Socialist Action /April 2001
Book Review: "Disposable People: New
Slavery in the Global Economy,: by Kevin Bales. University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1999. 298 pp. $14.95 (paper)
The New Slavery and the New World Economy
By PAUL SIEGEL
Most persons probably think of slavery as a thing
of the past that, if it exists at all in the world today, is present only
in isolated pockets and is fast disappearing.
Kevin Bales, however, finds that if we define slavery
as a condition in which people are forced to work "by violence and
held against their wills for purposes of exploitation," it is present
throughout the world and growing. Intimately related to the penetration
by transnational corporations of the economies of the underdeveloped countries,
it differs significantly, as we shall see, from the slavery of the past,
but it is slavery for all that.
Bales is the principal lecturer of the Roehampton
Institute of the University of Surrey in England. In this book he has studied
at close hand enterprises employing slaves in five countries-prostitution
in Thailand, water delivery in desert Mauritania, charcoal making in Brazil,
brick making in Pakistan, agriculture in India-talking to slaves and slaveholders
and studying the economics of the enterprises.
In his investigation he had the assistance of researchers
and representatives of human rights organizations in these countries, who
collaborated with him and acted as translators.
Some activists in human rights and anti-slavery
organizations have estimated the number of slaves in the world-which is
difficult to count since it is illegal in all countries but tacitly disregarded
by many governmental authorities-to be as high as 200 million. But Bales,
seeking to be conservative, puts it at 27 million. This is more than the
total number kidnapped and transported from Africa in the trans-Atlantic
slave trade and greater than the population of Canada.
The major part of this number are people in India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal who have given themselves into slavery as
payment for a debt, but slavery is also concentrated in South East Asia
and parts of Africa and South America. However, just about every country
has slaves even though in small number. Enslaved Third World prostitutes
and domestic workers have been found in Great Britain and the United States.
Also farm workers, kept under lock and key by armed guards, have been found
in the United States.
The basic difference between old-style slavery
and contemporary slavery is that in old-style slavery the slaves were a
major investment with a high purchase price and were maintained in a long-term
relationship. In contemporary slavery slaves come cheap as a result of the
world's population having tripled since 1945 and of poor peasants having
been dispossessed through the competition from modernized foreign and domestic
agriculture. They are therefore worked to the limit of their capacity and
when they are no longer so profitable are replaced by new slaves.
The old-style slave was valuable property, which
had to be secured by legal ownership. With the abundance of potential slaves
from the vulnerable poor, this is not necessary. The new slavery is, like
neo-colonialism, not based on legal ownership but on control.
In old-style slavery slaveholders did not have
the pool of potential slaves in their native land now available in the countries
where slavery is concentrated, and they went abroad for their slaves. Race,
therefore, was a distinguishing feature of the slave, and slaveholders could
rationalize their holding human beings under duress by claims of racial
superiority and of bringing civilization to supposedly inferior people.
In the new slavery race and ethnicity are generally of little importance,
and little effort is devoted to moral justification of the practice.
Contemporary slavery resembles the "lean and
mean" industrial economy with its constant downsizing, out-sourcing,
and loss of jobs in that slavery now is not a life-time proposition. The
slaveholder is thus spared such expenses as maintaining infants and small
children until they can be put to work and providing medical care for ailing
slaves. Slaves are "disposable people"-it is cheaper to let them
die.
Although the new slavery has these distinctive
characteristics, it takes different forms in different countries. Mauritania,
a small country in northern Africa which has an ancient tradition of the
Arab north maintaining slaves from the Black south, comes closest to the
old-style chattel slavery. Slavery has been officially abolished, but this
is a legal fiction that hides its continued actual existence.
On the Indian subcontinent the new slavery takes
the form of debt bondage. The length and nature of the bonded laborer's
service are not specified, but he is kept under absolute physical control
until he pays off his loan, which, though small, may take years since he
is not paid for his work.
The fastest growing form of slavery is contract
slavery. The contract is a means of enticement to promised employment at
an unknown place, and it gives an appearance of legitimacy. On arriving
at his place of work, however, the worker finds that he is in reality a
slave whose movements are controlled under the threat of violence and who
is paid nothing. Contract slavery is most prevalent in South East Asia,
Brazil, and some Arab countries.
Violence as a threat in the background or as a
constant presence exists in all forms of slavery. Another constant feature
is rampant governmental corruption, by which the police and legal authorities
overlook the existence of slavery or aid in the coercion of the slaves.
Rapid social change generates in traditional societies
greed and corruption on an immense scale. While the poor are having their
lives disrupted, the newly enriched elite, panting for ever more, disregard
law and ancient custom. These societies are like a stagnant, fetid pool
violently agitated by the winds of change, which bring up from the pool's
depths foul matter that comes to the surface as noxious scum.
The new slavery is an integral part of the world
political economy although the connections may not be immediately apparent.
As Bales says, "economic links can tie the slave in the field or the
brothel to the highest reaches of international corporations."
In the highly lucrative sex tourist business in
Thailand, although the sex workers are degraded and exploited, most of them
are not enslaved through debt bondage, as is the case of women in the brothels
frequented by Thai men. Nevertheless, "sex tourism has created a new
business climate conducive to sexual slavery" and, as a major stimulus
to the Thai economy, "also generates some of the income that Thai men
use to fund their visits to brothels."
The United States and France support Mauritania,
which serves as a buffer against Libya and the Islamic fundamentalists of
Algeria. They therefore accept its assurances that it is eradicating any
"vestiges" of slavery although the "ex-slaves" continue
to work without pay and have not been told of their "liberation."
In Brazil big companies and transnational corporations
like Nestle own vast tracts of forest, which they clear regardless of ecological
damage. They employ sub-contractors who use bonded laborers to make the
charcoal that is required for Brazil's steel plants. The plants may be modern,
but their charcoal comes from slaves.
Bales concluded with a plea for the dissemination
of information about the new slavery and for investors and consumers in
the West to fight against it through disinvestment in corporations that
cooperate with it and through appropriate boycotts.
Such measures, if they are carried on by mass movements
in well-focused and well-directed drives that make use of other forms of
struggle as well, have their uses, as we saw in the fight against South
African apartheid. However, slavery, as Bales's evidence itself indicates,
will in the last analysis only be eliminated with the overthrow of world
capitalism, a herculean but necessary task of the world proletariat.
Socialist Action /April 2001 |