There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History

http://www.alternet.org/world/142171?page=entire

by rms • 17 years ago

87 46 17 years ago

alternet.org

alnayyir• 17 years ago

Per capita or total?

scythe• 17 years ago

>there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million.

Total, clearly.

abefortas• 17 years ago

If it was per capita it would also be total.

cema5• 17 years ago

Define slave.

rms4• 17 years ago

It's repeated a few times in the interview:

>slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence

>TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape.

>BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

cema5• 17 years ago

In other words, different definitions from what was used in the past. Need a common definition for a meaningful comparison.

pyre5• 17 years ago

I really hope that Hacker News doesn't become a place were 'Didn't you read the article?' gets a response of 'You must be new here.'

cema5• 17 years ago

Do not jump to conclusions.

evansolomon• 17 years ago

I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

My first thought was, "Wow." My second thought was, "I wonder how many people end up in similar (very loose sense of the word) situations based on lending that's occurred in the last 5 years.

yummyfajitas• 17 years ago

What "lending over the past 5 years" are you referring to? Microfinance?

Or are you talking about credit card debt in the first world? In the US, the only consequence for failing to pay your debts [1] is an inability to get further credit.

[1] Child support debt excluded. You go to jail if you can't pay that.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

maybe the op was just wondering what amount of slavery he could personally have prevented. that was the thought that crossed my mind. not that "throwing money" at a problem is a reasonable solution, but how different is my perspective on money than "a slave." or rather, i wanted to add that perspective to my thought process.

ps - donations to credible organizations do help.

pps - somewhat relevant fiction making the rounds these days by Stieg Larsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson I really respect Larsson's response to things he felt were immoral. he set out to change them. 1+ investigative journalism.

jerf• 17 years ago

In the presence of the choice to go bankrupt, if one freely choose to go nuts working to pay off your debt which you freely entered into, that's a choice that should be respected.

That's two more "freely"s than the people we're talking about get, and I think it rather takes it out of the same domain altogether. In some sense I am a "wage slave" working for the man, but I freely chose it, and even suggesting that this is anything like actual slavery is unproductive at best (and probably offensive).

I know hatin' on the capitalist system is fun and all, but it's been a while in the places where the bad lending occurred where it is actual slavery.

rms4• 17 years ago

For anyone wondering about the credibility of this interview, Skinner's book got blurbs from Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel. http://acrimesomonstrous.com/

mahmud3• 17 years ago

Since when does a politician's blurb, and Bill Clinton's at that, add any credibility to anything?

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/C...

The blurbs often benefit their utters more than the books they're affixed to: looking at the list of people and institutions who gave feedback on the book, I can say a good chunk of them are karma-whoring themselves on the author's good standing.

jrockway• 17 years ago

Since when does anything add anything to anything?

This is a useful argument...

antipaganda2• 17 years ago

Elie Wiesel is a whore? I think you should maybe google the name before you imply such a thing...

pyre5• 17 years ago

> My great-great-great-grandfather fought with the Connecticut artillery, believing that slavery was an abomination that could only be overturned through bloodshed.

Yet today, after the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers, after over a dozen conventions and 300 international treaties, there are more slaves than at any point in human history.

This just seems like a bunch of self-promoting nonsense. His great-great-great-grandfather didn't shed blood with the idea that after the US Civil War was over slavery would be eliminated from the face of the Earth forever and ever. The point was to eliminate US Government legal acceptance of slavery.

Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all that we really can do.

> While that may sound like a very low price for human life, consider that five hours from where I live in New York -- a three-hour flight down to Port au Prince, Haiti, and an hour from the airport

I find this a bit disingenuous. 'Just five hours away' implies something that is a lot closer than New York and Haiti. At least he was nice enough to qualify himself, but stating like that comes across as trying to make this emotionally-charged rather than a rational discussion.

> They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50. Now to put that in context: Going back to the time when my abolitionist ancestors were on their soapbox, in 1850, you could buy a healthy grown male for the equivalent of about $40,000.

I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go?

There's also the difference that when slaves were being sold for $40K is was to put them to work in a money-making enterprise (i.e. plantations) and the slaver traders were selling them in a US market. Plantations owners weren't shipping themselves across the seas to buy slaves directly in Africa. For that matter, today the costs (and risks) of travel are hugely less than they were in the past.

In this example, he's going to another country and buying a child that will make him no money (housework and personal sexual favors are not a stream of money). Not only that, that $50 or $100 does not account for how he would them import that child back into the US. I would venture a guess that -- especially nowadays -- it's pretty expensive to get papers to bring a slave-girl child into the US (at least through 'public' ports of entry like airports).

> If you were to plot slaves on the map, you'd stick the biggest number of pins in India, followed by Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan. There are arguably more slaves In India than the rest of the world combined.

And yet, if you look at international efforts or American pressure, India is largely let off the hook because Indian federal officials claim, "We have no slaves. These are just poor people. And these exploitive labor practices," -- if you're lucky enough to get that term out of them -- "are a byproduct of poverty."

Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt.

Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the United States. I would really like to see numbers based on % of population for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for comparison, obviously). India especially seems to have problems with this due to population density and the caste-system that their society still holds on to.

I'm interested if this is an increase in the percent of the population that are slaves, or just an increase in the number of slaves because the population has exploded across the board. I'll admit that it's also possible that there is an increased demand for slaves as the Indian middle-class has taken off. I remember reading that a lot of Indians work on visas in the US for a while, but end up moving back to India because when their wives move over here they are disappointed that the middle-class doesn't have servants (as one in India would expect to have at that income level).

> Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt.

If this is the case, I hope that he's including 'indentured servants' in the numbers of slaves when he's looking all the way back into history. Indentured servants were often in the same situations he's describing now (even though most elementary school textbooks like to gloss over that fact by claiming that the servants were 'only' there to work off a debt and they were free to leave when they were done; conveniently leaving out the number of servants (or an estimate) that actually worked off their debt).

> They can also get involved with Free the Slaves. And they can talk about the issue more. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy.

Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of war/bloodshed?

spazmaster• 17 years ago

what's the point of your - rather elaborate - reply?

pyre5• 17 years ago

1. Sometimes articles rub me the wrong way, and I feel a strong compulsion to 'go on the record' refuting the problems I see or 'complaining' (for lack of a better word) about the issues with the article.

2. I channel that into a comment here because I found the article through Hacker News

3. I feel my comments could generate discussion. I could be completely wrong/off-base in my thought process, hopelessly naive on a topic or completely mis-informed.

4. I also enjoy the Hacker News/YC community here, and I feel that by pointing out these things that irk me (or adding additional commentary to some of the points that the article makes) I will enrich the community. I guess I should note that I'm not just pointing out grammatical errors or complaining because 'beg the question' wasn't used correctly.

tow21• 17 years ago

I really don't understand what you're arguing against here.

> Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all that we really can do.<

No, there's quite a lot more we can do. Foreign policy is all about influencing what goes on beyond your own borders.

> I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go?

The word "equivalent" in the original article is clearly meant to convey that it's $40k in today's money. (as would even a tiny amount of knowledge of economic history, surely?)

I don't know how far $50 will go on the average Haitian salary, but surely part of his point is that in this case there is a population (visiting American tourists) for whom $50 is disposable income. It was never the case for historic US slavery that the price of a slave was anything less than an investment.

(And slave importation may not be the end goal. Maybe you just want a slave for two weeks while you enjoy your holiday. Is that less reprehensible?)

> Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the United States. I would really like to see numbers based on % of population for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for comparison, obviously)

Well, yes, comparative numbers would be interesting. (and I'm fairly sure nobody would be surprised to learn that there is less slavery per head of population than previously - but does that make it any less bad?)

I don't think human misery works on the calculus you're trying to apply. One million people in slavery are going to be fairly unhappy, whether they're embedded in a population of 50 million or 5 billion. If the number of people in slavery is increasing, that's bad, even if it's going down as a percentage.

> Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of war/bloodshed?

Do you really think that's what he's asking for? Do you really think an appropriate alternative is just to shrug your shoulders, put it in historical context and do nothing?

Do you really think that if something can't be fixed immediately, or its fix isn't immediately obvious, we should just not bother thinking about it?

pyre5• 17 years ago

> No, there's quite a lot more we can do. Foreign policy is all about influencing what goes on beyond your own borders.

My point was that he was acting like the Civil War was a 'war to end slavery world wide' and he almost comes off as surprised that a Civil War years-ago in the US hasn't affected the slave trade on the opposite side of the planet. The point of the Civil War (in terms of slavery) was to abolish the plantations and make the slave trade illegal (i.e. to 'free the slaves').

Abolishing the legal trafficking of slaves is one step in the process, obviously, but a major step nonetheless.

> It was never the case for historic US slavery that the price of a slave was anything less than an investment.

This was mostly due to the cost of trafficking in the slaves. If I go down to Haiti the slaves that I could buy there aren't shipped from the other side of the world. If one wanted to buy a slave in Africa in the early 1800's I'm sure it would have cost you a lot less than right off the slave boats in the colonies. Even shipping a boatload of slaves around the world now would probably cost a lot less than it did then.

I guess what really irks me about this -- and my point -- is that presenting the low-cost of purchasing a slave today comes across as shock-value to get an emotional response. And the response that he seems to be going for is to get people thinking that globally humans have de-valued human life more now than in the past. My argument is that you can't compare the price of a slave in the 1800's to the price of a slave now and use the severe difference in price as proof that the people of the 1800's put a higher-value on human life.

> (and I'm fairly sure nobody would be surprised to learn that there is less slavery per head of population than previously - but does that make it any less bad?)

Doesn't make it any less bad, but it feels very deceptive to use raw numbers like that without presenting relative numbers. It feels like they are trying to get people to reach the wrong conclusions, but with the right intentions.

> I don't think human misery works on the calculus you're trying to apply. One million people in slavery are going to be fairly unhappy, whether they're embedded in a population of 50 million or 5 billion. If the number of people in slavery is increasing, that's bad, even if it's going down as a percentage.

Maybe the problem here is that I'm not mainstream enough to be the intended audience. I feel like I want to see all of the numbers, and when numbers are pushed off to the side, it feels very deceptive to me.

Aside from that, I feel that the best way to measure progress is whether or not the numbers are going down as a percentage. Especially compared to the percentage of population growth. If the number of slaves goes decreases by 2% and the population grows by 1%, I see that as a net win. I also think that it's unrealistic to think that we will ever get the number of slaves down to 0, though I would hope it's possible... even if it has to be on the long-long-term.

> Do you really think that's what he's asking for?

He said: He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy.

That comes off to me as too positive. That sounds like he thinks President Obama is going to abolish slavery. 'The true abolition of slavery' will not be part of Obama's legacy unless he actually abolishes all slavery.

I'm all for better foreign policy regarding slavery, don't get me wrong, but I thought that this guy's message was too positive. Better US foreign policy regarding slavery is a win as long as 1 slave gains freedom over it, but I daresay that foreign policy alone might not make a dent in world-wide slavery for at least a decade (though I'm really pulling that number out of nowhere; feel free to contradict me).

In general, I'm not disagreeing with the need to combat slavery. I'm disagreeing with some of what this guy is saying because it's coming across as deceptive (even though the intentions may be good) and too overly optimistic (I believe in setting realistic goals).

anamax• 17 years ago

> Foreign policy is all about influencing what goes on beyond your own borders.

How about some specifics?

For example, what military action is acceptable and when?

Is there a conflict between this and the belief that one can't "impose democracy" from outside? (Obama, among others, says that he believes that.)

aaronblohowiak2• 17 years ago

The civil war was about the cessation of the south, largely due to Northern economic and political domination of the South. Sure, slavery contributed to that, just as terrorism contributed to the war in Iraq.

antipaganda2• 17 years ago

What the hell, man? You're arguing all these points when the central point is staring us smack-bang in the face: THERE ARE MILLIONS OF SLAVES. I know that your gut is rebelling against this horrifying fact - since you thought that no matter how shitty the world is, at least we abolished slavery - but you cannot let that happen. There are millions of slaves in the world, and we can do something to try and free them.

known• 17 years ago

    Slaves !=  Wage Slaves

nwatson• 17 years ago

There's a movie about modern slavery (haven't seen it, don't know the quality) titled "Call and Response."

If you're in the Silicon Valley a group showed the movie at the Red Rock Coffeehouse in Mountain View on September 19, 2009. I'm not sure when the next showing is ... if you're interested contact the Red Rock or more likely the Highway Community (http://www.highway.org).

chasingsparks• 17 years ago

Debt slaves are not held by debt. Debt is merely the nominal excuse. The use and threat of violence coupled with an insulation from or complete lack of law drives slavery. And that is why I think it is such a pervasive problem. Solutions that work may require carrying a bigger stick -- and using it. That terrifies me. I abhor state military intervention, but I also abhor slavery through violence. Most people are similar which is why they stress alternative measures like economic disincentives and UN resolutions which don't seem to work well.

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

I'm living in Bucharest, Romania, and I can confirm this part. A few years ago I used to live in a somewhat less respectable part of the city (not a ghetto by any means, the communists made sure we don't have those, just closer to the periphery and poorer). For some reason it use to be a stop point in girl trafficking - lots of young girls worked at the corner of the street for a few weeks at a time. Many of them from Moldavia, and I presume going further west. At one time I was actually offered a woman for around $200.

A few points:

- Most girls were not slaves per se, kidnapped and hold by force. All, as far as I can tell, were driven to this by poverty, lack of any prospects in the village of birth or both.

- I am not against prostitution as a job, especially since I've seen it done successfully and with quite a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. But in some conditions it can be worst then anything you can imagine. I am especially suspicious of anything that looks organized. I'd guess this is a direct consequence of it being illegal - Amsterdam seems to have managed to make it both organized and civilized.

- I'd have liked to make some comments about corruption, politicians and the way things seem to be "settling in" in the last years, but it's all speculation so I'll abstain.

zandorg• 17 years ago

Reminds me of a recent article in BoingBoing, about some Arabic city (Dubai?) where people have to build skyscrapers to pay their way out of poverty, and they have to drink almost-salty water instead of fresh water, in bunks, etc.

Ah Google found it on the first query 'dubai slavery salty water':

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...

SlyShy• 17 years ago

I recommend the book "A Crime so Monstrous" for people interested in learning more on this subject.

johnnybgoode• 17 years ago

Some of the situations described sound absolutely terrible. While we're on the subject, though, I want to point out that slavery is a spectrum, not a binary condition.

I don't doubt his number, 27 million, for a certain cutoff point of who is considered a slave and who isn't. If you move the cutoff around, though, you can truthfully say there are billions of slaves, or maybe even zero.

shalmanese• 17 years ago

"I was able to negotiate for a 10-year-old girl for cleaning and cooking, permanent possession and sexual favors. What do you think the asking price was?

TM: I don't know ... $7,500?

BS: They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50."

This fails the smell test for me. at $1 per day for food & shelter, he can buy her for less than it would cost them to keep her for 2 months.

Most likely, he was being scammed in some way. They were probably planning to rob him and had no intention of selling the girl.

There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History

Related Stories