Voluntary slavery, in theory, is the condition of slavery entered into at a point of voluntary consent. It is distinguished from involuntary slavery where an individual is forced to a period of servitude usually as punishment for a crime. [1]
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Voluntary slavery, in theory, is the condition of slavery entered into at a point of voluntary consent. It is distinguished from involuntary slavery where an individual is forced to a period of servitude usually as punishment for a crime. [1]
Some believe[ weasel words ] that in ancient times, this was a common way for impoverished people to provide subsistence for themselves or their family and provision was made for this in law. [2] For example, the code of Hammurabi stated that "besides being able to borrow on personal security, an individual might sell himself or a family member into slavery". [3] However, according to a different translation, "If any one fail to meet a claim for debt, and sell himself, his wife, his son, and daughter for money or give them away to forced labor: they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them, or the proprietor, and in the fourth year they shall be set free." [4] This may be interpreted to mean that rather than people voluntary selling themselves into slavery in return for a loan, slavery was simply the standard penalty for failure to pay off a debt. [5] Other parts of the Code of Hammurabi show both debt and slavery as being part of the criminal justice system of the time, such as, "If any one be too lazy to keep his dam in proper condition, and does not so keep it; if then the dam break and all the fields be flooded, then shall he in whose dam the break occurred be sold for money, and the money shall replace the corn which he has caused to be ruined." [6]
According to some sources, in ancient times, one of the most direct ways to become a Roman or Greek citizen was by means of a self-sale contract. The laws surrounding Roman and Greek manumission made it quite possible for such erstwhile slaves to then become citizens or near-citizens themselves. [7] However, according to Walter Scheidel, while it is possible that some genuine self-sales may have occurred in ancient Rome, the quantitative weight of such events would have been minimal. [8] In ancient Greece, a form of voluntary slavery was associated with pederasty. Here, it was viewed as a component of reciprocal relationship wherein lovers consider voluntary servitude as legitimate, particularly in the effort to honorably satisfy the beloved in the pursuit of virtue. [9] Voluntary servitude in this case was integral in the practice of education.
In medieval Russia, self-sale was the main source of slaves. [10] However, as two of the reasons for self-sale in Russian history were avoidance of the military draft and avoidance of poll taxes, also known as soul taxes, it is questionable how voluntary this sort of slavery really was. [11]
The presence of a contract does not mean that a person entered into the condition of forced labor voluntarily. For example, a report by Dr. Raingeard, speaking of the Belgian Congo, states that, "When a native, remarkably enough, managed to resist the threats and blows of the merchants, I have seen government officers offering him the choice between signing a contract and prison." [12] According to Kevin Bales, "It may be that local custom and culture support slavery and that most of the population knows of its existence, but admitting it is something else again. Here false contracts conceal slavery. Slaveholders can easily force their slaves to sign anything: mortgages, loan agreements, indentures, or labor contracts. If questions are raised, signed contracts are produced and corrupt law enforcement looks the other way. Even in countries with mostly honest and conscientious police, the contracts hide slavery." [13]
Even where a worker did voluntarily agree to something, the conditions at the place of work may be different from that which he agreed to. Additionally, even if only one worker agrees to something, members of his family and his descendants may be forced to comply as well. For example, some workers in Pakistan agree to make bricks in return for an advance on their paycheck under a system known as peshgi. However, once there, the kiln owner may begin to molest and even rape women of their family. Many workers feel that an assault on the women of their family voids any work agreement they might have. Accounting of the debt is often dishonest. Children may be kidnapped and held captive if the slaveholder believes the family likely to flee. The debt is frequently passed on from one generation to the next. [14]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau contends that in a contract of self-enslavement, there is no mutuality. The slave loses all. The contract negates his interests and his rights. It is entirely to his disadvantage. Since the slave loses his status as a moral agent once the slave contract is enforced, the slave cannot act to enforce anything owed to him by his master. Rousseau contrasted this to the social contract, in that the subjects of the government have control over their masters. [15] John Stuart Mill wrote a critique of voluntary slavery as a criticism of paternalism. [16]
The term voluntary slavery is often used in polemical writings and rhetoric on a range of subjects. For instance, it has been asserted that the capitalist wage system amounts to voluntary slavery and is contrary to human dignity and inalienable human rights. [17] Libertarian Murray Rothbard criticized the term as being self-contradictory. [18] His protege Walter Block, on the other hand, has defended the idea from Rothbard's and others' libertarian criticisms and claims this is a consistent feature of their philosophy, but admits his is a minority view, along with Robert Nozick. [19]
Murray Rothbard allows for the possibility of a system of debt bondage, arguing that lifetime labor contracts could be broken as long as slaves paid appropriate damages.
[I]f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work. [20]
Gerard Casey argues that voluntary slavery is possible if the concept of self-ownership is interpreted positively. [21]
Anarcho-capitalism is an anti-statist, libertarian political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies, the non-aggression principle, free markets and self-ownership, which extends the concept to include control of private property as part of the self. In the absence of statute, anarcho-capitalists hold that society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through participation in the free market, which they describe as a voluntary society involving the voluntary exchange of goods and services. In a theoretical anarcho-capitalist society, the system of private property would still exist and be enforced by private defense agencies and/or insurance companies selected by customers, which would operate competitively in a market and fulfill the roles of courts and the police.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
Wage slavery is a term used to criticize perceived exploitation of labor by business, by keeping wages low or stagnant in order to maximize profits. The situation of wage slavery can be loosely defined as a person's dependence on wages for their livelihood, especially when wages are low, treatment and conditions are poor, and there are few chances of upward mobility.
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition, although the notion of Spooner as an anarchist has been challenged by legal historian Clay S. Conrad, who pointed out that Spooner advocated constitutionally limited governments in his writings.
Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.
Paternalism is action that limits a person's or group's liberty or autonomy and is intended to promote their own good. Paternalism can also imply that the behavior is against or regardless of the will of a person, or also that the behavior expresses an attitude of superiority. Paternalism, paternalistic and paternalist have all been used as a pejorative for example in the context of societal and/or political realms and references.
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or it may be imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment. Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade. Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas.
Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie was a French magistrate, classicist, writer, poet and political theorist, best remembered for his intense and intimate friendship with essayist Michel de Montaigne. His early political treatise Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was posthumously adopted by the Huguenot movement and is sometimes seen as an early influence on modern anti-statist, utopian and civil disobedience thought.
Involuntary servitude or involuntary slavery is a legal and constitutional term for a person laboring against that person's will to benefit another, under some form of coercion, to which it may constitute slavery. While laboring to benefit another occurs also in the condition of slavery, involuntary servitude does not necessarily connote the complete lack of freedom experienced in chattel slavery; involuntary servitude may also refer to other forms of unfree labor. Involuntary servitude is not dependent upon compensation or its amount. Prison labor is often referred to as involuntary servitude. Prisoners are forced to work for free or for very little money while they carry out their time in the system.
Self-ownership is the concept of property in one's own body, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity meaning the exclusive right to control one's own body including one's life, where 'control' means exerting any physical interference and 'exclusive' means having the right to install and enforce a ban on other people doing this. Since the legal norm of property title claim incapacitates other people from claiming property title over the same resource at the same time, the right to control or interfere with one's own body in any arbitrary way is secured. Anarcho-capitalism defines self-ownership as the exclusive right to control one's body as long as the owner does not aggress upon others, leading to the concept of the sovereign individual. Minarchism considers self-ownership to mean the exclusive right to control one's body insofar considering action between inhabitants and not involving the state, making it roughly a pacifist morality only among inhabitants. Self-ownership is a central idea in several political philosophies that emphasize individualism, such as libertarianism and liberalism.
Anarchist economics is the set of theories and practices of economic activity within the political philosophy of anarchism. Many anarchists are anti-authoritarian anti-capitalists, with anarchism usually referred to as a form of libertarian socialism, i.e. a stateless system of socialism. Anarchists support personal property and oppose capital concentration, interest, monopoly, private ownership of productive property such as the means of production, profit, rent, usury and wage slavery which are viewed as inherent to capitalism.
The nature of capitalism is criticized by left-wing anarchists, who reject hierarchy and advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical voluntary associations. Anarchism is generally defined as the libertarian philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful as well as opposing authoritarianism, illegitimate authority and hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations. Capitalism is generally considered by scholars to be an economic system that includes private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit or income, the accumulation of capital, competitive markets, voluntary exchange and wage labor, which have generally been opposed by most anarchists historically. Since capitalism is variously defined by sources and there is no general consensus among scholars on the definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category, the designation is applied to a variety of historical cases, varying in time, geography, politics and culture.
Slavery in the ancient world, from the earliest known recorded evidence in Sumer to the pre-medieval Antiquity Mediterranean cultures, comprised a mixture of debt-slavery, slavery as a punishment for crime, and the enslavement of prisoners of war.
The non-aggression principle (NAP), also called the non-aggression axiom, is the fundamental principle of morality that states that any person is permitted do everything with his property, except aggression, defined as the initiation of forceful action, which is defined as, 'the application or threat of', 'physical interference or fraud ', any of which without consent. The principle is also called the non-initiation of force. The principle incorporates universal enforcability.
Libertarianism is variously defined by sources as there is no general consensus among scholars on the definition nor on how one should use the term as a historical category. Scholars generally agree that libertarianism refers to the group of political philosophies which emphasize freedom, individual liberty and voluntary association. Libertarians generally advocate a society with little or no government power.
When the Dutch and Swedes established colonies in the Delaware Valley of what is now Pennsylvania, in North America, they quickly imported enslaved Africans for labor; the Dutch also transported them south from their colony of New Netherland. Enslavement was documented in this area as early as 1639. William Penn and the colonists who settled in Pennsylvania tolerated slavery. Still, the English Quakers and later German immigrants were among the first to speak out against it. Many colonial Methodists and Baptists also opposed it on religious grounds. During the Great Awakening of the late 18th century, their preachers urged slaveholders to free their slaves. High British tariffs in the 18th century discouraged the importation of additional slaves, and encouraged the use of white indentured servants and free labor.
Walter Edward Block is an American Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist. He currently holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans and is a senior fellow of the non-profit think-tank Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
The title-transfer theory of contract (TTToC) is a legal interpretation of contracts developed by economist Murray Rothbard and jurist Williamson Evers. The theory interprets all contractual obligations in terms of property rights, viewing a contract as a bundle of title transfers. According to Randy Barnett, the TTToC stands in opposition to most mainstream contract theories which view contractual obligations as the result of a binding promise. Proponents of the approach often claim it is superior on grounds of both consistency and ethical considerations. The TTToC is often supported by libertarians.
Slavery in international law is governed by a number of treaties, conventions and declarations. Foremost among these is the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) that states in Article 4: “no one should be held in slavery or servitude, slavery in all of its forms should be eliminated.”
Indentured servitude in British America was the prominent system of labor in the British American colonies until it was eventually supplanted by slavery. During its time, the system was so prominent that more than half of all immigrants to British colonies south of New England were white servants, and that nearly half of total white immigration to the Thirteen Colonies came under indenture. By the beginning of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, only 2 to 3 percent of the colonial labor force was composed of indentured servants.