From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Thu Nov 23 2006 - 04:42:13 EST
Rakesh wrote ------------ Paul does not seem to be answering so I'll say the obvious. No, elephants are not slaves though their domestication may well be cruel and unethical. But your interesting point here seems to be that only an animal which resists human domestication can be enslaved. But the point has shifted. Allin and Paul wanted to establish a general model of animal slavery with the human practice as just one example. Here you seem to be saying that 1. only humans are slave makers ---I agree with that and 2. humans and a select few other mammals can be enslaved. But are elephants enslaved? Even those domesticated from birth? Yet a slave can make a choice to remain enslaved and resist on the job, buy manumission, ingratiate and win favor or risk death in the attempt to escape. An elephant is under genetic control to escape into the wild. In this sense an elephant does not make a choice; he does not choose to resist domestication or 'slavery'. A slave always does make a choice--this was Jairus' Sartrean point in his Historical Materialism piece. ------------------------------------------------- Paul I think the reason why we are talking past one another is that we are working within different problematics. Rakesh is trying to think this through from a problematic of philosophical humanism, my standpoint, comming from an Althusserian background is a-humanist. I understand historical materialism to be the theory of modes of production and social formations, with the biological species who happen to fill roles within these modes of production being an essentially subsidiary issue. In one sense, this issue was raised by the Trotskyist leader Pousadas in the 60s when he discussed what mode of production the inhabitants of flying saucers had. I dont share his confidence that flying saucers exist, but the issue of social relations of production among other species is a real issue. In the humanist problematic deployed by Rakesh, the critical issue in discussing slavery comes down to the free will of the subject. Only humans are slaves since only they have this essence, free will, which is constrained by slavery. In the problematic within which I am working, the key category is not the free subject, whose existence I believe to be a philosophical myth reflecting the requirements of the juridical/moral level of the state apparattus, but labouring capacity. I would say that slaves are those subordinate organisms whose labouring capacity is equivalent to that of the enslaving species. This category is empirical and testable, those about subjects and their free will seem much harder to test. Gerry and Rakesh may legitimately have different views about the subjective lives of elephants. To the extent that they disagree about this premise, they can never agree as to whether elephants are enslaved. This issue is in the end related to the discussion that took place last year about whether the labour of slaves created value. I would say they do since their labour time constituted part of societies freely disposable pool of abstract labour time. The labour time of elephants, however strong and wise they may be, is not so universally distributable, and as such would not count as value. -----Original Message----- From: OPE-L on behalf of Rakesh Bhandari Sent: Wed 11/22/2006 10:54 PM To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Inter-species slavery >Hi Paul: > >For what it's worth, many science fiction plots center around the prospect >of humans being enslaved by 'aliens' or vice versa. The idea that >humans could enslave aliens isn't particularly controversial, that is, >if you accept the possibility that there are 'suitable' (for enslavement) >life forms on other planets, is it? > >Whether we have already enslaved other species is another question. I >think that domesticization (sp?) can be a euphamism. Aren't some >elephants, for instance, enslaved? Paul does not seem to be answering so I'll say the obvious. No, elephants are not slaves though their domestication may well be cruel and unethical. But your interesting point here seems to be that only an animal which resists human domestication can be enslaved. But the point has shifted. Allin and Paul wanted to establish a general model of animal slavery with the human practice as just one example. Here you seem to be saying that 1. only humans are slave makers ---I agree with that and 2. humans and a select few other mammals can be enslaved. But are elephants enslaved? Even those domesticated from birth? Yet a slave can make a choice to remain enslaved and resist on the job, buy manumission, ingratiate and win favor or risk death in the attempt to escape. An elephant is under genetic control to escape into the wild. In this sense an elephant does not make a choice; he does not choose to resist domestication or 'slavery'. A slave always does make a choice--this was Jairus' Sartrean point in his Historical Materialism piece. Slavery is in other words a specific set of institutional contraints on the choice making subject of same species. Elephants are not such a subject. They are animals cruelly turned into instruments of humans. They are not slaves. Enslavement is a a social relation between human beings. To fail to see this is to miss what gives actual slavery its dynamics. To put it another way: elephants don't experience this 'enslavement' in the same way as humans. Moreover, elephants are indeed a different species than humans while slavery involves (according to David Brion Davis) the bestialization or animalization of members of the same species, the denial of their specifically human capacities--imagination, reason, language. Though slavery is an ancient institution, this process reached its zenith in the nineteenth century United States in which scientific racism in the form of polygenesis--the so called American school of anthropology--took hold. Rakesh >In solidarity, Jerry
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