From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Nov 23 2006 - 11:02:17 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. Abstract laboring capacity or potential is difficult to talk about because we always only see it instantiated in one concrete form of another. So it may be no less a metaphysical concept than free will. Slave makers have always denied that slaves have the same capacities or potentials that they do on the basis of what slaves do. At any rate,there is indeed an important difference in the dynamics of human and ant slavery because in the former slaves are either individually or collectively resisting in hidden ways or struggling to buy manumission or ingratiating themselves to win favor or risking death in the attempt to escape. This is one reason why the human mode of slave production has an essentially different dynamic than the ant mode of slavery. You dismiss the question of whether ants have behavioral equivalents to these forms of resistance by saying that the question arises out of a humanist problematic. Saying that of course does not prove that ants do have behavioral equivalents. And I certainly deny that slaves (or slave masters) are free to make the world any way they wish--I have not said anything which implies a naive belief in the power of free will; how they respond will depend on constraints out of their control, but those constraints never eliminate the degrees of freedom which slaves as members of the homo sapiens species have. That is, slaves are homo sapiens not the beasts and animals slave masters have historically thought that they were. Of course, the dynamics of slavery are not the exclusive result of the class struggle waged by slaves, but it certainly has an effect. Exactly for the reductionist biological reason that humans have not undergone neoteny and thus will not endure so called slavery without struggle as do non human animals and do as a result of their 'emergent' imaginations have greater degrees of freedom, human slavery has its own dynamic and creates cultures of oppression and resistance which have no counterpart in the non human animal world. And human slavery also cannot be compared to ant slavery for functional reasons. Human slavery is motivated by conspicuous consumption, maximal profit making and/or sexual pleasure. Entomology has nothing to teach us about this. As Lewontin et al long ago put it, there is an error of backward etymology in which human institutions are laid on non human animals metaphorically and then human behavior is rederived from the animals as if it were a special case of a general phenomenon that had been independently discovered in other species. See Not In Our Genes. > >I would say that slaves are those subordinate organisms whose >labouring capacity is equivalent to that of the enslaving species. Well this seems to say that slavery is then an intra homo sapien affair! YOu don't agree with Jerry that even elephants are enslaved. And wouldn't the domesticated ants no longer have the same laboring capacity has the slave making ants, so no slavery among ants by this definition, right? And how do you define the nature of this specifically human laboring capacity? Be sure not to allow for any human-ist criteria! Rakesh >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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