Because even in 2023 we will (still) tolerate slavery
Slavery isn't just the one with chains or what you read in school books. It is a status that elites still ascribe to some 50 million people today. In the modern sense it is poverty, forced labour, psychological and sexual violence but we could eliminate it, if we only wanted to…
Dear Director,
As per tradition, I write you an end-of-year thought this time inspired by a book by James C. Scott, professor of political science at Yale University, entitled The Origins of Civilization. A counter-history (Einaudi 2018).
According to Scott, starting from the first civilizations up to today's societies we can record a continuous absorption of slaves at the lowest level of the social order. As the first slaves and their descendants were incorporated into society, the lower ranks were constantly supplied with new captives, further strengthening the line between free subjects and slaves. The Professor's theory is that the construction of the first human civilizations (Sumerians, Greeks, Romans, etc.) was made possible mainly thanks to the work of slaves, who "were employed as a sort of disposable proletariat for the hardest jobs and dangerous: silver miners, stone quarrymen, woodcutters, rowers, etc”. By 'slaves' Scott means domesticated human beings, made prisoners of status, with or without chains. The number of slaves used by the so-called elites was already enormous at the time, at least in proportion to the population of the Earth and also the subsequent creation of the modern state, according to the academic, was materially made possible by slaves.
We get to reflect on today's societies, even those considered more developed, the so-called democratic ones, and we notice that even these continue to be based on a system that enslaves many people, inexorably destining them to sacrifice their lives to be able to carry out the jobs more tiring and dangerous, for the benefit of others. Unfortunately, there is data outside Scott's book to support this idea. Data that certify the existence of persistent and indeed new forms of contemporary slavery: a phenomenon of multifaceted exploitation that will also affect all the continents of the world in 2023; a plague that spares no country and almost no sector.
According to the report Global estimates of modern slavery: Forced labor and forced marriage released by the International Labor Organization (ILO), “in 2021 there were 50 million people living in slavery modern. Of these people, 28 million were forced into forced labor and 22 million were forced into forced marriage. The number of people in modern forms of slavery has increased significantly over the past five years. In 2021, there were 10 million more people in slavery than recorded by the 2016 global estimates. Slavery is present in almost every country in the world and knows no ethnic, cultural or religious borders. Women and children are most vulnerable. More than half (52 percent) of forced labor and a quarter of all forced marriages are concentrated in upper-middle or upper-income countries.
Even the 2022 Report dedicated to seriously exploited women, edited by the Slaves No More Association , does not tell of exceptional cases, but of a submerged, widespread and structural reality that affects all countries of the world.
Modern slavery is poverty, sexual violence, forced labour, but also income inequality, welfare, various types of physical and psychological harassment, in the family and in the workplace.
In essence, centuries pass but the division between masters and slaves, between winners and losers, between exploiters and exploited, between those who work for others and those who make others work for themselves seems to repeat itself.
Why do we still tolerate the injustices at the basis of our economic and social system? About ten years ago Amartya Sen wrote in Prospect magazine that "the incidence of poverty varies according to country, but no state is free from this scourge" – and asked himself: how is it possible that more or less wealthy people manage to get to deal with the horrific suffering of those below them? The Indian economist indicated three possible causes: people's disinformation; the pessimistic realism of those who think that inequalities cannot be removed; the selfishness of those who see man as an egocentric animal attentive only to his own well-being. According to Sen, those who believe that inequalities cannot be removed more or less voluntarily use this excuse because they are ignorant, just as those who believe in selfishness as the driving force of our societies have perhaps limited themselves to reading only a few sentences of Adam Smith's writings, ignoring the rest of the discussion is the theoretical complexity suggested by the author of the Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776).
Sen indicates a way of salvation through culture, information and knowledge of history. His conclusion thus bodes well for humans in 2023 as well: “If tolerance of the intolerable results ultimately from misinformation rather than human selfishness, then we can afford to breathe a sigh of relief. However, we fully understand that there is still much work to be done”.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-anche-nel-2023-tollereremo-ancora-la-schiavitu/ on Sun, 01 Jan 2023 06:37:26 +0000.