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

[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.