Progressive Politics

Stop with the ad populum fallacies, I beg. It isn't a valid refutation and it's mainly you projecting ylur own misconceptions onto others and saying "everybody does it." Trump does this a lot, "Nobody knew how hard tax law would be." He means himself. You mean yourself. Reflect a bit more, you have consistent blind spots.

The condition in which one person is owned as property by another and is under the owner’s control, especially in involuntary servitude.

Everything I've listed literally fits that definition.

You can argue that because you need a job to survive, you’re forced to work.

Exactly, and they make it illegal or prohibitively difficult to do all other types of living unless you live in Slab City, and even those residents are trapped and heavily dependent on people to bring them food and water. Tell me how to survive in modern America with no job and no income. Who makes those laws?

This isn’t the traditional definition of slavery,

It is. You have failed repeatedly to look at your own propaganda you've consumed. Since the US ended chattel slavery and people pushed for civil rights, we've been distracted by the idea that there are no slaves (a lie from the rich to placate us), yet we've had company towns and our prisons are explicitly slave labor per the constitution. So why do YOU equate chattel slavery as the only type of slavery?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas

Here's a pretty famous guy from the 14/1500s who was originally a slaver then became against slavery. Read through his story and reflect why you associate slavery with chattel slavery of African Americans, when we can see traditionally it never meant that.

In keeping with the legal and moral doctrine of the time, Las Casas believed that slavery could be justified if it was the result of Just War, and at the time he assumed that the enslavement of Africans was justified.

Hmm, sorta like people today. Wild how some beliefs persist for centuries. He later changes his mind btw.

They also carried out an inquiry into the Indian question at which all the encomenderos asserted that the Indians were quite incapable of living freely without their supervision.

Don't CEOs say the same about workplaces?

In December 1511, a Dominican preacher Fray Antonio de Montesinos preached a fiery sermon that implicated the colonists in the genocide of the native peoples. He is said to have preached: "Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day."

That last line particularly seem apropos, and we can see that the parameters slavery includes as its defining aspects have long included the very things I currently criticize about capitalism and slavery. Ofc, the natives back then had it much worse.

In 1514, Las Casas was studying a passage in the book Ecclesiasticus (Sirach)[25] 34:18–22[a] for a Pentecost sermon and pondering its meaning. Las Casas was finally convinced that all the actions of the Spanish in the New World had been illegal and that they constituted a great injustice. He made up his mind to give up his slaves and encomienda, and started to preach that other colonists should do the same. When his preaching met with resistance, he realized that he would have to go to Spain to fight there against the enslavement and abuse of the native people.

Ecclesiasticus (Sirach)[25] 34:18–22: "If one sacrifices from what has been wrongfully obtained, the offering is blemished; the gifts of the lawless are not acceptable. ... Like one who kills a son before his father's eyes is the man who offers sacrifice from the property of the poor. The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood."

Pretty interesting.

“wage slavery”

This is a subtype of slavery

It is ad populum both in the argument itself and the way you are trying to refute the point. Both times. And you're wrong.

Can you clarify whether you think a middle class American making $50,000 a year is a slave? Are the poor in nations with better welfare systems also slaves? I’m earnestly asking because I want to understand what you consider “modern” slavery and what the prerequisites are for being a “modern abolitionist.”

Victims experience different types of abuse. The abuse is multilayered. A woman can be beaten, slapped, punched, choked, killed, starved, set on fire, hair ripped out, etc, and she is a domestic violence victim. She is still a DV victim even if only 1 or 2 of those things happen to her.

Most Americans making $50k cannot afford home ownership. That's a huge indication of slavery - owning your own land. So much so, feudalism was sorta about this, exploiting people by refusing them land (and if serfs in feudal times are a type of slavery as a function of THEIR economic system, then why can't your average worker under capitalism be considered the same?). The Native American genocide was quite effective because one of the abuses was taking all the farmable, decent land without horrific weather. Like look at Hatch, NM, a beautiful green oasis where the indigenous ACTUALLY lived, and then look at the Navajo reservation. It's clear who is being harmed and who isn't.

A person making $50k a year likely is not able to be very politically active. They usually cannot run for office. In fact, to go along with the homeownership point, it's extremely rare for a non-homeowner to be elected to government especially senate, congress, and presidency. Political power is ownership of the self. They have no ability to really change much compared to huge donors like Elon.

A person making $50k is less able to pursue education, a single medical event can ruin them for life, they cannot retire easily if at all, they cannot easily pursue hobbies and vacations (freedom of movement). $50k is pretty restrictive of an income in 2025.

I would argue that many many actors, actresses, and even workers like doctors and lawyers are a special type of slave, the gilded cage kind. They can generally move around and access resources, they enjoy more freedoms, because the wealthy literally need them (they function as Aunt Lydia types) and need to attract people to those professions. There is a bit about the psychology of this and projection I can explain too, but it'll make this comment even longer. Remember, the ones setting the salaries are the wealthy. Remember what kind of slaves got picked for house chores and which had to work in the fields - the ones they found attractive or competent were put in the house. Eg Sally Hemmings, and later her brother (whose ice cream recipe is still made at Mt Rushmore as "Thomas Jefferson's ice cream recipe" - but it was actually the Hemmings' boys recipe he learned in France at culinary school).

I'm making a list of documentaries, you are more than welcome to watch the ones about modern slavery. It'll be done in a day or two.

“Work camp” evokes Russian gulags, North Korean work camps, or even Nazi death camps

Because of the propaganda you've consumed and your personal beliefs. That's not on me. If I say "dog," and you think of a Great Dane, but I just meant "dog", then that's on you. Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasia is a great book that talks about the ordering of words and linguistics in general. Maybe it would help your confusion here, as this is a mistake you keep making and blaming on others.

Look, if YOU want things phrased differently, then YOU write it and YOU become a staunch abolitionist and deliver YOUR message. You don't own the way I speak or communicate. You are not entitled to dictating that.

Israel is the world's oldest and largest concentration camp for Jews.

Eta: I want to actually give you a more charitable explanation for why the idea of chattel slavery is so pushed in the forefront in America that I just remembered. There's some Andrea Smith books about this, esp Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Basically, because Native Americans were here and we were taking their land, we wanted to eliminate them so they couldn't have any claims to it. Much later than the 1400s example above, we already had black slaves here at the time I'm speaking of, they wanted to grow the black slave population at the same time.

So it became a huge goal to suppress Native Americans, which is why colorblindness is the most common type of racism outside of the south. In the south, explicit racism is much more common (obviously these days it is spreading) because the point was to keep black people knowing their place. Native Americans went to those reforming church schools and got their languages and names erased for the same reason - silencing them. Black enslaved people were not allowed usually to read at all. Black people were raped en masse, so much so that nearly every black person today with ancestry from that time is mixed/white - which the slave owners did to grow their population.

So you hear about black slavery more because of THAT residual cultural impact.