But this attempt to paint it as some failed system requires me to reject what I can see with my own two eyes.
Slavery was a system that worked, and yet I would call it a failed system. Not because it failed to produce products, but because it failed to be morally justified. It was immoral.
It might sound like an absolutely insane comparison to a 21st century westerner, but you want to know who didn’t think the comparison was insane? Literal slaves. Frederick Douglass for example wrote about how we should abolish wage labor along with chattel slavery, and how wage labor was only “a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other”
Slavery was a system that worked, and yet I would call it a failed system. Not because it failed to produce products, but because it failed to be morally justified. It was immoral.
It might sound like an absolutely insane comparison to a 21st century westerner, but you want to know who didn’t think the comparison was insane? Literal slaves. Frederick Douglass for example wrote about how we should abolish wage labor along with chattel slavery, and how wage labor was only “a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other”