Meta: Abolitionists and Slaves

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

So, I have a bit of a meta question....

We've seen people like Jeff, Dylan and even the Catholic Church, argue that, given the state of things in the USNA, keeping slaves and treating them well is the right/humane thing to do.

Then there's the argument that keeping slaves at all is wrong, and that it's better to either pay the fines and remove yourself from society (Cate Blanchett is a good example) or to deliberately live poor so that you don't have to own slaves (although we haven't gone into this much yet, David Hewlett's mother and his sister Kate live like this).

I'm kind of curious as to what people here think: which way makes more sense in the context of the AKB verse and which way is more ethical in that same context?

PS: There may be other examples of both sides, I'm kind of behind on the more recent additions to the 'verse.

Comments

[angels3.livejournal.com]

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.

[asknosecrets.livejournal.com]

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.)

I'm sorry this is so long!

[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?

[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

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

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.

[facetofcathy.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.