There’s some considerable cross over between slavery was good because it taught slaves skills, and wage slavery is good because it teachers wage slaves skills.
Rhetorically, it feels like both a return and an advancement of a stupid ideology: a return in the sense that slavers believed this shit during their own time, and an advancement because they’ll potentially use this same line of reasoning for increasingly slave-like conditions for workers. “At least you’re learning skills to become more valuable…” as if that’s a good thing.
How does it matter what skills an enslaved person developed?
They were owned by another person. When those skills were used, whatever was created became owned by the slaver. That is how slavery works. There is no gain to the enslaved person.
It’s all about marketing. Those were just unpaid internships to help develop practical skills of modern industry in developing African countries! Involuntarily!
“Own personal benefit”? You mean like making their master profits, while not being able to leave at threat of death? Sounds like great skills to learn.
These are the kind of people that would ask, “other than that, how did you enjoy the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
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Do it again, General Sherman!
Reconstruction was ended too early. We were far too easy on the slavers.
“Calm down, it was just a lifelong unpaid internship, y’all.”
