Growing cotton has never profited from slavery. In fact, paid laborers were more profitable than slave laborers even after the cotton gin was created; although the question of whether the paid laborers were not also being exploited is certainly apparent. The country was divided on the matter of slavery from the very start - northerners, influenced by Quaker ideals, tended to express the belief that all men are equal under God, whereas white southerners, for what reasons I cannot fathom, tended to express the belief that the color of someone's skin displayed the color of their soul, or something to that poetic effect. Letters from 1775 show that white southerners *believed* slavery to be more profitable, to be a biological necessity, even held some kind of religious concern about it and definitely had concerns that the kingdom of Britain would impact their profits. They extended this lack of courtesy to anyone with any color to their skin at all, including the Cherokee nation, which was forcibly expelled from the land we now call Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, in a nearly genocidal cash grab from about 30 years before the Civil War.
But that's a whole separate conversation. Regardless of how much more we could have profited without slavery, the income generated by the practice of slavery and theft/abuse of real estate allowed our country to become independent, and after the cotton gin, allowed our country to modernize. Jim Crow laws in the south and sweatshops/child factories in the north allowed for rapid industrialization but increased economic depression among the lower classes in the east, forcing a westward migration especially for desperate, quick-fix-hungry gold miners and loggers, who irrevocably changed the landscape of the far west and destroyed much of its resiliency to natural weather patterns. This eastern economic depression among the lower classes also encouraged land-exploitative and drought-causing farming techniques in the Midwest, and these factors snowballed into the Dust Bowl and Great Depression.... Again, if we hadn't been so quick to abuse strangers we could have prevented this - for instance nowadays every farmer knows that wind screens of trees are a necessity to keep the soil on the ground, and the original inhabitants of this continent had already known that. They would have told us if we'd treated them fairly. The ideals of a free, self-determinate, and unexploitable populace were not truly implemented even from the birth of our country, and exploitation has never ceased but only changed form.
The biggest argument I see repeated by defenders of capitalism is that "being forced to work in order to survive is not exploitation when you can choose where and how you work", but I, personally, have only once experienced the privilege of having the choice of where to work, and for the people I grew up with who do get a choice it's often a difference of "which fast food place gives you more hours" rather than who pays more or who treats you more kindly. None of us have enough income to pay all our bills, let alone save up enough to move somewhere else. I used the military to escape that place and wound up somewhere else that's exactly the same - and that one time I got to choose where I worked, I feel like I sold my soul to earn the chance.
And then I made the "wrong" choice. It seemed like the right one, but in hindsight, I should have chosen the other...
And now I don't have any choice at all.
So I'm very glad that is an argument you haven't made, as it's one that causes very strong negative feelings for me... the frustration of being someone whose value only lasted as long as I could work, and now people tell me I don't even deserve to eat... I cannot express the true depth of that feeling in words. I have always done my best, put my pride into everything I've done, and failure after failure has taught me that no one cares about effort, only results, and people like me should be removed from the population. It's nothing personal, it's just about efficiency, and productivity, you know.
But we're humans, not robots. Nothing about me is repairable or exchangeable. You can't just oil my knees and replace my wrists. My mind is sensitive and craves novelty, my entire mental being writhes in pain when stifled and forced to endure repetition. I have never been useful to anyone who just wants another cog. And there are many, many people who are like me, and many more people who can force themselves to be nothing more than cogs for a time; and there are even people who *are* the reliable, dependable, grindstone turners whose joy in life is doing one thing and doing it predictably...
We all deserve to have the opportunity for self-fulfillment, the highest category of needs in Maslow's hierarchy. The category that requires everything else to be fulfilled - hunger, safety, validation, love...
And it is my opinion that any work that prevents the opportunity required for meeting *all* of Maslow's needs is exploitative. Work that exhausts you, work that takes more than half of your time (without meeting any higher needs)... this is exploitative and a direct result of the socially accepted model of exchanging currency for food, water, and shelter. Maybe your job isn't like that, but most people in the United States live like that, unable to pursue any of their own goals or meet their own needs because their time and energy is stripped from them for the sake of acquiring things that used to be provided for free.
How many years ago was it, in this land, that one could simply go out and throw up a leather tent/teepee, or build a log house, and stock up wood for the widowed granny who likes to paint? Now you have to buy or rent the land first, you have to make sure no one owns the fallen trees. How long ago was it that skilled laborers would work together to erect barns and dig sewers, and the cooks would make them a barbecue and the sewers would make them clothing and quilts in repayment? I believe the Amish still do this, actually. At what point did working together for a cause become so individualized that it's basically impossible for most of us to become a part of such a community? We did not evolve as a social species to become so isolated ...
Comments
Post a Comment