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Slavery preserves violence by embedding it in social reproduction

All exploiters--bosses, landlords, kings, husbands, cannibals--consume the lives of the people they exploit.

Care labor produces people

Care labor produces people in both a physical and a social sense.

Caregivers grow and cook the food that constitutes our physical bodies. And they raise us from children to adults.

We gain our social identity through the care we give and receive. A parent is a parent because they care for a child. A subject requires a king. And slavery produces a luxury class, meaning that slaves allow their masters to become elites.

Slavery is the theft of care labor

Slavery steals care labor in two senses.

First, the capturing society steals all the effort and love that the other society invested in that adult.

Second, slaves typically perform care labor. They grow food. They cook. They wash and clothe and groom the masters. They raise the children.

Capturing societies typically turn war prisoners into temporary slaves

There are many examples of "capturing societies"...

  • the Roman Empire;
  • the Wendat;
  • the Kwakiutl;
  • Northwest Amazonian horticulturalists;
  • Swabian (French) feudal barons and their German-speaking serfs;
  • the Guaicurú, Nomadic hunter-gathers on the Paraguay River; and
  • the Calusa, fisher-gathers in Florida.

The diversity of these groups shows that slavery isn't a function of ecology or food production technology; it's a choice.

Each group treated slaves differently, but shared two key commonalities...

  1. Slavery was social death.
  2. Slaves could become full members of society.

Slaves can't make promises

For the Romans, for example, all war prisoners were considered dead. Some lost their heads. Others lost kin and community.

When a prisoner became a slave their social ties were severed. And they were prevented from making new social connections.

Because they are dominated by the will of their master, slaves can't make promises. They cannot even make promises to themselves. Slaves are thus prevented from self-governance and making the sort of social commitments that establish community.

Slaves can be freed

Both the Wendat and Kwakiutl took great pride in their ability to integrate slaves into society. This was typical for many capturing societies.

Slaves were adopted, like pets. They were fed and instructed in the proper ways of civilization. If they could successfully integrate into the new culture, the slave could become a full member of their adopted family.

The Wendat and Kwakiutl differed, however, in that the Kwakiutl kept a large number of slaves in permanent limbo. The Wendat, in contrast, had no permanent slaves.

After a trial period of domestication, Wendat prisoners either became full members of the family, or were tortured to death by the entire community. This torture is surprising because the Wendat even didn't spank their children. Yet even the children participated in this collective act of shocking violence.

Graeber and Wengrow hypothesize that this moment of extreme, communal violence was meant to prevent individual acts of violence, and to keep the perpetual violence of slavery out of family life.

Corvée

Distinction: corvée is not necessarily slavery.

For example, corvée in Uruk was more like a festival of shared work on public projects, like temples and irrigation canals. This required work came with feasts and debt forgiveness--so, in contrast to slavery, it freed folks from bondage.

Violence persists by confusing itself with care

Most violence is fleeting: a moment of passion, a lone sociopath.

Violence can last only when it is confused with care-taking. This isn't confusion in the sense of deception or false consciousness, but rather in the sense of getting tangled together.

In Amazonia, for instance, property ownership is theorized based on an initial violent act (killing or capturing something from nature) followed by care (tending it).

This is true of sovereignty as well.

Tyrants always brag about how they care for the people, particularly widows. Royal courts are often made up of single women, orphans, disabled folks, and otherwise isolated individuals who need royal charity. These charity cases then become the servants and flunkeys who extend their leader's power.

French Kings and Egyptian Pharaohs linked themselves to the people through a reciprocal chain of care. They "cared for" the people, and the people "cared for" them. The French people produced the luxury that defined the French court. The Egyptian people built the Pyramids to honor the dead Pharaoh. In return, French Kings and Egyptian Pharaohs acted as conduit to the spiritual realm on behalf of their people.

Like the Wednat, the French also practiced public torture. For the French, however, the torture was construed as care. Public torture demonstrated and reaffirmed the proper relationship between King and subject. It was an act of tough love, a fatherly duty to correct the children. This public violence both justified, and was justified by, more intimate forms of violence, like violence between husband and wife, or parent and child.

All of France's major institutions--religion (God's relation to man), government (king to subject), and family (husband to wife and parent to child)--each of these institutionalized violence by making domination the mode of care-taking.