Is some form of "slavery" inevitable?
It depends, of course, upon the definition of slavery. We see something approaching chattel slavery today in the form of human trafficking. When chattel slavery is abolished, peonage, serfdom or pauperism may arise. In the U.S., we now have New Age Slavery, a term borrowed from Angela Davis. New Age Slavery is mass incarceration followed by the pariah class known as The New Jim Crow, the title of Michelle Alexander's book. When slavery was "abolished" in Europe, it was followed by serfdom and later by the chattel slavery of Africans taken to the New World. After emancipation was encouraged by the Koran, it continued for many centuries, until the 1960s in Arabia and later in parts of Africa. The number of African Americans incarcerated in U.S. prisons is now equated with the American slave population in 1850. Socialists believe total and immediate dependence upon wages is "wage slavery." Of course, attempts to create perfect equality in society resulted in some of the most horrendous slave systems in history, the slave labor camps of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and other communists.
Stratification in society is inevitable. The military, government, religions, companies, professions, organizations, even the United Nations -- virtually every group or association one can imagine -- contains gradations of honor, wealth, power and respect. It follows from this that societies must have a bottom class. In one way or another, we call people in the bottom echelon "slaves."
We should not be shocked that income disparities exist in the world, nor that we have one or more classes of individuals in the bottom class. Some group of people have to be at the bottom. The real question is: What should we do about the way people reach the bottom and then strive to better themselves? In a free and progressive society, the bottom should be composed of the most criminal, worthless and destructive elements. In many ways, we succeeded in placing the worst elements in prison. But we are constantly debating criminality, worth to society and productivity.
We overuse incarceration in the U.S. and multiple other countries. Some of our prisoners are not the worst elements of society. The process of incarceration itself is harmful to society as a whole with regard to the lesser offenders in prison, the types who might be put to hard labor while in prison and rehabilitated . . . . or simply grow up.
What we need to do is acknowledge the perpetual existence of a bottom class and work to make entry into that class just.
The worst of the worst should be executed; the next worst should be held in prison; but the less culpable and dangerous should be punished the old-fashioned way, with public flogging in front of the sentencing judge and then returned to normal society. If someone is in prison, we ought to work them in private businesses without government interference or regulation, subject to the prisoner's right to return to the general prison population if they dislike their prison job. This is the way criminals have been punished for most of recorded history . . . . by societies that understood there is always going to be a segment of society dwelling at the very bottom.