It's about social control and it's about labor, and fortunes have been built on that labor and it is one of the very difficult things for Americans to acknowledge.
It's about social control, and it's about labor, and fortunes have been built on that labor, and it is one of the very difficult things for Americans to acknowledge.
In the same way that the world economy was largely built on slave labor, the modern American economy has become increasingly dependent on immigrant labor.
As such, a growth model built on cheap labor has been transformed by the emergence of a large and expensive welfare state, and also labor market rigidities that have led to high youth unemployment rates.
There remain entire industries built on prison labor.
Apartheid in South Africa protected a regime of white owners whose original wealth was almost entirely extractive, built on the labor of black Africans in mining and farming.
Walter Johnson's "River of Dark Dreams" shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.
Indeed, to all the great Western trading powers of the day — much of whose wealth was built on the labor of enslaved Africans — Haiti stood as a frightful example of freedom carried too far.
If you wear cotton blue jeans, if you take out an insurance policy, if you buy from anyone who has a connection to the industries that were built on chattel labor, then you have benefited from slavery.
But it is curious that "The Conspirator," while it includes a scene in which Mary speaks with tragic, misty eloquence about "the cause," declines to note, even in passing, that her cause was the defense of a way of life built on the labor of human chattel.
