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<coqueryv@ext.jussieu.fr> Once more, I completely agree with Martin Klein, word by word! (I hesitated myself in calling the victims in concentration camps "slaves". His double definition is perfectly precise. I quite agree with Werner Hillebrecht and Martin Klein's remarks: slavery might be a not everlasting status : such where the Herero prisoners,or the Jews deported of the Shoah, or still may be these poor Russian or East Europeans girls deported to the West for prostitutionŠ Indentured labor might probably be confused with conjunctural slavery, at least when at last the "contract" was respected and the worker sent back home. Besides, as we always knew, in a few cases, few indeed but actual, one can escape from slavery. By the way, I don't propose the status of slave as "a definition of slavery that turns upon payment for services" (Thornton), but the slave himself BEING merchandise (which did not prevent him or her, sometimes, to receive payment). You did not need a cash economy to be a merchendise and a tool, therefore to be bought or sold - or given or exchanged and used as such, either by the state or by an individual - : there were slaves in any kind of a society, monetized or not (exchanged, pawned, or by origin & descent). I perfectly agree that a definition of the status of a slave does not necessarily deal with the real treatment received by slaves : it depended on many factors, mainly on the privileged organization of social production, and partly at least on the more or less spark of "humanity" in the slave's owner mind: you were good or bad with slaves as you were for dogs or horses or donkeys, and careful or not as with a cart or a plow. Therefore a definition of a slave by ill treatment and torture is not either a satisfactory definition. Most of them were very ill-treated, but not ALL of them, probably even in the Independent State of the Congo, even if these were very few: in an autaucratic regime, you always need kapos (consider and compare with slavery in the South of the U.S.). As for Africa internal slavery, perhaps a number of them were relatively well treated (the so-called domestic slavery), but at least a few and often more were ill-treated. At last, Ken Harrow's comment that this probably made little difference to the people undergoing harsh slavery or forced labor is certainly also true. In that meaning, you may also argue that the very bad conditions of Chinese (or Indian or other nearly homeless) workers, including many children, paid nearly nothing to produce huge quantities of very cheap clothes benefitting the West (and an internal upper bourgeois class), make them feel slaves facing the capitalist globalization ! But this is not a slave production, neither a colonial one. It is a western copitalist modern one based on the so-called "unequal exchange". It is one of the reasons why we have to well define and precise our concepts. Independently of the practical misuse that politicians made of his theories later, this was indeed a very good quality of Marx's thought as a social scientist.
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