cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17294985
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." - Abraham Lincoln
"I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world." - Abraham Lincoln
"The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world." - Karl Marx
I would argue that forced labor without profit motive or ownership of a person is so far removed from slavery as to not warrant the term. Community service is slavery under that definition (and, in fact, challenges on the basis of the 13th have been [unsuccessfully] leveled against community service), yet I think few of us would view some rich twat getting a hundred hours of community service for a DUI to be slavery in any form, even on a purely technical level.
Labor as punishment is not effective or worth keeping as a tool for ensuring the compliance of a free citizenry by its government, but I also don't think that it is inherently slavery. My point thus is that the 13th Amendment was not meant simply as a punishment, but as a genuine attempt (emphasis on 'attempt') to end slavery as an institution.
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.