Comments Elsewhere

I’m afraid you misunderstand my references to slavery. CIW has been involved in exposing and working to change two distinct things in southern Florida (and the Southeastern US broadly):

1. Extremely low wages and harsh working conditions

2. Enslavement of migrant farmworkers by large farming operations

I agree with you that (1) isn’t slavery in any but the metaphorical “wage slavery” sense, and that metaphorical phrases like “wage slavery” conceal at least as much as they reveal and usually don’t belong in serious analysis. But when CIW says “slavery in the fields” they don’t mean (1). They mean (2). As in, farming operations where bosses threatened to torture or murder immigrant workers if they left their jobs and pistol-whipped passenger van service drivers who had given enslaved workers rides out of the area. Here’s what CIW says about it:

Q: What does the CIW mean when it uses the term “slavery”?

A: When the CIW uses the word slavery, we do not mean “slave-like” or “resembling slavery” —- rather, we are referring to conditions that meet the high standard of proof and definition of slavery under US federal laws.

Modern-day slavery is a violation of the 13th Amendment. The cases we have helped bring to justice have been prosecuted by the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division either under laws forbidding peonage and indentured servitude passed just after the Civil War during Reconstruction (18 U.S.C. Sections 1581-9) or under the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which prohibits the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

In our latest case, three Florida-based agricultural employers convicted in federal court on slavery, extortion, and weapons charges were sentenced to a total of nearly 35 years in prison and the forfeiture of $3 million in assets. The men, who employed over 700 farmworkers, threatened workers with death if they were to try to leave, and pistol-whipped and assaulted — at gunpoint — passenger van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. The case was brought to trial by federal authorities from the Department of Justice (Civil Rights Division) after two years of investigation by the CIW.

You can find out more about cases of straight-up slavery that the CIW has helped expose from the Feds or from from the CIW.

Because I agree with you that neither (1) above (sucky pay and harsh labor conditions), nor my definition (3) of “capitalism” (a boss-directed labor market) constitutes slavery, I also agree with you that neither is coercive, and that they can’t legitimately be met by government force (or any other kind of force). But that doesn’t answer the question whether or not it’s O.K.; it just answers the question of whether or not you can use force to stop it. There are lots of things that you have unquestionably legitimate authority to do that are nevertheless absolutely despicable ways to act. Justice is the only virtue that’s enforceable but it’s not the only virtue!

What I hold is that there are good reasons to think that we should be concerned—I mean that it is virtuous to be concerned, not that we should be forced to act concerned—about the living and working conditions of the people that make things we enjoy, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for the sense of solidarity that that concern entails to affect the decisions we make in a free market for goods. That’s a preference that most people act on, at least when it comes to family—few people are such scrooges that they wouldn’t help a child or a relation out in business, even at some economic cost—and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that you can (indeed, ought) to have and to act on a similar attitude—though weaker, and for different reasons—for all your fellow human beings. Also that it’s an attitude worth encouraging in other people, as long as you do it not through coercion but through education, persuasion, and peaceful incentives. Which is what the CIW has been doing.

As for the price of tacos—Jesus, do you really eat so many tacos in one sitting that a penny-per-pound increase in the cost of tomatos is going to make a difference in price on the margin to you? :)

The title of the post contains a category error. I have serious ethical qualms about prostitution, but whatever one thinks, women in prostitution are just doing a job to make a buck. If you want to find lazy, shiftless, greedy, shameless people trying to live off of others, you might look at pimps (who routinely employ coercion and graft to take money from others). Or politicians.

Or, for that matter, any number of corporations within the tech industry. I mean, this is lame, but it’s not like it isn’t Standard Operating Procedure in the tech industry for big firms to get out the legal club and use it to bar competition wherever they can get away with it. It’s just that the assault on substitute goods and services usually comes under the heading of a “patent”, so the companies can not only go around bludgeoning peaceful competitors with the law, but also piously proclaiming how they are doing it in the name of free enterprise (!).

Tex: “The labor theory of value and and the class theory of conflict still live on.”

You do know that the labor theory of value and class theory both predate Marx—and, for that matter, predate socialism entirely, don’t you? The former can be found in, inter alia, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and others; the latter is a bedrock component of republican political theory dating back to classical Greece and Rome. (Not surprisingly, class theory as such isn’t wedded to any particular theory about the respective roles of State and Capital, since it originated before either the modern State or modern capitalism.)

I mean, look, if you want to complain that both are wrong-headed, you can do so, but taking either one as a mark of Marxism or even Marxian influence is, frankly, historically illiterate.

I also have to wonder how many contemporary anarchists you have read when it comes to their relationship to Marxism. The historical rivalry between anarchists and state socialists (and Marxists in particular) is hardly a matter of little knowledge. On the contrary, a lot of contemporary anarchists are concerned to the point of obsession with Marxist betrayals in, e.g., Russia between the Revolution and the end of the Civil War, or in revolutionary Spain.

If you’re looking for embarassing quotations from Bakunin—an anti-Semite, among other things—or Proudhon or any number of other 19th and early 20th century anarchists, they aren’t very hard to find. On the other hand, since contemporary anarchists are both aware of and explicitly critical of these strands of their thought, I have to wonder what of value you think this sort of drive-by ad hominem abusive is going to accomplish.

Just to add on to what Media Girl said a bit:

“Permalinks” are human-readable. They’re the links you use to get to a post in your web browser, even if the post has fallen off the front page of the blog. (Hence “Perma[nent] link”.)

The “TrackBack” URI is an address for a machine-readable conversation where one blog tells another that it referenced a particular post. (If you try going to a “TrackBack” URI in your web browser, you’ll most likely get an error message in XML.) Since the TrackBack URI doesn’t convey any useful human-readable information, ideally blogging software should be able to embed this information in a page where humans won’t see it, and should be able to extract it automatically from pages that you are sending TrackBack pings to. But in this vale of tears that very often doesn’t happen, so most blogging software displays a TrackBack URI somewhere for manual cut-and-paste. Yet one more way, I guess, in which technological gizmos make our world a little more useful and a little more ugly.

HTH.

Joe Miller:

If you were told that you could have anything that you wanted without working for it, would you really insist that, no, you’d prefer to work for it?

Well, I don’t know; that depends on what the object of desire in question is, doesn’t it? If I could have cookies without working for it, sure, I’d like the free cookies. But it’s not clear that everything worth having in life is worth having without the correlate work. There are lots of places that will offer me a college degree without any work at all; but it’s precisely because they don’t require any work at all that I don’t think a college degree from those places is worth having. More broadly speaking, honors and fame are not worth having if you have not done the work to earn them. You might think they make your life easier, but so what? Who says ease is the only thing to go after in life?

I don’t want to live on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. I’d really insist that I don’t. And I’ll bet you wouldn’t either.

Micha:

I agree that there are no purely rational reasons to not be a prudent predator and lie, steal and cheat when you can get away with it. I don’t believe in cosmic karma.

You seem to be supposing that the only motivations which can count as “purely rational” are those that involve gaining natural goods or avoiding natural evils. I agree that it’s often possible to be a Friedmanian PP without losing any natural goods or gaining any natural evils—hell, just go into politics and you’ll be set for life. But why does it follow from that that there aren’t rational reasons to avoid it? Is not wanting to treat other people like crap irrational?

We are more complicated creaturs than some of the popular accounts of human actions and attitudes seem to take for granted. The fact that an explanation of somebody’s behavior is ennobling is not necessarily a good reason to think that it’s false.

All excellent recommendations. You might also add Mozilla Thunderbird, an e-mail client coming out of the same project as Firefox, as a replacement for Outlook Express. Partly because it is more secure, and partly just because it’s by far a better e-mail client—it features excellent spam filtering, good IMAP support, a better interface, etc. (It also, for what it’s worth, features a handy-dandy Atom/RSS newsreader, and happens to be the main way that I keep up with blogs these days…)

Well, what are you supposed to say instead of a sentence like “Where’s the Party at?” You could just drop the preposition and say “Where’s the Party?” but that doesn’t have the same meaning. You could try to fix it by saying “At where is the Party,” but, well, as Winston Churchill said, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”

Dobeln:

Plus, it’s pretty obvious Rall’s position on the issue is a ruse. Rall and his friends will cheer on any force that opposes the United States. Simple as that.

If they has to make up a halfway consistent position to cover their asses , they will do so.

Fine, but that’s not really to the point. Maybe Rall is playing games here and maybe he’s not, but either way the conclusion that he is “casting his lot” with the Taleban is radically undermotivated by the evidence which is presented in the post. If you want to make the claim that Rall casts his lot with the Taleban, or cheers on any forces which happen to oppose the US, you’ll need burlier evidence for that conclusion than an interview in which he declares the Taleban “the world’s worst regime” ca. December 2001. You can write off the statements in that interview as duplicitous, but then whatever other evidence that you have for considering them duplicitous seems like a more natural candidate to present as evidence for the conclusion that he sides with the Taleban than the interview linked here.

It’s also worth wondering what any of this has to do with anything of real interest. If Rall does happen to “cheer on any force that opposes the United States”, does that make his assessment of the evils of the Taleban and Northern Alliance therefore wrong? I thought that the truth or falsity of statements like that were established by an appeal to the facts of the matter, not by the team loyalty of the person advancing them.

“Mr. Rall, of course, casts his lot with that genocide’s perpatrators and beneficiaries.

“Apparently murderous hatred of Westerners, especially Americans, gives you carte blanche for murderous hatred of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and, yes, Zoroastrians.”

jeet, what are you talking about? If you’re referring to the Taleban, Rall describes them as “the world’s worst regime” ca. December 2001. He also thinks the Northern Alliance jihadi-warlords who now have their claws sunk into the country are just as bad, or worse, than the Taleban were. Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not—Afghans who had to deal with all of these fuckers from 1989-present are mostly not very enthusiastic about any of them. But (1) how do Ismail Khan, Rabbani and company count any less as “that genocide’s perpatrators and beneficiaries” than the Taleban? And (2) how does ranking one bunch of people “#1 most evil motherfuckers in the world” and ranking another bunch of people “#2 most evil motherfuckers in the world” constitute casting your lot with #2?

Well, I guess these sandwiches have something to do with porn.

Specifically, they look really, really gross.