609
Republicans were cooler back when Marx liked them
(lemmy.world)
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Take a step back. We're talking about prison labor. That labor is worth capital that the laborer will see none of. They are in state custody, potentially for the rest of their life.
There is a profit motive. The prisons make money selling slave labor. Corporations make money sourcing cheap labor from prisons. Many of those prisons are privately owned for-profit businesses.
The laborer is owned by the state and is not free to leave or cease laboring, and and is subject to other forms of cruelty including psychological torture if they refuse.
How you couldn't conclude that this laborer is a slave is beyond me. "It's okay if you're not profiting off of it" is a terrible rational for stripping a person of their rights completely and using them like cattle with the threat of torture as a punishment for disobedience. Furthermore, it's not true, prison labor is quite profitable for everyone involved except for the slaves.
My point is not to defend modern prison labor, which is pretty indefensible, my point is that the exception carved out for punishment was not meant as slavery-by-other-means, even if that's what it turned into. See: 'grinding the wind' in contemporary prisons of the time.
It's dumb and pointless, but was not meant to have a profit motive. It was meant as punishment, in the delusion that work was 'reformative'.
Well, that's exactly what the 13th amendment says:
It's pretty easy to conclude that using convicts as slaves was a part of the plan. Remember, this was 1865, 99 years before the civil rights act. Black people may have been freed from obligate slavery, but the completely unequal laws made it quite easy to funnel black Americans into chain gangs.
Just because some white people were also slaves now doesn't really make a difference.
And considering that legislators are often involved with the legal profession, the wording is carefully chosen - legal challenges to 'involuntary servitude' have been issued on everything from community service to military contracts. Slavery, as we would recognize it, was intended to be exterminated by the 13th. What kind of evidence would you accept for the intention of the drafters of the 13th to eradicate slavery?
Chain gangs were an innovation that primarily came about after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and championed by local elites in the South - I don't find it a particularly compelling idea that the Radical Republicans in the Federal government were considering that before chain gangs became widespread. Furthermore, extensive civil rights actions were passed in the Reconstruction era when the Radical Republicans still dominated the government, including anti-segregation legislation and the election of the first African-American Congressmen. It was only once the time of the Radicals had passed and Reconstruction had been ended that Jim Crow laws as we would recognize it took hold.