The 1970s were 50 years ago. "Long dead", in other words. Did you know that Brazil didn't abolish until 1888? They also imported far more than the US: https://www.slavevoyages.org/static/uploads/01.jpg
I don't think you can say "long dead" until no one who met them is still alive. We have 6 serving Senators over the age of 80, meaning they were born in the 40s or earlier. We have a total of 76 serving Senators who were born before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed...
It's called penal labor, and it was and remains widespread around the world. (And, yes, Brazilian law requires mandatory labor for all prisoners.) It wasn't until the middle to late 20th century that countries began to reform penal labor. But it's complicated. Without penal labor you can't force prisoners to, e.g., do laundry or mop floors. Even mandatory community service is a form of penal labor, and you can still find that in some Western European countries.
The norm now is to require a wage for mandatory labor, but of course often it's just a pittance. (Only 6 US states have uncompensated labor.) But even when you require minimum wage, many criminals owe restitution, so it could be and is taken away again.
Many US states have penal labor systems just like in Europe, that is nominally opt out, mandatory wages, etc, but at the end of the day it's always open to accusations of coercion and claims of "slavery".
The rhetoric around the 13th Amendment is exactly why we're in the situation we are now politically. Everything is equivocated to maximize rhetorical impact. Every unethical thing a politician does is "corruption", so when you get open and egregious corruption as with Trump, people can't discriminate and assume it's all the same.
Was penal labor abused to roll back the clock on abolition? Yes. Is penal labor abused today? Yes. But calling it slavery, drawing parallels to chattel slavery, is just irresponsible.
> Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
> Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 13th amendment specifically mentions penal labor as an exempt form of slavery.
Take your criticism to the authors of the 13th amendment, not the people who bothered to read it.
Setting aside textual analysis and how commas are used in the constitution, the point is that people claim not just that slavery is allowed, but that mandatory penal labor is slavery, and implicitly the same slavery that was ostensibly abolished.
So do you agree or not agree that mandatory penal slavery is an extension of 19th century and earlier American slavery. Because that's what the movement and rhetoric are saying. And removing the Exception Clause won't change the rhetoric, because the entire point is to argue "things haven't changed".
It's the same rhetoric that equivocates "wage slavery". All those things can, of course, fall under a literal definition of slavery. Just like all forms of misbehavior by politicians can be called corruption. We can say, well, Trump isn't doing anything every other politician hasn't done. Which can be literally true. But I choose not to play semantic games like that, because those semantic games are at least as likely to be used to excuse abuses as they are to prevent them. If you want reform, pursue reform. Note that many states have removed their state constitutional Exceptions Clauses which by itself resulted in zero changes to the status quo, because when you play semantic games there's always room to redefine things on-the-fly, or to find another semantic loophole. Every court knew what the Exceptions Clause actual, contextual meaning was, and can just as well redefine slavery or non-slavery to exclude or include penal labor. Semantic games don't change the real world, except insofar as they promote cynicism, confusion, and disengagement from substantive issues.
"Around the world, at least eleven million people are imprisoned, either pre-trial or following conviction. Most sentenced prisoners will work while in custody...
...
Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work—sometimes for no pay, but typically for very low rates of pay.
There are, even so, multiple potential benefits to prison work. For example, ICPR’s recent research indicated that prisoners who could not work (when prison regimes around the world were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic) reported many negative consequences, including to their mental and physical wellbeing. At the minimum, work may mitigate some harmful impacts of imprisonment. At best, it may increase prisoners’ prospects of successful reintegration into society, potentially also benefitting society by reducing recidivism."
The question isn’t whether prisoners work in other countries which I’m confident you know and dodged.
The question is whether the prisons in Brazil are private, and are allowed to sell prison labor FOR A PROFIT, incentivizing both greater incarceration rates, and disincentivizing release.
The answer is no, I’m not aware of ANY other country that allows a private organization to profit off the labor if people imprisoned by the state. At least not any country we would consider 1st world.
It’s absolutely absurd to suggest the current situation is beneficial to anyone but the ruling class and anyone claiming otherwise has never been to prison, never had a relative or friend who has been to prison, or is literally a psychopath who lacks basic human empathy.
Your comment stated: "And does Brazil have their own 13th amendment that allows them to use prison labor as their modern slave workforce?"
The article I linked states: "Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work..."
So my quote directly answers your original concern.
Your new concern is about private prisons. Here's a new quote from the article which addresses your new concern:
"Involvement by non-public entities in prison work can take many forms. In most countries including all three of Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for-profit companies operate entire prisons (or provide services within prisons) under government contract. Similarly, the operators of both public and private prisons in all three countries contract with buyers, equipping prison workshops and using prisoner labour to produce goods and services which go on to be sold beyond the prison."
(p. 15, emphasis mine)
So no, the US system doesn't seem to be especially unusual, according to this article.
You're welcome to decry this practice as inhumane, btw. I just don't think it is some sort of skeleton key which will help us understand every aspect of US politics.
It's recent enough that people living today knew former slaves. That's not ancient history at all, so I think the comparison is not good. I'm sure Brazil also has to deal with fallout of their practices, but I don't see how it changes how the fallout of US slavery impacts the US.
A full 76 of current serving US Senators were born before the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which officially ended segregation and the Jim Crow era).
That certainly means it's recent to me. My own parents (both still alive) grew up while "separate but equal" was still law of the land.
So, yes, it's definitely racism. Or shall we say, the lasting imprint of slavery and the Confederate ideology more generally. Reconstruction failed and therefore allowed the Confederate ideology to persist for 100 years of Jim Crow and right on into today.
>It's recent enough that people living today knew a slave.
Slavery ended in 1865. That's 161 years ago. So maybe there are a few modern 80-year-olds who interacted with 80-year-old former slaves when the modern 80-year-olds were infants. Those 80-year-old former slaves would themselves have no memory of slavery since it would've ended before they could form memories. And the modern 80-year-olds would have no memory of the interaction, since they themselves were infants when the interaction happened.
In other words: There aren't very many of these people, and it's unclear if most of them would count.
You know something which happened more recently in the US than slavery? Prohibition. A trendy, self-righteous moral crusade which didn't accomplish what it set out to achieve, and ended up creating a bunch of problems instead.
I think Prohibition is a pretty good template for understanding the form and tendencies of modern left-wing activist movements. But--at least reducing alcoholism was a good cause that we had a shot at doing something about! Short of inventing a time machine, crusading against slavery from centuries ago seems rather pointless. That's not a problem for activists whose primary goal is to be trendy and self-righteous, of course.
Someone who died in 1964 was technically a slave, but not yet old enough to function as a slave. Real slaves were mostly dead by 1940, the few who remained are outliers
Babies being born into slavery served the slave system just as much as grown men slaving in a field. Slave was a legal status in a system, not a job title. A baby born into slavery is a real slave, not a fake slave.
Either George, who enslaved her mother, or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood, who enslaved her older brothers, Rufus and Andrew,[3] was probably Anna's father
So Anna came into existence because her mother was raped by a man who legally owned her as property. And that was recent enough that Anna lived to witness Gilligan’s Island.
Moreover, she was still a slave until she was six and served her masters as a domestic house servant. When you were six you were probably being educated to read and write and do math.
You guys are so quick with your “well ackshually” that you’re missing the point which is very simple and has been restated by other posters.
I'm anti-Trump. If you tell people "Trump is a corrupt asshole", that has a chance at convincing supporters to abandon him. If you tell people "the US needs a cultural revolution due to events from past centuries", that's what got him elected in the first place.
A good general wouldn't voluntarily shift the battleground to a region where their troops are weak. Political persuasion is no different. The Democratic Party keeps losing because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues. If Trump is as bad as you say, prove it to me by showing willingness to strategically cede ground on a few issues in order to win more voters.
>We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks
That is a historical fact which has important explanatory power. It may not directly be the best basis for public Democratic platform, which most people probably agree with. The core manifestation is in our institutions, and that's what we need to fix. I agree with you that framing it through the lens of corruption is the best overt political strategy.
Is this theory falsifiable? What would it look like if this problem was "fixed"? Many confederate statues were taken down--did anything change as a result? The entire thing seems like a delusional crusade against windmills. Focus on the present, not the past.
I get the sense that many in this thread simply have an un-quenched lust for re-education camps. Probably under Stalin they'd be mumbling about dastardly capitalist spies and saboteurs.
> Many confederate statues were taken down--did anything change as a result? The entire thing seems like a delusional crusade against windmills. Focus on the present, not the past.
This sounds like a thinly-veiled argument to keep them up. But why should we keep them up? In what universe does it make sense to honor the losers of a failed coup attempt against our nation by embodying them in statutes?
The reason many continue to pursue this is because of the surprising number of people who want to maintain them. It's not a "crusade against windmills," it's a crusade against people who want to honor the enemies of our nation. It's as understandable as being upset that a group of people would want to maintain an Osama bin Laden statue in the middle of Manhattan.
Taking statues down may not change much in and of itself, but it's a small piece of the bigger puzzle.
> I get the sense that many in this thread simply have an un-quenched lust for re-education camps.
I’m generally aligned with your point, but I also don’t think the official position of the Democratic Party is that we need a cultural revolution, nor do I observe most Democrats feel that way.
What I do see is media and politicians on the Right characterizing extreme positions held by a minority of folks on the far Left as though they are adopted by the entire Left, and that weak uncritical minds on the Right believe that nonsense. Rush Limbaugh pioneered this technique to profit himself, and Trump gave him a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom in his first term.
I think you're somewhat underestimating how effectively the far-left minority has scared others into silence. Anyways, I do what I can to push back against them when they say things which seem wacky to me, as in this instance.
Maybe I should work harder to make my actual views clear. I added a few sentences to the end of my original comment in this thread: "I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572347
Scared others into silence with what magical powers? Zero control of both chambers, zero control of the executive, military, cable news, Supreme Court, law enforcement etc. With what is this mighty far left minority scaring people? Protest sit-ins on campuses? That's what makes you quake?
> I think you're somewhat underestimating how effectively the far-left minority has scared others into silence
Besides all the YouTube videos, X posts, the addition of two new right-wing TV networks (OANN and NEWSMAX), “Truth” Social, WSJ, NY Post, etc.? Silence is a myth perpetuated by the right (“people are trying to suppress the truth and your 1A rights!”) to build a following when in fact opposition voices are plentiful.
> because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues.
The Republican propaganda machine will always be ready to make any cultural issue the dems hold 'unpopular'. They turn anything and everything into a culture war, and if nothing exists, they are more than happy to manufacture it.
Observe how they turned their own vaccine into a cultural issue.
There was a lot for people to be angry about, particularly the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush administration got us into as a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, combined with the 2008 financial crisis and Wall Street public bailout that culminated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
You should check out this podcast episode with two historians, tracing the influence of the Confederacy ideology all the way to the current Supreme Court:
Pretty much everything that has happened in the past has consequences today. It's the butterfly effect.
Slavery has existed as far back as history. The idea that people are created equal, and are equal under the law, is very, very new, and that idea has resulted in a great many positive things happening.
