The New World Order
All economic empires, past and present, laid their foundations on the slave trade. The term slave ironically originates from the slavs of Eastern Europe who served the Romans as spoils of war (the source of the latest influx of economic migrants to the UK). As any aristocrat or courtesan might reluctantly tell you, wealth is not measured solely in terms of money or land. The less those who sit at the apex of the pyramid of human consumption have to pay for their goods and services, the greater their effective wealth becomes. True wealth is measured in terms of ‘buying power’ and the number of servants one has to do one’s bidding.
Nowhere is this principle more keenly demonstrated than within the textile mills and shoe factories of the ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘over-industrialised’ world, where items that retail in the West at over $30 cost less than a dollar to manufacture. It appears that quality goods, soldiers and arms are not the West’s only exports; we also export much of our slave labour too. Whilst swarms of Mexicans and Eastern Europeans continue to flow into our capitals, much of the slave labour that maintains Western affluence continues to live under flags of foreign convenience.
The simmering issue of immigration has once again bubbled to the surface of American, French and British politics, as Mexicans, North Africans and Polish workers actively change the social landscape of our fat, aging and increasingly lazy economies. While we often object to the influx of cheap labour and all its attendant social miseries, this is an economic inevitability of our age of affluence. It is inevitable because our super rich (albeit fewer than 5% of the population) spend so much on cars, holiday homes and consumer goods that they drive up prices of houses, goods, and most especially land. The only individuals who appear to be willing (and able) to work for less than $10 an hour are those who escaped hardship in poorer climes, lured by promises of higher wages and imaginings of greater prosperity. For many immigrants, city streets which once appeared to be paved with gold soon become seen for what they are, avenues to a more expensive form of poverty.
The contentious public debate which raged throughout California during the 1970s has resurfaced with a vengeance. The waves of Mexican immigration of the seventies were alleged to be ‘ruining’ the cultural climate of the sunny state of California. I once heard the same argument when flying back from Brussels as I sat adjacent to a Chinese-American who then served as requisitions officer for NATO. She remarked that Los Angeles, her city of origin, was ‘OK until the Mexicans ruined it’. Well, after all her forebears arrived there first… This Mexican immigration debate was famously resolved in a single line when the then Governor of California declared that ‘Americans don’t pick lettuce’, a statement which could perhaps be more simply stated as, ‘you can’t have cheap lettuce in the supermarkets without having Mexicans pick it’. This debate was recently resurrected when Senator John McCain challenged an audience of Americans to determine whether they would themselves pick lettuce for $50 an hour. The answer was resounding, ‘leave it to the Mexicans’. Even if Americans could and would pick lettuce for $50 an hour, this rhetorical question becomes a self-defeating economic proposal. After all, a nation’s effective wealth is considerably diminished if goods and services cost more., including expensive lettuce. If a Californian earns the same and goods and services cost more, then obviously the quality of life in California will become a little less sunny. The solution to the dilemma of wage stagnation is obvious – increase immigration to push down the costs of manufacture and to reduce the cost of services. After all, if lettuce cost $50 an hour just to pick, then salads would become the food of the rich (incidentally in 18th Century Britain oysters were a food of and for the poor).
In our modern Western world, in which the corporate elite own everything from energy to software, the spiralling cost of living has driven more into debt, poverty and servitude than at any time in our history. The cost of living is in fact now so high that millions simply can’t afford to live on the minimum wages paid by cleaning companies, fast food chains and farms, no matter how many hours a week they work. Caught between the inadequacy of immigrant wages and the necessity of finding the thousand or so a week it costs to live within our job rich cities, many Westerners born outside of privilege find that their only viable options appear to be debt*, crime or prostitution.
*ongoing education is taken to be a form of debt
Of all the goods and pleasures favoured by the wealthy, there is perhaps none as sweet to the palate as service, whether it comes in the form of handmaidens, butlers, or even common household servants (Prince Charles has a modest entourage of three dozen). After all what is the value of wealth if it does not afford pleasure, even if this service is limited to maid servants? Indeed, the global tradition of slavery is as long as it is grimly fascinating, reflecting the economic servitude of the ‘weak’ by the ‘strong’. As Hitler once remarked, “Nations, like individuals, are engaged in a ceaseless conflict in which only the fittest can hope to survive’. Twisted by Nazi logic, this is of course only a short ideological shuffle from ‘the strong dominating and enslaving the weak’. This is the very basis of industrial wealth, and the reason why so many members of the aspiring classes dream of owning a factory. A giant lateral and somewhat warped step in reasoning you might think? Perhaps not, as a return to Nazi economics soon reveals. In the 1930’s Hitler decreed that cars should no longer be the exclusive domain of the wealthy, and that every hard working and honest German citizen should own a car. At this juncture the concept of the ‘people’s car’ or Volkswagen (in literal German translation) was born, apparently with only the noblest intentions. However the truth owed more to the economic importance of slavery than to any ideal of social justice or equality. At the close of World War II, Volkswagen admitted to having used no fewer than 17,000 slaves in just one of its factories in Wolfsburg - no wonder the “people’s car” was so affordable to the masses. Another issue of clouded morality centres upon the motivations of the American Civil War, when the populous and industrial North attacked the relatively rich and rural South, allegedly over the immorality of its slave economy. Cynics however prefer to believe that envy and a desire to import slaves to the factories of the burgeoning industrial economy of the North were closer to the true motives behind the American Civil War.
So valuable are slaves that they are (still) regarded as amongst the most valuable of all traded commodities. Catherine the Great of Russia allegedly gave an estimated 45,000 slaves as gifts, whilst in Texas the average price of a healthy male slave in the mid nineteenth Century was equivalent to 200 acres of prime farmland. The significance of this ratio is possibly best demonstrated by the social upheavals of late 14th Century Europe where, after half the population died from the Plague, labourers took over the vacated farms of the gentry, and the remaining land owners were forced to farm their own lands due to a shortage of labour. In a stroke many of the poor became land owners, and the Feudal gentry had lost half of their servants and were no longer maintained by their serfs. For those numerophilic individuals (like myself), African-American slaves performed an estimated 222 million hours of labour between 1619 and 1865, equating to around $100 trillion of work in today’s currency. These figures are merely a snapshot of the economic value of slavery throughout history, from the American Plantations of pre-civil war America to today’s textile factories in South America, Asia and Mexico.
A UNICEF report in 2004 claimed that slavery continues today within every African nation, and is currently enjoying a boom in southern Asia. One estimate put the global slave population at 27 million at the turn of the Millennium, although this figure fails to take into account debt slavery or the clandestine nature of the slave economy (most slave traders don’t declare their earnings). As far as slavery is concerned, there’s a pleasurable side to the market too, given that at least half a million women and children are forced into sexual slavery or prostitution a year according to the US State Department (a figure probably closer to 2 million).
It is slavery then, rather than its sister prostitution which is the World’s oldest profession. The slave trade generates annual global revenues well in excess of $31bn, half of which occurs within the industrialised world. A sex slave presently retails at around $70,000 in the West, and almost a million people are ‘trafficked’ across international borders annually, including more than 20,000 into the United States, 80% of whom are females destined for the commercial sex trade. UN figures suggest that profits from human slave trafficking may be as high as $9.5 billion a year, ranking it alongside drugs & arms trafficking as a leading source of black market revenues.
In 2003 a UN official described the trafficking of women and children across Asia as ‘the largest slave trade in history’. Over thirty million children have been traded over the last three decades in Asia and the Pacific Rim alone, the victims usually being teenage girls who materialise in sweat shops or brothels. The trade is so lucrative that many government and police officials provide Asian traffickers state protection. As a consequence more people are enslaved today than at any time during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, even though there is no longer a census of the world’s slave population. Vast numbers indeed, but if estimates included those who are forced to work at or below the minimum wage, or those who toil long hours due to a suffocating burden of debt, then we would be talking in terms of billions. The question that has become lost in the haze of the Western dream is who we really serve through our labours, ourselves, society at large, or an exclusive and phenomenally wealthy social elite? Next time you go to a designer clothes shop and pick out a brand name, or buy a few bargains from the supermarket just ask yourself who the beneficiary of slavery really is?
Nowhere is this principle more keenly demonstrated than within the textile mills and shoe factories of the ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘over-industrialised’ world, where items that retail in the West at over $30 cost less than a dollar to manufacture. It appears that quality goods, soldiers and arms are not the West’s only exports; we also export much of our slave labour too. Whilst swarms of Mexicans and Eastern Europeans continue to flow into our capitals, much of the slave labour that maintains Western affluence continues to live under flags of foreign convenience.
The simmering issue of immigration has once again bubbled to the surface of American, French and British politics, as Mexicans, North Africans and Polish workers actively change the social landscape of our fat, aging and increasingly lazy economies. While we often object to the influx of cheap labour and all its attendant social miseries, this is an economic inevitability of our age of affluence. It is inevitable because our super rich (albeit fewer than 5% of the population) spend so much on cars, holiday homes and consumer goods that they drive up prices of houses, goods, and most especially land. The only individuals who appear to be willing (and able) to work for less than $10 an hour are those who escaped hardship in poorer climes, lured by promises of higher wages and imaginings of greater prosperity. For many immigrants, city streets which once appeared to be paved with gold soon become seen for what they are, avenues to a more expensive form of poverty.
The contentious public debate which raged throughout California during the 1970s has resurfaced with a vengeance. The waves of Mexican immigration of the seventies were alleged to be ‘ruining’ the cultural climate of the sunny state of California. I once heard the same argument when flying back from Brussels as I sat adjacent to a Chinese-American who then served as requisitions officer for NATO. She remarked that Los Angeles, her city of origin, was ‘OK until the Mexicans ruined it’. Well, after all her forebears arrived there first… This Mexican immigration debate was famously resolved in a single line when the then Governor of California declared that ‘Americans don’t pick lettuce’, a statement which could perhaps be more simply stated as, ‘you can’t have cheap lettuce in the supermarkets without having Mexicans pick it’. This debate was recently resurrected when Senator John McCain challenged an audience of Americans to determine whether they would themselves pick lettuce for $50 an hour. The answer was resounding, ‘leave it to the Mexicans’. Even if Americans could and would pick lettuce for $50 an hour, this rhetorical question becomes a self-defeating economic proposal. After all, a nation’s effective wealth is considerably diminished if goods and services cost more., including expensive lettuce. If a Californian earns the same and goods and services cost more, then obviously the quality of life in California will become a little less sunny. The solution to the dilemma of wage stagnation is obvious – increase immigration to push down the costs of manufacture and to reduce the cost of services. After all, if lettuce cost $50 an hour just to pick, then salads would become the food of the rich (incidentally in 18th Century Britain oysters were a food of and for the poor).
In our modern Western world, in which the corporate elite own everything from energy to software, the spiralling cost of living has driven more into debt, poverty and servitude than at any time in our history. The cost of living is in fact now so high that millions simply can’t afford to live on the minimum wages paid by cleaning companies, fast food chains and farms, no matter how many hours a week they work. Caught between the inadequacy of immigrant wages and the necessity of finding the thousand or so a week it costs to live within our job rich cities, many Westerners born outside of privilege find that their only viable options appear to be debt*, crime or prostitution.
*ongoing education is taken to be a form of debt
Of all the goods and pleasures favoured by the wealthy, there is perhaps none as sweet to the palate as service, whether it comes in the form of handmaidens, butlers, or even common household servants (Prince Charles has a modest entourage of three dozen). After all what is the value of wealth if it does not afford pleasure, even if this service is limited to maid servants? Indeed, the global tradition of slavery is as long as it is grimly fascinating, reflecting the economic servitude of the ‘weak’ by the ‘strong’. As Hitler once remarked, “Nations, like individuals, are engaged in a ceaseless conflict in which only the fittest can hope to survive’. Twisted by Nazi logic, this is of course only a short ideological shuffle from ‘the strong dominating and enslaving the weak’. This is the very basis of industrial wealth, and the reason why so many members of the aspiring classes dream of owning a factory. A giant lateral and somewhat warped step in reasoning you might think? Perhaps not, as a return to Nazi economics soon reveals. In the 1930’s Hitler decreed that cars should no longer be the exclusive domain of the wealthy, and that every hard working and honest German citizen should own a car. At this juncture the concept of the ‘people’s car’ or Volkswagen (in literal German translation) was born, apparently with only the noblest intentions. However the truth owed more to the economic importance of slavery than to any ideal of social justice or equality. At the close of World War II, Volkswagen admitted to having used no fewer than 17,000 slaves in just one of its factories in Wolfsburg - no wonder the “people’s car” was so affordable to the masses. Another issue of clouded morality centres upon the motivations of the American Civil War, when the populous and industrial North attacked the relatively rich and rural South, allegedly over the immorality of its slave economy. Cynics however prefer to believe that envy and a desire to import slaves to the factories of the burgeoning industrial economy of the North were closer to the true motives behind the American Civil War.
So valuable are slaves that they are (still) regarded as amongst the most valuable of all traded commodities. Catherine the Great of Russia allegedly gave an estimated 45,000 slaves as gifts, whilst in Texas the average price of a healthy male slave in the mid nineteenth Century was equivalent to 200 acres of prime farmland. The significance of this ratio is possibly best demonstrated by the social upheavals of late 14th Century Europe where, after half the population died from the Plague, labourers took over the vacated farms of the gentry, and the remaining land owners were forced to farm their own lands due to a shortage of labour. In a stroke many of the poor became land owners, and the Feudal gentry had lost half of their servants and were no longer maintained by their serfs. For those numerophilic individuals (like myself), African-American slaves performed an estimated 222 million hours of labour between 1619 and 1865, equating to around $100 trillion of work in today’s currency. These figures are merely a snapshot of the economic value of slavery throughout history, from the American Plantations of pre-civil war America to today’s textile factories in South America, Asia and Mexico.
A UNICEF report in 2004 claimed that slavery continues today within every African nation, and is currently enjoying a boom in southern Asia. One estimate put the global slave population at 27 million at the turn of the Millennium, although this figure fails to take into account debt slavery or the clandestine nature of the slave economy (most slave traders don’t declare their earnings). As far as slavery is concerned, there’s a pleasurable side to the market too, given that at least half a million women and children are forced into sexual slavery or prostitution a year according to the US State Department (a figure probably closer to 2 million).
It is slavery then, rather than its sister prostitution which is the World’s oldest profession. The slave trade generates annual global revenues well in excess of $31bn, half of which occurs within the industrialised world. A sex slave presently retails at around $70,000 in the West, and almost a million people are ‘trafficked’ across international borders annually, including more than 20,000 into the United States, 80% of whom are females destined for the commercial sex trade. UN figures suggest that profits from human slave trafficking may be as high as $9.5 billion a year, ranking it alongside drugs & arms trafficking as a leading source of black market revenues.
In 2003 a UN official described the trafficking of women and children across Asia as ‘the largest slave trade in history’. Over thirty million children have been traded over the last three decades in Asia and the Pacific Rim alone, the victims usually being teenage girls who materialise in sweat shops or brothels. The trade is so lucrative that many government and police officials provide Asian traffickers state protection. As a consequence more people are enslaved today than at any time during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, even though there is no longer a census of the world’s slave population. Vast numbers indeed, but if estimates included those who are forced to work at or below the minimum wage, or those who toil long hours due to a suffocating burden of debt, then we would be talking in terms of billions. The question that has become lost in the haze of the Western dream is who we really serve through our labours, ourselves, society at large, or an exclusive and phenomenally wealthy social elite? Next time you go to a designer clothes shop and pick out a brand name, or buy a few bargains from the supermarket just ask yourself who the beneficiary of slavery really is?
posted by The Angry Man at 3:00 PM
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