Consider this: At the height of the Roman empire, most inhabitants of Rome were slaves. Citizenship meant the difference between pursuing your own ideas or furthering someone else's. With the death of slavery, does citizenship mean anything anymore? I say the reinstitution of slavery would fix many problems. Unpaid debts. Medicine. Crime. Military service. All could be solved. All that without even considering how easy it would be to establish slaveholders' responsibilities and oversight of such.
Hmm. Slavery is ownership of a sentient being by another. Representation is a way of doing government that allows for a nation to functionally make decisions without a one man rule, and without athenian democracy. Two different topics imo.
SAM, dont confuse the US's political system with Indias. Representation offers freedom and if you doubt that look at the communist nations during the cold war. Communism was so amazing and so good, that they had to build a giant concrete wall with machine guns, barbed wire, and landmines to keep everyone in "paradise"
awfully hypocritical of you to imply the soviet union was an example of communism while claiming that minor differences in the election process from those in india make america at all democratic
The problem with slavery, for the power classes, is that you must do the whole room and board number on your slaves. You are responsible for their upkeep and to some extent their behavior. Nowadays you can pay people shit to do shit and they have to kiss your ass and then they go home and have to feed themselves and no centurion is going to come to your door and say 'Hey, your slave here is drunk and disorderly.' Which is embarrassing and then you have to whip the slave and have him or her sulking around. The modern system is streamlined and efficient and the slaves don't, for the most part, realize they are slaves. Hell, many of them, in Western democracies think that choosing between two candidates each approved and chosen by the ruling classes is democracy. It's like freedom is choosing Rebock over Nike. Oh, how creative and involved I am in the running of my country and feet.
I think certain people deserve to be kept as slaves, like the piss head who thinks it's funny to wander around the town near where I live and make crude sexual gestures at women, even when they expressly tell him to fuck off. I'd probably beat him to death for fun, though, and then I would need another slave.
See that's the thing. Beating someone to death in the heat of the moment can be much less damaging to the soul of the potential slave owner than owning a slave. Slave owning demeans the owner though their position is the better one.
Okay, it's actually great that you are willing to take a second-look at dangerous ideas, and I respect that. However, I would like to step away from slavery as it was practiced in Ancient Rome because, quite frankly, the Romans were a bunch of douchebags. The Athenian system of slavery was a different story, and that is probably more likely to happen during modern times. During the Hellenistic period, what amounted to slavery wasn't really a form of ownership at all, even though it sort of was technically. People actually served Athenian citizens for the rank and privileges of being part of a wealthy Greek's estate, and these servants could earn their citizenship by doing work under the table and even have opportunities at seeking political office. It wasn't the worst thing in the world, and it wasn't the best thing in the world either; it just isn't anything like what we think of slavery as being, viz chattel slavery. Really, the Athenians took a little bit of national pride in the fact that they treated their "slaves" very fairly, all things considered. Today, we'd be doing something a little bit similar to what the Athenians thought of slavery as being if we did something like require such-and-such hours of community service before we would declare a person to be a legal citizen of the United States. This would mean that, if you weren't showing up for your hours of community service, the federal government would put you on a bus, and you would be shipped back to whever you came from. Something relevant would be maintaining the country's interstates and picking up various forms of litter. If we have very beautiful roads and attractive scenery, what this this is going to do is draw money into the country. That's what really determines whether someone with any amount of money is going to want to immigrate to the United States. So let's say that some uneducated fellow from Guatamala wanted to move into the USA and work legally, perhaps become eligible one day for citizenship. Since he isn't qualified for any of the kinds of high-rolling careers that we really need an immigrant to try to fill, we're going to demand thirty hours per week of community service from this guy for a full two years, and we're going demand another twelve hours per week from this guy for an additional four years, set up to be flexible so that it could work around a class schedule at a technical college or something. We really want the guy to succeed, so he can bring in more revenue, so we're not going to deliberately impede any of his efforts to do so. So then let's say that some guy from Mexico City, which is a fairly educated and wealthy center of population in the country, is looking for a cooler climate to move to. He is a very affluent individual, and he would stack the revenue curve in our favor if he were to move in. If he were flying over our country and looking out his window at our cities, we'd want him to see a very attractive landscape, so he would be more inclined to want to move in. Well, with a small army of would-be illegal immigrants working on just that kind of job, that's exactly what he would see. There is a three-way gain here where we get extra revenue and a lot of cheap labor, the workers get to earn their citizenship relatively painlessly, meaning "painlessly" compared to being shot at while they try and cross the border," and the Mexican millionaire gets a nice piece of real estate to move his family to. I don't see anything wrong with that. Also, the increased value of our land would result in a form of gentrification, therefore driving out a lot of the riffraff out there who don't really want to do any legitimate work. The more gentrification taking place in our population centers, the more likely to chronically impoverished and unemployed are to move out into the countryside where they belong. Out of sight, out of mind. I say we should bring back gentrification because our population centers represent us as a country. Our population centers are what people see of our country. As cruel and callus as it sounds, we need money to keep those riffraff on their food stamps. It costs money, lots of it, to make sure that someone receives treatment during a medical emergency. It costs money to make sure that their children have a chance at a decent education, so maybe their lives won't end up as fucked-up and wasted as those of their parents. That money has to come from somewhere. It's in everyone's best interests to put our best foot forward when people from overseas come here to visit. The thing is, this community service would be kind of like a form of slavery, but it wouldn't really be like what most people would call "slavery" in modern times. A slave, in the time of Ancient Athens, was a fairly privileged citizen compared to how we treated the negro people. The same applies to "slavery" as it was practiced in Scandinavia: a so-called "slave" was really just a common person who lived on the premises and worked for room and board. It might have been essentially slave labor, but it was better than vagrancy. Anyway, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. They are most appreciated.
So did they have the right to say "This blows - I'm going to go live somwhere else"? If so, then they weren't slaves. See above. If you can quite, then by definition you are not a slave.
Someone offered a chicken sandwich for me, Swarm... As far as Rome v Greece... No clue. I think of the movie Gladiator when I think Roman Slavery. I guess the best way to do it would be to have some sort of legal oversight. Something like Animal Control perhaps. Slaves, of course, are human. They'd receive certain rights from that fact, but beyond that nothing. Citizens have legal rights, Slaves have the right to be treated humanely, but no more. Part of it would be that in becoming a slave, your new owner assumes your debts, current and future. Let's not forget that the government being a slave owner would allow for the manning of any nationalized industries at the lowest cost possible.
By the modern definition, no. However, these were also people who had absolutely nowhere else to go. It would have been suicidal to simply cut ties with your estate and drift off somewhere. It would have cost you any chance of gaining citizenship, and odds are high you'd be treated like shit. Probably your only real option at that point would be to get your ass out of Athens. With no master to speak for you or defend you, you didn't matter. Only war captives were chained to their tasks, and they were treated like shit anyway. Otherwise, a slave could very well be something like a police officer or an usher. You could own property if you bought it, and you could work and earn to buy your "freedom." Oh, and there was even an Athenian law at one point against striking a slave, partially because you could be striking a citizen who was just slumming at the time or didn't care to keep up with fashions. Ancient definitions of slavery simply wouldn't apply in modern times. In some ancient cultures, you'd be better off as a slave than you would be as a non-powerful person under Christian government. That includes Nero, by the way, who gave slaves the right to sue their masters in a court of law. In fact, the Christians really ended up fucking up a not-bad (if not great) system.
Only slavery as it came to be defined after hundreds of years of Christian rule. The Christians were really a bunch of savages, actually. They have only been behaving like civilized, intelligent human beings for perhaps three centuries if you wanted to be generous, and that only happened after they stopped treating their religion with any degree of seriousness whatsoever. Now that all they really do is run a bunch of charities, it is a lot easier to get along with them.
