this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Yeah they used slavery instead
Not slaves
The masons and other specialized workers were paid, and there is a theory that many of the laborers living near Giza were paid, but no one actually knows if they were. What is known, is that slaves were used in that era, and thinking they weren't at least used in transportation of materials is naive.
If a slave is granted accommodation and food by his master, is it functionally different from a worker in a country with no social security, whose wage does not cover both food and accommodation?
yes.
Why?
Being physically owned is functionally different from struggling to afford your choice of housing and cuisine. I am really not sure how you would like me to elaborate the complete lack of bodily autonomy and freedom. Being provided bare necessities does not functionally negate the inability to get educated, to choose a profession, to leave a property, to not get physically abused, to be separated from your family, to be denied thr right to marry, to be sold.
But you can't leave the property because you cannot afford rent anywhere else. You can't get a different job, because there is no different job available in the area. You can't get a better education because you cannot pay for it or even if it is free you cannot pay for your survival without the full time job, or multiple part time jobs. You get abused by the police or now also the ICE. You can't afford to marry anyways...
Of course from the formal rights it is a huge difference, however from the practical result, modern wage work for working class people creates similarly unfree conditions. And it is no surprise that the ardent Neoliberals want to go further and establish slavery, by allowing contracts where people sell themselves "voluntarily" into permanent ownership of somebody else. This is the ultimate freedom according to these kind of Capitalists and they work to create such a society.
When slavery was abolished in the United States, all of the former slaves immediately moved to the desolately impoverished category. By the time that they died, would you say that the quality of their lives, and that of their descendants, on average, improved, stayed the same, or was worse than before?
Did it improve? Yes. Did it improve more than the general improvement through advances in technology, medicine etc.? That is at least questionable.
If we look further at unethical experiments done on primarily black communities or prison inmates, again primarily black, such as testing biological warfare agents and pharmaceutics on them, regular lynching and other acts of deadly violence, the whole forced labour in the prison system... It becomes clear, that the government still very much considered the former slaves and their descendants as property, they could largely do with as they pleased.
Wonderful perspective. Now, let's compare that to the white population in poverty during the same time span.
Can all key differences be attributed to money? The acts of violence and unethical experiments were the result of being seen as property, as you said, which someone in poverty would not have to deal with by default. We can't ignore the non-economical impacts of slavery.
What percentage of white and black children from impoverished homes went on to get an education or move to a different area? This comparison eliminates the bias from technological advances. If that number is greater than 0, then it proves people in poverty have the oppurtunity for growth, which is not possible under slavery.
If we want to snapshot a single moment by a single metric, yes, not having enough money to move may be comparable to not being allowed to move by your owner. But I don't think the overall situation is close enough to say they are the functionally the same.
I hope you're not taking info from christian piblications. These were professionals who lived in a dedicated settlement.
The professionals did the building. The slaves did the brick-making for the building, and probably a lot of other low skill things too.
If we're talking about the pyramids the amount of quality building material in there was not sourced from slavery. Egyptian used slavery in farming and in army and logistic matters, but these heavenly buildings were all pretty important. What we do know is that salvery was also an outcome of tye conquest of other areas and cultures, so they forced them into what was considered egyptian culture at the time. And it's a damn long time span of many hundreds of years. We have so much documentation from the egpyptian kingdom. There are things that are more mysterious than the pyramids to me, temples and little oddities like the Osireion.
🎶 Slaves built the pyramids! Slaves! Built the Parthenon! Slaves! Built America! Slaves! This is your song 🎶