Slavery was never abolished
…I’m glad Reagan dead.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
6 6 6
Mmm-hmm! You were havin’ that dream where you made the white people riot, weren’t you?
Throws a chair
The forehead engravers, enslavers of men and women.
9-5ers anthem by Aesop rock is another good song. Slavery lives not just through the exception in the 13th, but also our required dependency on employment to get table scraps from our “lovely” rich overlords.
https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e?taid=65b7c1a82fcc0f0001ff66e6 the whole article for those interested. its worth reading!
Think about how often you hear about this vs how often you hear about Xinjiang.
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I was making the point in the opposite direction. American slave labor is rarely broached in media, yet my government tells me that China is not to be trusted because the west claims they’re using slave labor in Xinjiang.
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The 13th is a great documentary exploring this and coming to the same conclusion.
This Black Myths Pod episode in turn does a great job of deconstructing that documentary, acknowledging its strengths, and pointing out where it misleads or leaves out information.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Does anyone have the Costco proof. They must have been doing this on a Costco level, getting other prisoners from different regions.
Seems like costco used products from this Hickman’s Family Farm which used prison labor
I’ll try to ween off of Costco now. Thank you internet exposing all the things we are oblivious to.
Costco isn’t the problem, they are a symptom, and there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Whatever alternative you choose will either have similar practices or be owned by the same/similar people.
The problem is capitalism, and specifically in this case also the white supremacy that supports it.
Aim to ween yourself, and everyone around you, off those (this is not to imply you are a capitalist or white supremacist, but we all exist under those systems, and others, and there is no escaping their impact - you are either oppressed by them or benefit from others being oppressed by them even if not directly or even willingly). Combat the system, not its symptoms, that battle is futile, which is why those in charge want you to keep fighting it so much.
yeah exactly the point of my posting this isnt to say people should boycott but they are free to choose to do so but rather that this is a symptom of capitalism and i thought people might find this interesting. capitalism requires exploitation at almost every level to sustain itself. sharing this article around is a great first start, maybe contact representatives. im not american but ive consumed a lot of stuff from some of these brands that are more global, some im already avoiding because of their stance on palestine but boycott is only one tool in our arsenal. The root problem in this and so many things is capitalism
Yeah, it’s a good share, and of course I’m not encouraging people to shop at these places, just pointing out that the alternative won’t be much better…
I’m not American either, but as you say, the problem is global and local to each country (in different ways, sure, but even in the UK many prisons are now run for profit, so things might not be on the same scale, or as explicit as in the US, but there are similar problems in different variations everywhere you look) which is why representatives within the existing system aren’t going to get any significant change either. The whole system is designed to withstand “reform”, which is why it needs abolishing, and you can’t do that playing by the rules they set, you have to be willing to unlearn a lot and build networks of solidarity and mutual aid and resistance, create alternatives within the local and global community that they can’t profit from or control, then go after about 2000 people that are holding the rest of the world hostage, and end this shit.
Prison labor as a continuation of chattel slavery is seriously flawed. You may be arguing “prisons are worse than you think”, but you’re implying is that “slavery wasn’t all that bad”.
Prisons aren’t profitable, they cost States and the Feds billions. It’s true that private companies profit from prisons, but the vast majority of that profit comes from the prisoners and their families (often coercively) buying products/services.
White prisoners make up ~50% of the populations. Are you really going to argue that the Union’s victory introduced white slavery to the US?
Prisoners have rights.
Incarceration isn’t inherited.
The prison system is awful, racist, exploitive, senseless and unjust. But equating it with chattel slavery minimizes the abominable cruelty of that institution and serves white supremacy.
I’d argue that ignoring that any forced, unpaid labor under threat of violence is slavery is worse than “minimizing chattel slavery,” full stop.
This is unintentionally drinking the corporate prison Kool Aid at best, and actively sanitizing our prison’s cruel labor system at worst.
Accurately calling prison labor slavery isn’t a knock on chattel slavery, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s changed. Say it’s not as bad all you want, but it’s still the same forces at work.
There’s just so much there. You dance around a ton of things and beg like three different questions. Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities? What happens if you refuse to work? It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?
What you typed is the bullshit prison labor corporations use to argue in bad faith and it doesn’t stand up to the slightest examination. Slavery is bad. Period.
Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?
Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.
What happens if you refuse to work?
I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.
We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.
It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?
…no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?
Are you really going to make the argument that forced labor with beating and torture as punishment for not working isn’t slavery? Even the guy I responded to felt like they had to strawman chattel slavery in there.
And again you admit the system is racist. But the presence of white people means it can’t be slavery somehow?
And because we made it legal it’s not slavery somehow?
And we absolutely target the children of prisoners. Do you know what the police call it when a teenager hangs out with their ex felon dad? A gang association. Do you know what an employer calls surveillance and repeated searches? Unemployable.
There’s a hundred little things like that, including the school to prison pipeline, the zip code lottery, over policing, and more.
Saying we don’t target the exact same families for legal slavery requires ignoring the evidence of your eyes.
There was this one time I had to help a customer after I clocked out. You can read all about it in my memoir “Twelve minutes a slave”.
A. You didn’t have to.
B. What the fuck does that have to do with anything I said? Are you equating prison labor to volunteering a few minutes at your normal job?
White prisoners make up ~50% of the populations. Are you really going to argue that the Union’s victory introduced white slavery to the US?
Yes, that’s exactly what happened. The fact that white people make up 50% of the prison population while being 60% of the general population means that minorities are still getting hit harder than white people, but white people did get swept up in this.
Lmfao nah, slavery of any kind is one of those moral absolutes that humanity accepts for good reason. There is NO case where it’s acceptable. Literally NONE. 🤦
Their point is that they agree with you 100% on slavery, but this isn’t slavery.
And they’re wrong. It is slavery.
It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.
Which is just a lot of caveats.
Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.
A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.
Someone explain to me why those who wronged society shouldn’t contribute back to it in recompense. The biggest issue I see with this is that it benefits private corporations, and not the public.
Because morality is not, and has never been the primary directive of America’s prison industrial complex. People still locked up for marijuana charges dropped on them pre-legaliziation did not wrong society in any way. People put in directly as a result of explicitly racist legislation did not wrong society. We all know Stanley didn’t steal those sneakers, my man!
America’s prison population is insanely inflated, and it’s been doing that ever since we freed the slaves by using an amendment that simultaneously designates criminals as slaves. Justifying prison labor is one degree removed from justifying slavery.
I absolutely agree that America’s prison industrial complex and their justice system as a whole is fucked beyond repair. But in a more general sense, taking into account other countries as well, I don’t really have an issue with inmates working from prison to contribute back to society. That, along with rehabilitation, should be what they’re there for, no?
Theory and practice are separate in America’s case. We’re not rehabilitating criminals as much as we’re punishing the poor and disenfranchised for being such. The majority of prisoners aren’t doing any prison labor at all, because slavery is the point first and foremost. We’re stripping people of freedom, reducing them to less than human, removing opportunities to become more than the bottom caste of society, and telling the country its their fault. And then a very small percentage of that population is given the privilege of working for minimum wage, which I feel says a lot about how awful prison conditions are when we consider how embarrassing minimum wage work is in America.
This is very far from an ideal system, and we seriously need to rethink the purpose of prisons here before we attempt to make any arguments that slave labor is a good thing, if only for a fact that it is still slave labor and not rehabilitative work. Otherwise, what you’re really saying is “our slaves ought to work to prove they’re capable of being working slaves, as opposed to the subhuman trash we’ve determined them to inherently be”. We’ve had this very same conversation before, and it was just as fucked up the first time.
Prisoners having jobs isn’t the issue here
The issues are due to, among other things, lack of compensation, protections, and choice. These companies are taking advantage of a vulnerable population.
We don’t use prison populations for experiments for similar reasons but since businesses don’t have ethics boards there’s nothing stopping them from exploiting them.
Because forced labor isn’t recompense. It’s torture for profit. They can contribute by learning and growing as people who can then get out and lead legally productive lives. The purpose of the system shouldn’t be revenge or exploitation. It should be to create people we want back in society. But we can’t get over this idea of punishment, wherein we can just declare somebody a criminal to be punished. For example with marijuana. They could be a perfectly fine person, but God forbid they have the plant equivalent to alcohol around. There’s no rehabilitation needed there so all we do is punish them and then suddenly we’ve created a need for psychological counseling and job help.
