Captive Labor Research Articles

Captive labour and the free market: Prisoners and production in the USA

This article documents the resurgence of US prison work programmes under neoliberalism, investigating the dynamics through which state and private corporations have erected factories inside public prisons, moving manufacturing jobs behind bars. It contends that the corporate use of inmate labour has not resulted from an autonomous capital's quest for profit, but rather that it is a strategy that has developed through and cannot be abstracted from the US state as it has restructured in order to author processes of globalisation, and as it has adopted the neoliberal domestic policy of mass incarceration.

Slavery and American Economic Development (review)

2007Book Reviews227 at odds in their competition for adherents; that identities differ across American regions; that the black-white racial dichotomy does not fit the historical facts ofthe American West; and that the West unsetdes conventional understandings about American history. Yet it would be unfair to say that there is nothing new in these pages. Perhaps what makes this book especially relevant is that these points must still be made for readers and for historians alike. University ofPennsylvaniaBrian Isaac Daniels Slavery andAmericanEconomicDevelopment. By Gavin Wright. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 152. Charts, tables, maps, notes, appendix, works cited, index. ISBN 0807131830. $25.00, cloth.) Every slave in the antebellum United States shared a common quality—he or she had the legal status ofmovable chattel, a piece ofpersonal property belonging to a particular owner. This quality, according to the distinguished economic historian Gavin Wright, is the key to die role ofslavery in American economic development. Originally delivered as the 1 997 Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, these three essays make a very convincing case mat property rights in slaves, rather than productivity resulting from work organization or physical efficiency, created an early advantage for soutfiern slaveholders in developing the best farmland and producing cash crops. To state the case in a way that perhaps oversimplifies but makes the point: Slaves, because diey were property, could be treated by their owners in ways that free labor would never have accepted from someone who hired them, especially not in a country as land-rich and labor-poor as the United States before 1 865. Wright highlights three features of property rights in slaves that benefited the masters. First, owners could move their labor to any part of the South, however distant or undesirable as a place to live, and put them to work immediately clearing land and establishing a plantation. This allowed larger slaveholders to gain control ofmuch of the region's best farmland. Second, owners could disregard any preferences on the part ofdieir slaves and assign all members ofslave families to any kind ofwork at any time during the year. This meant that they could constandy work at whatever was most likely to return a profit. Third, owners did not have to concern themselves with having too litde labor at peak planting and harvesting times; a captive labor force had to remain with the owner and do all the work he required. Wright's arguments on the key importance of property rights in slaves are persuasive for the South as a whole, and they are especially convincing for Texas. The Lone Star state had huge amounts of very cheap land but very litde free labor. It is difficult to imagine how large plantations, the most productive units in terms of cash crops, could have been established in Texas with free labor. How long would men have worked someone else's land for wages (let alone work it the way slaves had to work) when they could acquire their own for so litde? Small wonder that when good cotton land sold for less than ten dollars an acre, prime male field hands sold for more than a thousand dollars each. Wright focuses on how slavery contributed to the development of the South's agricultural economy, but he also describes an economic cold war between the 228Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober North and Soudi that followed the elimination (or the beginning of elimination) of slavery north of the Mason/Dixon Line and Ohio River during the era of the American Revolution. The North won this war, pulling ahead ofthe South, as Wright points out, in population, infrastructure, and technology. Wright indicates the ways in which slavery contributed to these failings in southern economic development, but, probably as a result ofthe time/space constraints ofthe lecture format, he pays little attention to other explanations. For example, he deals briefly with the role ofgeography as it affected certain aspects of the South's economy, but he does not consider how geography probably retarded the growth of industry. Steeply falling rivers in die New England states offered abundant waterpower for factories. Texas, where tfie rivers flow sluggishly to the Gulf, had no comparable source of...

Bugs in the Capitalist Machine: The Schizo-Violence of Alejandro Morales'sThe Brick People

In his novel Brick People (1988), Alejandro Morales depicts both the process of deterritorialization initiated by Porfirio Diaz and the Mexican Revolution, which creates flows of Mexican migrations across the US-Mexico border, and the process of reterritorialization instigated by the modern US capitalist system, by which Mexican immigrants are constrained within the United States as a captive labor force. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have suggested that this dual process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is essential to the workings of the modern capitalist machine, which depends upon a strict class axiomatic to control the decoded and deterritorialized flows of capital, people, and information. However, in Morales's novel, the dual process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization is ultimately upset by schizophrenic flows, which they define as the surplus product of the decoding and deterritorializing machine of capitalism. In the novel, these schizophrenic flows are unleashed by supernatural and human acts of violence (including plagues of devouring insects, a massacre of Chinese immigrants, and the kidnap and brutal murder of a twelve-year-old girl), and they create a slit in the canvas of reality (Morales 161) that reveals the limits of the capitalist machine. (1) Ultimately, Morales suggests that only by following the revolutionary potential of these violent schizo-flows can the captive Mexican workforce of the brick factory escape the strict social constraints imposed by the modern US capitalist system. Brick People is a biographical and historical novel, based on the life of Morales's parents and their experience coming from Mexico to the United States. (2) It tells the story of Octavio Revueltas, who migrates from Mexico to Southern California to work in the Simons brick factory. As Morales notes, it was Mexican labor in the first half of the twentieth century that created the material to house, build, and develop the economy of Southern California. They were in a sense the backbone of industry that was never recognized; one of the great links, important, crucial, silent links, unrecognized links of a great economic chain (Gurpegui, Interview 11). (3) Morales's novel traces the process by which the Mexican peon (or landless laborer) is deterritorialized by the despotic machine of Porfirio Diaz's Mexico and incorporated into the modern capitalist machine of the early-twentieth-century United States as a migrant laborer who must sell his labor capacity. At the same time, Morales shows how the process of deterritorialization is accompanied by a process of reterritorialization, whereby the Mexican migrant laborer is incorporated into the artificial neoterritoriality created by the Simons brick factory. brick factory, constructed by its owner Walter Simons on the model of the Mexican hacienda, constrains the physical movement and economic mobility of its deterritorialized Mexican workers in order to maintain a captive labor force for its own system of production. Deleuze and Guattari provide a useful model for interpreting the economic, social, and representational transitions depicted by Morales in Brick People. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe how such transitions occur between three types of social machines: territorial, imperial (or despotic), and modern capitalist. In a social machine or socius, the parts (human beings) are integrated and organized to perform certain tasks, and the flows (of capital, people, and information) are coded so as to control the forms of desire inherent in any human machine: The prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated (33). first form of socius is the territorial machine in which the social body remains integrated with the natural body of the earth. …

Calvert versus Carroll: The Quit-rent Controversy between Maryland's Founding Families

This essay examines the historical background behind the 1826 U.S. Supreme Court case of Cassell v. Carroll. The legal merits in the case concerned arcane questions of feudal property law which the Court avoided and left unanswered. Today the case is of little jurisprudential significance. It is the historical record behind Cassell v. Carroll that tells a story that continues to be of interest and importance today. It provides a window on the economic and social life in provincial Maryland. It tells the tale of two dysfunctional dynasties - the Barons of Baltimore (the Calverts), who lost their faith, their fortune and came to be charged with bastardy, murder and rape, and the family of Carrolls who kept their Catholic faith and amassed great wealth, but still found their good name sullied with allegations of self-dealing, usury, breach of trust, illegitimacy, and slave-driving. The essay argues that the Carrolls succeeded while Calverts failed because (in today's parlance) they had a better business plan. The Calverts clung to their feudal rights while the Carrolls diversified their investments and plunged into the market economy. Capitalism trumped feudalism. The essay casts doubts on the sincerity of the revolution rhetoric of freedom. This narrative suggests, at least from the viewpoint of the Carroll family, that money not freedom was the driving engine of the American Revolution. The Carrolls were Maryland's largest holders of slaves and indentured servants and they had no intent of relinquishing them. Captive labor was an important source of their wealth and a necessary factor of production on their agricultural plantations. The Carrolls only hesitantly took the risk of revolution and popular government to increase free trade, to escape perpetual debts, and to increase the supply of money. And finally the story of Cassell v. Carroll turns the arguments of social conservatives upside down. It portrays the cherished right to freely market one's property for top dollar (which today's property rights advocates fervently seek preserve) as nothing more than the creation of 15th century judicial activism. And it depicts the American Revolution as an assault on the private property of the ruling elite with the rule of law serving as an excuse for the massive confiscation of the land from the rightful owners.

Slavery and American Agricultural History

This essay considers the role of slavery in American agricultural history by examining the impact of political decisions during the period when the boundary between free and slave states was not yet settled. This boundary was not dictated by geographic imperatives. In Kentucky, an early beach-head in the bluegrass district allowed slavery to become firmly entrenched, even in a state where the majority of farmers held no slaves. On the other hand, slavery was vigorously debated in all of the Northwest territories-losing a close vote in Illinois as late as 1824. The essay argues that American agricultural history would have been very different had these votes tipped the other way. Evidence from three outlying slave regions-the Kentucky bluegrass, Missouri's Little Dixie, and the wheat belt of Virginia-shows that slavery could adapt readily to crops and regions commony considered ideal for family farms, so ong as land values were sufficiently high. Drawing on census samples collected by James Irwin, the essay argues that the peculiar affinity between slavery and wheat-growing in Virginia can best be explained by property rights. Specifically, control over a captive labor force allowed slaveowners to expand wheat acreage without fear of the harvest peak

Slavery and American Agricultural History

Abstract This essay considers the role of slavery in American agricultural history by examining the impact of political decisions during the period when the boundary between free and slave states was not yet settled. This boundary was not dictated by geographic imperatives. In Kentucky, an early "beach-head" in the bluegrass district allowed slavery to become firmly entrenched, even in a state where the majority of farmers held no slaves. On the other hand, slavery was vigorously debated in all of the Northwest Territories--losing a close vote in Illinois as late as 1824. The essay argues that American agricultural history would have been very different had these votes tipped the other way. Evidence from three outlying slave regions--the Kentucky bluegrass, Missouri’s "Little Dixie," and the wheat belt of Virginia--shows that slavery could adapt readily to crops and regions commonly considered ideal for family farms, so long as land values were sufficiently high. Drawing on census samples collected by James Irwin, the essay argues that the peculiar affinity between slavery and wheat-growing in Virginia can best be explained by property rights. Specifically, control over a captive labor force allowed slaveowners to expand wheat acreage without fear of the harvest peak.

Singapore Prison Service

“Work is not a right; it is a privilege”, said Wong Hoi Kit, commenting on the labour policy implemented by the Singapore Prison Service. “We have a captive labour market; the prisoners are eager to work, as it gives them a chance to interact with others, while it helps the time go by.” The motto of the Singapore Prison Service was “Security – Humanity – Rehabilitation”, and considerable energy was focused on rehabilitating inmates by teaching them skills, through on‐the‐job training, during their prison terms. To this end, inmates were put to work, and that which they produced was sold for profit. Mr Wong – who had his MBA from Queen’s University, Canada – was chief executive officer of Singapore’s Corporation of Rehabilitative Enterprises (SCORE); in this capacity, he was seeking to identify commercially‐viable food industry opportunities, which would meet the objectives and constraints of the prison environment. These could include primary production, manufacturing, packaging and catering.

Devolution by revolution: Selective genocide ensuing from the French and Russian revolutions

Robert K. Graham^1 Foundation for Human Advancement, Escondido, California With the rise of social stratification, Humankind has developed class warfare to heavily dysgenic proportions. The author here provides historic examples of genocide which targetted the mor successful members of society. His examples are primarily drawn from the French and Russian revolutions. Key Words: French revolution, Russian revolution, Russian revolution, Marxism, genocide, dysgenics Throughout the course of half a million years of hominid evolution there is evidence that our ancestors often killed or otherwise supplanted their rivals for control over resources necessary for survival and procreation. Since hominid intelligence rose dramatically during this period it can only be assumed that in general the more intelligent tended to survive in the struggle to survive and procreate. If the mitochondrial DNA theory of human evolution is correct, the ancestors of the living varieties of man practiced a strict racist creed, supplanting these without interbreeding with them. However, whatever treatment was extended to other sub-species (and there is evidence that cannibalism may have been practiced as early as a quarter of a million year ago) it is generally assumed that with rise of in-group altruism, the members of the same human social group only seldom killed each other. In-group altruism promoted group survival, and groups which were less inclined to be supportive of their own members competed less effectively against rival populations, and in the long run would be less likely to survive.2 In small inbreeding human groups, we might expect a heavily homogenized genetic pattern to have existed. Only when mankind progressed to the level of cultivating or advanced herding or fishing societies did the more successful groups expand and incorporated less successful populations, for agriculture made captive labor useful. Territorial expansion and the incorporation of less successful populations as serfs or slaves led to greater genetic diversity within territorial areas. This meant that the less competent and less intelligent populations were able to procreate under the protection of the more competent rather than be supplanted by them. More of the less competitive thus survived and reproduce alongside the more competitive, the rate of evolution effectively slowed down. If this hypothesis is correct, it is reasonable to suspect that the rise of empires and slave-holding made possible by agricultural economies resulted in a significant modification of the reproductive patterns normally associated with the evolutionary process. A markedly greater proportion of the less competitive would have begun to survive and propagate. In primitive hunting societies, competition placed a survival value on intelligence, but in agricultural societies, the more intelligent could utilize the labor of the less intelligent to till the ground and harvest crops, and engage in the physical labor of erecting fine buildings designed by the more intelligent. The utility of cheap labor inclined the more intelligent to encourage the reproduction of the less intelligent and to protect them at the same time. Today, technologically-advanced societies have fewer simple agricultural tasks to give to the less intelligent, and as technology advances more positions call for a higher level of intelligent. The complex and genetically heterogeneous modern Western societies face another problem. Not only have they for generations promoted the reproduction of the less intelligent, who in under evolutionary selective processes would have been less inclined to leave progeny behind them, but factors discouraging the reproductive activities of the more intelligent have emerged. The liberation of women from their traditional role of motherhood and child-rearing has enabled the more intelligent to devote their interests to professional careers, with the result that they marry late, if at all, and have fewer children. …

Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier

Historiography of South African slavery, Elizabeth A. Eldredge and Fred Morton the Cape slave trade, Robert Shell slavery and enslavement on the Cape frontier, Clifton Crais and Susan Newton-King the fortunate slave - slaves as labour tenants in the 19th century Cape, John Mason patterns of slave-raiding across the shifting frontier, E.A. Eldredge slavery and slave-trading in Natal, Carolyn Hamilton and John Wright Black Ivory - slavery and the indenture system in Zoutpansberg, 1848-1869, J. Boelyens slave-raiding and slavery in the Western Transvaal, 1845-1870, F. Morton Black Wool - the Ngamiland-Marico slave trade, Barry Morton.

Teaching as a Gendered Experience

In this article, I explore teaching as a gendered experience. I first reflect on the history of teaching and the circumstances surrounding the entry of females into teaching; I then discuss the gendered experience--the absence of voice, choice of teaching as a career, lack of autonomy and control, low status and salary, blurring of boundaries of home and school, teacher isolation, evaluation, and career advancement. Finally, I suggest some ideas for female teacher empowerment. An Historical Look The feminization of teaching in America began during the Industrial Era, from the late 1700s until about 1860. Grumet (1988) describes the Industrial Era as a time when capital and I labor shifted from agriculture to industry. Wages of skilled laborers and managerial employees increased more rapidly than those of unskilled workers. A highly differentiated, sharper class system began to emerge. The common school emerged, a school favoring culture homogenization and creating the work ethos to equip children to compete for the new wealth of the industrial society (Grumet, 1988). Men left homes--no longer centers of economic productivity--to go to places of work; children left homes to attend common schools where they learned the rules, laws, language, and the order of their fathers, the principal, and the employer. Some women sought employment in the common schools. Underpaid, unmarried, and ill-prepared for the chaos and harsh discipline of urban schools and the isolation of rural schools, young women sought those jobs. Teaching welcomed women at this time. Society expected them to work without complaint for little pay while teaching, disciplining, supervising lunches, bandaging cuts, and being constantly on duty. Tyack and Hansot (1990) indicate that as far back as colonial times, teaching welcomed women because they accepted less pay than men. Norton (1926) reports that in the 1820s, male teachers' average salary was $15.44 per month (including board); female teachers' was $5.38. Walsh (1995) notes: They were a captive labor force, politically powerless, without opportunities for work in other fields, without suffrage, without even the right to own property (p. 48). Women were not prepared for the patriarchal systems of the schools. The nurturing aspect of mothering was separate from the business of teaching. Both the historical traditions of schooling and the traditions of ethical discourse have despised the family, defining the standards for public conduct and the political action in terms explicitly designed to oppose the relations, expectations, promise, and constraints of intimacy (Grumet, 1988, p. 168). Control was key to teachers' survival; principals expected teachers to control students and accept control by superiors. In 1867, visitors to Boston's Emerson School noted its exemplary order: Every pupil appears to be in anxious waiting for the word of the teacher, and when issued it is promptly obeyed by the class. The movements and utterances of the class are as nearly simultaneous and similar as they can be (Tyack, 1974, p. 54). Women teachers during this time were encouraged to exhibit passivity and self-abnegation. Bennett (1971) quotes from the 1795 Strictures on Female Education, which noted: Their virtues, exercised in solitude and springing purely from the heart, make no noise, and court no observation. Lavished chiefly on their children and their friends, they blaze not on the world, nor are they thought of dignity or consequence enough to embellish the recording page... Many are the statesmen they have raised by their secret magic, into fame; and whenever they are tempted to repine at the appearance of weakness and inferiority it becomes them to remember that their greatest strength lies in their `weakness,' their commands in their tears (pp. 99-100). Many teachers did not work well under these conditions and fled teaching. A few operated well in this rigid, ordered, objective world; some had gone into teaching to escape the closed, physical, limited lives of herded domesticity (Lawrence, 1915). …

Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier

Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier

Book Review: Review Article: Slavery in the Western Hemisphere and South Africa: Legacy of European Colonialism: Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, Breaking the Chains: Labour in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s

Book Review: Review Article: Slavery in the Western Hemisphere and South Africa: Legacy of European Colonialism: Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, Breaking the Chains: Labour in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s

Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier

Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier

African Medicine and Magic in the Americas

CONQUEST and colonization of the Americas by Europeans were accompanied by an unprecedented blending of Old World and New World diseases, ethnomedical systems, and plant-based pharmacopoeias. Romantic visions of a salubrious American Eden, free of illness and aging, yielded to the reality of epidemic and premature death. Indigenous peoples succumbed in droves to exotic viruses; Mediterranean colonists battled new tropical maladies; and African captives, overworked and underfed, fell prey to both. Colonial physicians, few in number and often self-trained, doled out the medical care then known to late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Barbers, surgeons, bleeders, and priests, whose views of causation ranged from astrological imbalances to the effects of evil spirits and bad air, responded to the needs of the growing European population. But neglect by slave owners and the exorbitant cost of physician services and pharmaceuticals forced African chattel to tend to their own medical problems. African priests, herbalists, and magicians, initiated into their trade before passage to the Americas, pursued their vocation to the extent possible in their new urban or rural settings. Firmly established in colonial times, African-based medicine, magic, and their associated plant pharmacopoeias have persisted and in many cases flourished in the Americas. ARRIVAL AND SURVIVAL The demographics of the slave trade most clearly delimited where and to what degree African magico-medical systems diffused into the New World. Where the volume and duration of slavery were heavy and protracted, African-based ethnomedicine not only survived but also in some cases came to predominate. Brazil, which absorbed more than four million African immigrants, retains African religious and medical systems so orthodox that, until recently, Nigerian priests undertook pilgrimages to Brazil to rediscover ceremonies long forgotten in Africa. With a total of approximately five million slaves imported, the old Spanish Main exhibits magico-religious systems scarcely different from those in Africa. By contrast, North America, which received only half a million Africans during the entire slave trade (Rawley 1981, 428), witnessed minor survival of their ethnomedical systems. Cultural diffusion from Africa to the Americas was indirectly fostered by the insufferable conditions of plantation existence. Treatment of slaves varied among owners, ranging from benign paternalism to sadism. Where conditions were most brutal, high mortality combined with sub-replacement-level fertility to generate a constant demand for fresh captives. In the Dutch colony of Surinam, 300,000 Africans arrived between 1668 and 1823, but scarcely 50,000 descendants survived at the end of that period (Price 1976). In Rio de Janeiro, even after three centuries of sustained slave traffic, more than 73 percent of the 1832 slave population was African born (Karasch 1987). In Latin America, at least, the captive labor force was numerically dominated by slaves born not in the Americas but in Africa. Included among the ranks of these newly arrived laborers were priests, magicians, and herbalists, who frequently retained, even as slaves, a measure of their previous status. This, in turn, facilitated the survival of a social hierarchy, necessary to the existence of a shaman class, and reinforced the collective knowledge of African ethnomedicine among the resident black population. The religious division between Protestantism in British North America and Roman Catholicism in Latin America also contributed to the degree of cultural retention. Whereas the simpler ritual of Protestant sects conflicted with the complexities of African religion (Camara 1988, 304), Roman Catholic liturgy had some structural similarities with African religions: ancestor worship, elaborate ritual and offerings, and, most importantly, polytheism. For Roman Catholics polytheism meant devotion to the hagiology of saints; for Africans, faith in the power of a pantheon of deities. …

CAPTIVE RIDER, CAPTIVE LABOR: SPATIAL CONSTRAINTS AND WOMEN'S EMPLOYMENT

We examine the impact of residential and workplace location and mode of transportation to work on the incomes of female and male workers. We first review the literature on transportation to work and local labor markets with the goal of integrating aspects of the behavioral and structural approaches. We then present the results of our analysis of household survey data collected in suburban Toronto in 1983. Using the concepts of choice and captive transit users, we conduct a genderfocused analysis comparing transit riders with automobile users regarding journeyto- work distance and income characteristics. To understand the concept of captive labor markets we develop a typology of labor markets based upon distance to work and income. The results support prior research showing that women work closer to home and earn less than men, but type of transit user has different implications for each sex. We use regression estimates to determine the relationship between journey- to-work length and income received, by m...

Captive and client labour and the economy of the Bida Emirate: 1857–1901

The purpose of this essay is to discuss a number of aspects relating to the client and captive labour force in the Bida emirate in the immediate pre-colonial period. Using data collected in surveys of 1611 captive and client villages in the 1930s, it has been possible to estimate the origins of a large part of this force and to establish the different periods of its recruitment. Comments are made regarding the role of this labour force in the pre-colonial economy of Nupe, on the position of slaves and clients in the society of the emirate, and on the effects of the extensive population transfer on the ethnic demography of Nupeland. It is hoped that this essay will contribute to the contemporary discussion regarding indigenous slavery in Africa, and will lead to an accelerated abandonment of simplistic notions concerning the nature of African economy and society in the late nineteenth century.