this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Not really, since slavery is the ultimate expression of underregulated capitalism.
If you think American corporations don't exploit penal slavery and wouldn't be doing outright chattel slavery if they were allowed to, you're just too naive.
The only thing capitalism loves more than slavery is prison labour. Next up 'undocumented' labour that can be easily exploited. What's next? Oh yes. Child labour.
Perfect system
I wrote it's not wrong but the criticism is wrongly addressed. What you wrote is known and that's why regulations exit. And still we have this kind of slavery. Don't give your regulators a pass here.
I'm not giving anyone a pass. Just because "regulations exist" doesn't mean that all the necessary ones do or that it's because pro-regulation people don't want it. Ever heard of regulatory capture?
They don't call it the Prison Industrial Complex for nothing. It's just as insidious and powerful as the MIC.
Sure, regulators are forced to fix it, but only because unregulated capitalism is completely broken. Capitalism itself is the festering wound, regulation is the band-aid that we stick onto it, to make it not leak bile over the part of the floor that we care about.
I'm not seeing how it's a stretch to criticize capitalism when someone says they don't want to get rid of slavery because "think of the economy!"
@Ensign_Crab @Dnn "Who would do these jobs if people possibly wrongfully convicted weren't forced to do these jobs?"
It doesn't get much more Capitalist than maximizing profitability by minimizing manpower expenses and there really is nothing in the Capitalist ideology about the methods of doing so which involve the use of force to make people work for free not being allowed, quite the contrary (it's all about how businesses should be free, not people)
Capitalism has nothing at all about Morality, which is something that always came from outside it, be it traditional Conservative Family Values and Religion or the various The Greatest Good For The Greatest Number theories from the left (some genuine, others hypocrite).
The Everybody For Themselves that Capitalism promotes is actually the moral of the Sociopath (in the Psychology sense of zero consideration for others, not in the movie sense of evil-doing for the pleasure of it which is ridiculously off).
Slavery is a strict outcome of unregulated capitalism. That's literally where "classical" slavery originated. Money gave slavers power, and they used that power to abduct people into slavery which made the slavers money.
Better veiled versions of that plopped up all through the centuries past slavery (and before that) as well. Factory towns were exactly that as well. You worked in the factory/mine and instead of money you received company vouchers as income. These vouchers you could only spend in the company shops and company housing. So if you tried to leave the company, you had nothing. And since they could essentially charge you whatever they wanted, they'd make sure you earned less than what you needed to survive, so that you'd rack up debts while working there. So if you left, you were forced to pay your debts, and if you couldn't (and you really couldn't in most cases), you'd just go to prison, and be forced to work in the mine/factory anyway.
Completely unregulated capitalist sectors (e.g. the mafia) use the same exact system to this day.
Have, for example, a look at human trafficing rings.
My thoughts as well.
lmfao, I can't even imagine the mental gymnastics you have to do to separate the two.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_complex