abuse. Passing manumission laws so that slaves can be given their freedom. Setting the amount of debt that a human being can be sold for very high, forcing a portion of the public to find another way to deal with debt. Establishing training programs and living communities for former slaves. And eventually easing everyone out of the system without crashing the economy.

But this of course is based on a hope that people who have been raised to see slaves as property will be willing or able to change their thought processes and their comfortable way of life. And that this would happen before all of the humane masters are either arrested, or fined to the point that they can no longer keep slaves.

In one way Kate and Jeff, though they seem to be working for the same thing, are somewhat working againt one another because I don't think that both resolutions can bring about the end of slavery in combination.

I'm writing a fic right now in which a person who finds slavery abhorrent sees slaves for sale and finds himself compelled to give one a home. He accepts the hated position of 'slave owner' in order to save one person. He is propagating slavery by participating in the system, but he is doing it to save one person from a life of slavery.

That is his decision. Until enough people are able to join together in one movement or another, each person has to make the decision on his or her own, according to his or her conscience. But does that help the slaves?

From:

lj_stowaway

Yes, what you said. This is very like what's been going through my head as I ponder this 'verse but I could never had laid it out so clearly.

Thank you!

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adrian-turtle.livejournal.com

If a large enough movement of people obligated to own slaves pay the fines instead until there is no demasnd for slaves, then eventually the practice will stop.

The stories are about body slaves, but there's no reason to think the economic force of any slaveowning system has much to do with body slaves. There are a lot more people working in sweatshops, or doing service work for businesses or government agencies, than there are selling their bodies for sex. (Do you know the Dar Williams song, Buzzer? "Tell me who made your clothes, was it children or men?")

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dairwendan.livejournal.com

Jensen is a body slave, and I believe most of the other fics contain body slaves, but the AKB universe includes slaves of all types: slaves who do manual labor, slaves who do clerical work, slaves who do dangerous work such as cleaning up toxic waste, educated slaves, uneducated slaves, slaves of all types. Individuals of a certain economic class or tax bracket are obligated to use an amount of their income to support slaves, but companies and corporations also have slaves, so I assume they are under the same obligation.

I don't know that slave owning is limited to those obligated to own them.

Are there non-slave sweatshops? I think that is a question left open by the FAQ so that each writer can answer depending upon how he or she views the universe.

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angiepen.livejournal.com

I think a key question here is just how much is the slave supply driven by demand?

That is, does Commerce somehow control the number of people enslaved to match within so many percentage points the projected demand for slaves within, say, a given year or decade? So if there are X number of people over the income level where slave ownership is mandatory (and are there multiple lines? so if you have a million you have to own one slave, if you hav five mil you have to own five? or something? or if you're over the line you just have to have one and any others are optional?) and they know from experience that Y percentage of those people will want to have Z number of "extra" slaves, that gives an estimate of demand, and Commerce knows they need N number of slaves available, plus or minus whatever.

I could see something similar to the sliding income tax scale, which changes occasionally, or a cost of living raise built into Social Security. So once per year or five years or ten or whatever, there's an adjustment of the amount of debt which will get you enslaved (with more estimates by the Commerce bean counters of how many new slaves that'll result in) to keep the supply sort of in line with the demand.

If it works more or less this way, then refusing to keep slaves and paying the fines, or dispersing your income through charitable donation (will that work?) or taking a lower-paying job so that you aren't obligated to keep slaves, will lower the demand, which will result in a raised debt threshold and fewer slaves. In that case, then refusing to own slaves at all would be a moral duty.

If, on the other hand, that's not how it works, then that sort of protest by the rich abolitionists wouldn't accomplish anything. If anyone with more than the threshold level of debt will be enslaved no matter what, period, then the rich paying fines or dumping their jobs or whatever would only result in some growing percentage of slaves who are stuck at Commerce because there are no positions for them in people's households. I don't know whether that's a better or worse life than that of your average slave who has a regular master, but I can't imagine it's terribly fulfilling and it is still slavery. The rich can financially martyr themselves all they want, but if it's not going to actually reduce the number of slaves, then it's actually counter-productive, because....

...if all the abolitionist rich people beggar themselves with either income reduction or paying fines every year (and who gets those fines, BTW? if the fines go through Commerce, then Commerce definitely has no incentive to do anything about the "protests") then the very people who still hold to a moral position on the subject of slavery are divesting themselves of the money (which means power and influence) they should be using to try to change the system. If the rich abolitionists protest themselves down into the middle class, then all they can do is protest. If they take in some slaves (and treat them well) and stay rich, they can use that money (and power and influence) to take political action to influence public opinion, influence the politicians, influence the people controlling the system and get it changed. Poor, they're just as helpless as anyone else, except the slaves themselves.

If it's a given that under the current system there will be slaves, I think it's a moral duty of good people to own slaves and treat them well. Slavery under a good master is still slavery and it still sucks, but it's the lesser (and sometimes by a metric ton) of two evils, when the alternative is being owned by someone like Lord Cruise. And when you've provided as safe a harbor as possible for as many slaves as you can support, then the next moral duty is to work to change the system. Even if it takes several generations, someone has to start.

Angie

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(and are there multiple lines? so if you have a million you have to own one slave, if you hav five mil you have to own five? or something? or if you're over the line you just have to have one and any others are optional?)

The minimum number of slaves you're required to own is based on a combination of income and location. David and Jason are multi-millionaires, but their minimum is two because they're a household of two in a loft in San Francisco, and not a large family on a sprawling estate in a less urban area.

I've been operating on the assumption that Commerce doesn't worry about oversupply because they haven't come close to meeting demand yet. On one end, corporations who rely on slave labor tend to need lots of people and have high turnover because they simply use people up. On the individual end of the scale, owning slaves is a status symbol. There will always be a market for pretty body-slaves if having at least one is a social necessity and a display of conspicuous consumption.

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angiepen.livejournal.com

So corporations can own slaves too? That makes sense, but I wasn't sure. Do they have a requirement threshold too, or is it just a matter of economic advantage for them so no one's bothered to pass any laws about it?

And it also makes sense that the cost of living where you are, and the size of your property would be factored in. [nod]

If there's more demand than supply, then I think the "good" rich people should definitely be buying slaves as a moral duty. If all the people of conscience bow out by one means or another, then that'll leave just the mid-range folks (like Mr. Neal, and realistically Liam, although he's a little farther up the range than Neal) and the real assholes (like Cruise) owning slaves.

Heck, I could see coalitions of the Good Rich People making some concerted effort to buy up as many pre-pubescent slaves as they could get ahold of, to prevent people like Cruise from getting them. Sort of like people in Texas buying cheap horses at auction just to prevent the meat packers' agents from buying them, turning them into steaks and selling them overseas where horse meat is popular. (With the comparison reflecting the suckitude of the system.)

Angie, who's getting more plot bunnies :P

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It's the old "is it better to fight the power from the outside, or work from the inside and risk getting co-opted by the system" argument. In this world, though, I think the ideological purity argument is inevitably a losing one. You're penalized in one way or another for refusing to own slaves; there's no way for slaves to be legally freed and escape is next to impossible, and the USNA is a slightly-post-modern surveillance state where citizens are constantly monitored. So you have no way to influence anything if you don't own slaves yourself, there's nowhere for slaves to go and no viable path to freedom, and it's hard to plot an armed revolution when you're always being watched.

The lack of influence is really the big one, I think: how many actual slaves has Kate and David's mother helped, and how many has Dylan helped? Dylan has the money to throw at both the abolitionist cause and the Reformist party, his position as an wealthy Ivy-League-educated lawyer to use the law for good, and the status in society to make people listen to him and take him seriously--he's not a dirty fucking hippie, after all. He's well aware of the fact that his gradualist argument is self-serving; if slavery were abolished tomorrow, he'd have no idea how to do things like cook his own food, clean his house, or do his laundry. But it's still true that the slaves in his household don't have to fear being sold or being punished at their master's whim, and they're allowed as much autonomy and dignity as is possible in that society. There's a place for conscientious objectors in the movement, certainly, but the structure of the world makes it difficult for that to be much more than a symbolic act of resistance.

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Leonard Cohen said, They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.

The thing about a system is well, it's systemic. It would be impossible in a slave society to participate in any way in the economy as a free person without benefiting from the existence, however removed and unseen, of slaves. That fuzzy sweater of Cate's, who made that? The chair that Jensen perches on so uncomfortably, where did it come from? (I'm picking on her because she's the only person we've actually met who eschews ownership completely.) So the question becomes, is it possible to be a free person and remain free of sin.

The phrase liberal guilt gets used in some of these stories, to describe Dylan and Cate and the campaigner Joe meets one day, even David and Jason. It's valid certainly, but I think all of those people are motivated as well by something a little less savoury. They want to feel free of sin, they want to feel important, they want to feel special. It is, to one degree or another, all about them.

So which one of them has done anything, ever that has had an effect on someone they don't know? Which one of them has done more than sweep the dirt from their own floor? At this point, maybe Dylan, but maybe none of them.

It could be said, that the only moral choice is the person we haven't seen yet, the person who puts on the ninja black and skulks about in the deep of night, slitting the throats of the owners. But then, that body slave, the one who wakes covered in blood, how is his life suddenly better? Maybe the moral choice is the person who spray paints slogans on the wall, Ownership is a State of Mind - Change Your Mind. But what would Joe say when he drove past that wall in his Master's car?

Maybe the only moral choice is to sit and wait for the first field hand or miner somewhere to say, hey, there's more of us than there are of them, and then give him a gun.

From:

epeeblade

Maybe the only moral choice is to sit and wait for the first field hand or miner somewhere to say, hey, there's more of us than there are of them, and then give him a gun.

I'm waiting for this. If everything is dependent on slaves - to the food grown, to the factory work, it's only a matter of time before they all rise up, because ultimately, they control the quality of life for the rich.

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It does seem inevitable in some light, and we have had successful workers revolutions in our own history.

But that was another country, and besides Che is dead.

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Maybe the only moral choice is to sit and wait for the first field hand or miner somewhere to say, hey, there's more of us than there are of them, and then give him a gun.

I'm waiting for this. If everything is dependent on slaves - to the food grown, to the factory work, it's only a matter of time before they all rise up, because ultimately, they control the quality of life for the rich.

There are a couple of reasons why this is unlikely to happen yet. The big one is the level of surveillance. Nearly everything you do in public is monitored. Slaves are both branded and chipped--not foolproof, as

angiepen has shown, but still difficult to get around.

Slaves who somehow manage to run discover that there's nowhere to go. Most countries, even those who've severed diplomatic ties with the Empire, still won't take refugee slaves. A few places will look the other way, like New Zealand--but you have to get there, and for most people, the consequences of getting caught greatly outweigh the risk.

For, say, the mining slaves, escape is even more difficult because they're in space. The orbital stations and mining platforms rely on contact with Earth; even if someone was able to mount a successful revolt, as soon as they allowed a shuttle to dock with supplies, they'd be overrun by government troops.

There's no legal path to freedom--and if there is a change, that's where it's going to come. Eventually, a tipping point will be reached where slaves dramatically outnumber free people, and the majority of them are in situations where they feel they have nothing to lose. The quickest way to create a safety valve is to make freedom a hard-to-reach but not impossible goal.

The Romans relied on slaves, but they did realize that the only way to have a stable society was to use the carrot along with the stick. After Spartacus, Roman law said that if a slave killed his master, all of the slaves in the household, without exception, would be executed--usually by crucifixion, a truly awful way to die. At the same time, though, slaves could be freed by their masters (often in their wills), or they could buy their freedom using money from extra jobs that they were allowed to keep. It wasn't easy, no--but there were visible freedmen all over Rome. The choice between violent revolt resulting in agonizing death--not just for you, but for ever other slave in the household--and hanging onto the hope that someday you'll be able to get out, who's going to choose the former? That's the main reason Dylan is in favor of the gradualist approach, because it's an argument that appeals to the self-interest of the ruling classes (including him).

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epeeblade

See, I wasn't aware of the miners being in space. (Just how powerful is this empire? How much of the rest of the world is against them?)

I think the numbers issue is what will eventually get them, when there are more slaves then free.

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See, I wasn't aware of the miners being in space. (Just how powerful is this empire? How much of the rest of the world is against them?

PT's been deliberately vague on that. I should add that the miners being in space is my assumption based on the "orbital station" references--she may have something completely different in mind.

I think the numbers issue is what will eventually get them, when there are more slaves then free.

Yes. If there's no safety valve on the system and the current trends of more people being enslaved and the concentration of wealth continuing, then eventually, they'll reach a point where the slaves are the overwhelming majority--and they have nothing to lose by rebelling.

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epeeblade

The hopelessness of this universe is just starting to get to me a bit:) Once a slave, you can never, ever be free, and the society is so tightly bound, that even dreaming of revolution is impossible. And then you have slaves like Jensen who wouldn't know what to do with freedom if they were given it.

Just a wee bit depressing!

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The hopelessness of this universe is just starting to get to me a bit:) Once a slave, you can never, ever be free, and the society is so tightly bound, that even dreaming of revolution is impossible.

The thing that makes it work, for me, is focusing on how individuals negotiate their place in the system, and find a way to live with and under it. But it is grim, no question.

And then you have slaves like Jensen who wouldn't know what to do with freedom if they were given it.

I'm not sure Joe would either, to be honest. He's spent almost his entire life taking care of someone. If emancipation happened tomorrow, I think he'd probably want to stay with Jason and David--he'd just be a lot more open about how clueless he thinks they are. And then he'd jump them.

Just a wee bit depressing!

Yeah, I hear ya. Even the stuff like the Rachel/Kavan has a bittersweet undertone, because no matter how much they love each other, in the end, he's still her slave.

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What I was really saying - before coffee, gotta stop doing that- is that the moral question may be the wrong question.

The revolution is not around the corner. Sexualizing ownership of people is a brilliant way to get everybody who owns to want to keep the system the way it is. Talk about self-interest baby, that's it.

The owner who abhors ownership has to decide what has an actual effect beyond the stains on his own soul. Jeff's dilemma is so compelling because his own guilt is really just not the point, and he needs to learn that.

From:

zillah975

Eventually, a tipping point will be reached where slaves dramatically outnumber free people

Chiming in late. This speaks to something I've been thinking about for a few days, which is that it seems like the existence of corporate slaves would make this a self-perpetuating system. If slave labor weren't cheaper, corporations wouldn't use it; since it's cheaper, they'll prefer it to the exclusion of non-slave labor. It seems like this would create greater and greater unemployment and thus a larger and larger pool of people dropping into poverty and eventually slavery. So what we'll finally have is a system of the very rich and their slaves...except, then, who buys the products that keep the rich rich and the corporations producing?

This may just be a failure of imagination on my part, but it seems like our consumer culture relies on a large middle class with enough disposable income to perpetuate our consumer culture.

Erm.

It's possible that I should go to bed, I'm not sure I'm thinking clearly.

From:

i0am0crazy.livejournal.com

"Maybe the only moral choice is to sit and wait for the first field hand or miner somewhere to say, hey, there's more of us than there are of them, and then give him a gun."

And maybe the only moral choice is to talk to minors or factory workers and tell them their more and stronger and that together they´ll change the world... maybe then the first will rise and he will be beaten but then others will rise and they will have little victories and feel encouraged and someday they´ll be able to really change the world
unfortunately all of this is day dreaming... but who says ione shouldn´t dream of a better world.

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Well true enough, it's not like Che was actually a peasant himself.

I'm not married to my own conclusions. I'm rather attracted to that mythical graffiti artist, and Dylan at least is hanging his ass out in public, which is something.

From:

i0am0crazy.livejournal.com

well i wouldn´t call che the last revolutionist he´s just the most popular one. in fact i think the way he is presented today is more like a rock star,and what he did whas more of a geruilla fight and not a real revolution with the people getting power like it would have been necessary.

yeah it´s good he´s doing something,even if he´s doing that inside of the social structures he wants to overcome... even if he might be seen as hypocritical i think if there´s no other way of rescuing someone then buying him maybe it´s right.
i´m not sure if the people who would really start a riot are lost in the stories,because even if there were bourgeois wanting to change society it were always working class people who really did it... however i love the sweetness of this stories because in no other setting this would be possible reminds me a little bit of "the slave breakers" by masculategiraffe...

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wickhouse2005.livejournal.com

But the slaves have to get to the point that death is preferable to living as a slave. I do think that the revolution would have to come from the corporation slaves and not the ones individually owned. But we can also conclude that the first million or more slaves that uprise will be executed. Tyrants hold power by any means.

(deleted comment)

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