Slavery continues to be the main driver of right wing #uspol at all levels.
The most salient horror for a lot of people is abortion access. Forced birth is literally "involuntary labor." Forced reproductive labor is simply corvée (temporary de facto slavery) enforced by the state.
Forced birth serves at least 3 purposes related to slavery. It forces women, especially black and brown women, to stay in low wage jobs. Black and brown women are the basis for the service industry. Forced birth is a mechanism to enforce wage slavery.
Wealthier people tend to be able to circumvent laws against forced birth, so it's really about targeting people who are already disadvantaged. Families who can't plan birth are more likely to reproduce generational poverty.
When combined with the push to strip away support, children of forced birth are more likely to themselves be in poverty. Two pipelines exist to siphon forced birth children in to other forms of slavery: school to military, and school to prison.
Folks who don't have military family may not realize that the military is a form of slavery in the sense of people being owned. Some military jobs can pay a lot. They can lift people out of poverty. There is a reason people join the military, beyond adherence to Americanism. But none of that makes it not slavery. If you get a hand tattoo, you are charged with "damaging government property." Soldiers are government property. It's pretty literal.
Prison labor is a pervasive element in the US economy. Basically all major corporations use it. While folks may say that the things I've talked about so far are not literally slavery, or may contest my use of language, prison labor is often explicitly slavery justified by the gap in the 13th amendment ("except as punishment for a crime").
Those who aren't siphoned off generally remain in poverty to perpetuate the next generation of this system.
Now, the thing about slavery us that the point isn't actually the free labor. In terms of labor, these pipelines are actually more expensive (to society) than just having a free society. Just think about it. Chattel slavery required a massive portion of the society to suppress slave revolts. Police, today's slave catchers, are *by far* the largest part of any city budget and prisons are incredibly expensive. The "free labor" that corporations get is really massive subsidization. The point of slavery is to maintain social stratification.
All wage workers are, in a sense, kept (to lesser and lesser degrees) in subjection by the threat of more extreme forms of slavery. The high wage worker obeys because they are afraid of becoming a low wage worker. The low wage worker obeys because they are afraid of being houseless. Houselessness is made illegal so they can be swept in to prisons and enslaved. The entire capitalists system is built on increasing threats of subjugation and violence, where stratified classes are aligned more and more with the dominant class and have more and more incentive to enforce it's will on other subjugated people.
It's slavery all the way down.
Malcolm X was taking about this structure in 1963.
hex
in reply to hex • • •Elon Musk, very much a product of apartheid South Africa, uses Tesla to destroy mass transit because he and other oligarchs are afraid to be in stabbing distance of the poors.
You are forced to use a car because (1) the capitalist class uses cars to keep themselves safe and (2) having the world behind a paywall makes you easier to control.
Pay attention to how afraid people are of using mass transit. That anxiety is not just fear of safety, it's also fear of being perceived as lower class. It's class anxiety trained in to people to align them with the interests of the ruling class against the interests of everyone.
We can do this literally all day.
#uspol
Edit: #FuckCars