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Slavery and Wage Labour: Freedom and Its Doubles

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Slavery and Wage Labour: Freedom and Its Doubles 3 Slavery and Wage Labour: Freedom and Its Doubles In a 2012 TEDx talk titled ‘Photos that bear witness to modern slav- ery’, a photographer talks us through what the publicity blurb describes as her ‘hauntingly beautiful images ...illuminating the plight of the 27 million souls enslaved worldwide’. Lisa Kristine, a slim, young white American woman, with neat blonde hair and a startlingly white shirt, stands spotlit on a stage. Behind her, images of impoverished develop- ing world black and brown men, women and children are projected onto a huge screen. As the photographs appear, Lisa recounts the story of her work with Free the Slaves. It was, she tells us in a voice husky with sup- pressed emotion, a journey into ‘Dante’s inferno’, a hidden world where ‘modern slaves’ are forced to labour with ‘primitive tools’ in unbearable heat (Kristine, 2012). On her journey, she met people engaged in brick production and stone quarrying in India and Nepal, brothel prostitution in Nepal, silk dyeing in India and informal gold mining in Ghana. In the Himalayas, Kristine tells us, she found and photographed ‘children carrying stone for miles down mountainous terrain to trucks waiting below. The sheets of stone weighed more than the children’ (Kristine, 2012). They, like other workers she met, were not paid for their backbreaking work, but many did not even realize they were slaves ‘because they’ve been slaves all their lives’ and knew no differ- ent. But, she continues, one group of villagers did attempt to resist their exploitation. In response, the ‘slavers’ burned down their homes, and the villagers ‘were so petrified they wanted to give up’. Yet one woman: rallied for them to persevere and abolitionists on the ground helped them get a quarry lease of their own. So that now they do the same backbreaking work, but they do it for themselves, and they get paid forit,andtheydoitinfreedom. (Kristine, 2012) 55 J. O. Davidson, Modern Slavery © Julia O’Connell Davidson 2015 56 Modern Slavery It seems likely that she is referring to a case that is presented by Free the Slaves as a success story, in which ‘hereditary slaves in a stone quarry’ in northern India were helped ‘to stand up to their masters and renounce slavery’ and subsequently ‘embarked on new lives, many of them now running their own quarry. The children went to school and some ex-slaves even ran for elected office’ (Bales, 2007a; FTS, 2014b). I do not doubt that these villagers were in an extremely oppressive situation, or that they managed to improve that situation in certain respects through their collective action. But I do wonder what it is that leads organizations like Free the Slaves and Walk Free to describe such workers as ‘modern slaves’, and what kind of freedom they wish to bestow upon them. Take artisanal gold mining and stone quarrying work, for example, both generally classified under the broad heading of ‘Artisanal and Small Mining’ or ASM. The term refers to ‘informal mining activities carried out using low technology or with minimal machinery’ (Fraser Institute, 2012). Definitional problems, the absence of reliable and cross-nationally comparable official statistics, and the fact that workers are often involved on a seasonal and occasional basis mean that all statistics on it should be treated with caution. However, it is estimated that, in the developing world, there are ‘at least 25 million artisanal miners, with 150–170 million people indirectly reliant on ASM’ (Fraser Institute, 2012). The employment relations associated with ASM vary widely, not merely between different countries and regions, but also within them, and even within a single mine. In Ghana, for instance, labourers in artisanal gold mining may be working on a seasonal or more perma- nent basis, with seasonal workers often having migrated from poorer rural regions in the north; they may be hired by the day or work- ing on a self-employed, entrepreneurial basis (Okyere, 2012). In South Asia, ASM includes workers on permanent and casual employment con- tracts (though not usually written contracts), self-employed producers, dependent producers, unpaid family members and bonded labourers. Many workers are indebted, in some cases leading to forms of bondage transferrable between family members, or generationally, and the vast majority are migrants from other regions of the same country (ILO, 2005; Lahiri-Dutt, 2006). As ‘internal migrants’, they are often unable to access basic entitlements to housing, health facilities, education and banking services, or to secure ‘social security and legal protection’ (UNICEF, 2014) and, in addition, such workers are in the main drawn from extremely poor and marginalized communities, Dalit (or Sched- uled Caste) or Adivasi (or Scheduled Tribes) (almost half of India’s Adivasi Slavery and Wage Labour: Freedom and Its Doubles 57 population of 84.3 million live below the official poverty line, Nilsen, 2012: 1). Whatever the nature of the employment relation, ASM workers in the developing world typically labour without proper equipment or safety gear and the conditions they face are notoriously harsh (Hilson et al., 2013; Okyere, 2012, 2013). Occupational hazards affecting all workers in ASM in South Asia (in other words, the ‘free’ as well as the bonded) include: respiratory problems, silicosis, tuberculosis, leukemia, arthritis, poor vision and deafness to reproductive tract problems. They occur due to constant exposure to dust and noise, poor water supply and sanita- tion. Whereas major accidents claim mostly the lives of men due to their preponderance in the underground jobs, minor accidents due to blasting or falls are also common for both women and men. Snake bites in conditions of inundation can also claim lives. (Lahiri-Dutt, 2006: 25) Workers generally earn either only enough for daily survival or too little to avoid becoming mired in debt. In many places, ‘Living and working conditions are deplorable; small and low temporary huts with plastic sheets for roofing, no clean and safe accessible drinking water supply, no electricity, no health services and no educational facilities for the children’ (Lahiri-Dutt, 2006: 30). Samuel Okyere’s ethnography of an artisanal gold mine in Ghana reveals similar living and working conditions (2012, 2013). The new abolitionists are not, of course, in favour of such hazardous and miserable conditions, or of inequality, poverty or caste/tribal dis- crimination. But they imagine these problems as separable from what they call ‘slavery’. More than this, the new abolitionists believe that end- ing ‘slavery’ and enabling workers like those Lisa Kristine photographed to ‘work in freedom’ is part of the solution to the problem of poverty and global inequality. What they dub ‘modern slavery’ is presented as an anachronism that can and will disappear when economic develop- ment and modernization is combined with proper anti-slavery law and law enforcement. As Kevin Bales (2010) puts it: Slavery has been pushed to the criminal edges of our global soci- ety and to the very edge of its own extinction ...freed slaves given opportunities today generate economic growth through a ‘freedom dividend’. 58 Modern Slavery Though workers liberated from bondage may not immediately enjoy a standard of living, working conditions or social protections compa- rable to that enjoyed by people like Kevin and Lisa themselves, they have been gifted the basic building blocks of ‘freedom’. Now they can participate in capitalism proper. Their freedom, carefully managed and mixed with good, honest toil, will ultimately pay dividends that will allow them to lift themselves and their descendants from poverty and deprivation, and help their countries to develop economically. Again, there are strong echoes of nineteenth century European thought. Gyan Prakash (1993: 134) describes a letter to the civil court authorities in Calcutta written in 1808 by a minor official of the East India Company, which denounced British tolerance of slavery in India, arguing that its abolition ‘would inspire progress and prosperity in the region’, and that ‘free labor would bring the benefits of a market econ- omy and promote population growth and industriousness’. The new abolitionists, it seems, rely on the same ‘transition narrative’ that has historically been deployed in liberal defences of various European colo- nial ventures (Chakrabarty, 1992), ‘a heavily ideological narrative’ in which history unfolds as progress from the ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’ and from feudalism into capitalism, culminating with ‘the modern individual’ at the story’s end (Brace, 2004: 210). This chapter critically explores that narrative against the history of wage labour in liberal capitalist societies, then returns to consider what is masked, forgotten or glossed over in depictions of workers like those photographed by Lisa Kristine as ‘slaves’. ‘Freeing up’ wage labour In feudal European societies, material production and human reproduc- tion were visibly united. A person’s position at birth determined their role in the process of material production, and material production was arranged with a view to sustaining and reproducing the human rela- tions that characterized the society, as well as human life itself: ‘all of what we might now call “society” was understood in terms of kinship or kin-like bonds of loyalty or fealty on the model of the patriarchal household’ (Slater, 1998: 138). There was profound political inequality, but those at the top of the hierarchy had certain obligations to their dependants lower down the hierarchy, as well as rights in relation to them. According to the standard liberal account of the history of lib- eral societies, and also to orthodox sociological theory, the two cycles – production and reproduction – were wrenched apart in the transition Slavery and Wage Labour: Freedom and Its Doubles 59 to capitalism. Productive activity was no longer suborned to the imper- ative to preserve a society organized around kin-like bonds, and status hierarchies were gradually eliminated and replaced by contractual rela- tions between free and formally equal buyers and sellers of labour.
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