The Civil War and subsequent 13th Amendment put an end to American chattel slavery. Briefly it seemed possible that the occupying federal government might grant formerly enslaved people the means to control their own labor, reap their own profits, to some extent, e.g. by giving them actual productive land. But this hope died with the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and from that point on the formerly enslaved were once again subject to whatever methods of exploitation the local ruling classes could cook up, as long as they fell short of literal chattel slavery.¹

And they cooked up with all kinds of ways to continue to exploit their former slaves. They passed vagrancy laws making it illegal not to have an employer, laws requiring convicts to work for the state, laws that ensured a steady supply of convicts who could be forced to work, laws regulating sharecropping in ways that made it pragmatically impossible for workers to get ahead financially, and so on. Literal American slavery ended in 1865 but the exploitation of workers rolled on. Northern states already had a great deal of experience exploiting free workers, and the ruling classes of the former slave states ended up both adopting and sharing a lot of proven techniques over time, to the point where today the entire United States uses essentially the same methods.

I don’t know if modern exploitation techniques are more profitable than slavery, which was immensely profitable, but they are certainly more stable. As the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, another name for the systematic exploitation of workers by the ruling class. This was never the case with slavery. Obviously it’s easy for actually enslaved people to imagine the end of slavery, and in the years leading up to the Civil War it was increasingly harder for anyone else to believe that slavery could last. And, of course, it didn’t. Some of the relative stability of modern capitalism comes from the fact that it’s less immediately brutal than slavery was, at least for its American victims. Another stabilizing factor is the relative invisibility of both the exploitation and the violence used to enforce it.

Nevertheless, the modern American economy runs on the exploitation of working people, just as it did in slavery times. Slaveowners and modern capitalists share the same MO, which is to steal profit produced by other people’s work, so it’s not surprising that similar methods have been useful to both kinds of exploiters. Thus it’s a fruitful analytic technique to look for parallels between the two sets of exploitation methods, always keeping in mind that modern capitalism’s resilience is in large part due to its astonishing proficiency at hiding the violence required to coerce labor and appropriate the profits. Comparing modern methods of exploitation to older methods can help make the violence more visible.

When people talk about American slavery they’re usually thinking of agricultural slavery. Which is reasonable given that most American slaves worked on plantations and farms. Plantation slavery deserves infinite attention. It was absolutely the most horrific form of American slavery, probably the most horrific thing in recorded human history. Its very horrors, through the revulsion they evoked from all but the most hardened, inhumane witnesses, contributed significantly to its downfall.²

Agricultural slavery wasn’t the only form American slavery took, though, even in rural areas. Some rural slaves were trained craftsmen — plantations and farms had to be fairly self-sufficient given their relative isolation, so required blacksmiths, coopers, masons, carpenters, wheelwrights, and so on. Slaves did all these kinds of skilled labor. Not only that, but plenty of slaves lived in cities, where slavery looked very different from the more common forms it took on plantations.³

One significant difference between urban and rural slavery is that plantations were self-contained isolated worlds whereas in cities everyone knows their neighbors’ business. In particular urban enslavers were often reluctant to physically punish their slaves because a reputation for brutality would hurt their social standing. The physical isolation of plantations solved this problem and consequently extremely brutal treatment of slaves was commonplace and undisguised. But if one is going to keep human beings imprisoned and force them to work it’s necessary to terrorize and torture them. It’s ultimately the only effective method.

So slaveholders, the ruling class of their time — who therefore had full control over legislation and law enforcement — attempted to solve this problem by implementing publicly operated punishment systems in their cities and towns. For instance, slaveowners could send slaves to the police station with a note stating how many lashes they were to get and the cops would whip the slaves, creating social distance between urban slaveholders and the brutality they needed to keep the economy functioning.⁴

Another significant difference between urban and rural slavery is in the way work was organized. It was commonplace for enslavers, both rural and urban, to lease their presently unneeded slaves to others, usually for a year at a time, but in cities this process was transformed into something quite different. City slaves were still leased out on a yearly basis, but there was also a need for more flexible day labor than in rural areas, or possibly the much shorter distances and denser population made slave day labor more feasible. In any case, in contrast to rural areas, short-term hiring of slaves was a huge part of the urban economy.

Meeting this need effectively required slaves to have unsupervised mobility, which clearly tended to weaken the enslavers’ control. In response to this problem, which was much discussed at the time, enslavers instituted complex and ubiquitous state- and municipal-level regulations, which included publicly run hiring halls, mandatory badges and passes for hired-out slaves, and so on. As with public punishment, urban police were responsible for organizing and enforcing the process. As Wade explains:

In place of the annual agreement the towns therefore developed a method for short-term employment. Owners with Negroes they wanted to hire could purchase badges from the municipality which permitted the slave to work by the day or even the hour. No contract or additional document was required. If the master could find an employer, a bargain could be struck without further formality. To smooth the exchange, some cities furnished a public place as a sort of hiring hall. These devices greatly eased the movement of Negro labor without the cumbersome use of the written agreement.

This flexibility, however, presented a new problem of control. In this looser arrangement the slave was released from the management of his master but bound out only casually to another. To fill this vacuum of private responsibility, local governments carefully constructed a public system of supervision. A series of regulations surrounded the whole process, governing both employer and black and invoking the city’s full enforcement powers. Municipalities licensed hirelings through badges; some provided a central rendezvous for the two parties of the exchange; others set by law the length of the working day; and a few even established wage levels.⁵

This system was essentially a restructuring of the familiar rural annual hiring-out process to meet distinct urban needs, but at the same time a new type of hiring-out, unique to cities, evolved. In effect urban slaveholders would lease slaves to the slaves themselves:

In the cities, the slaves — excepting the household slaves — are generally allowed to ‘hire their own time,’ as, with hidden sarcasm, the negroes term it: that is to say, they give their master a certain sum per month; and all that they make over that amount they retain.⁶

Governments across the south recognized the necessity of the first kind of hiring out, so much so that, as I said, they invested significant resources in organizing and facilitating it. The second kind, slaves hiring their own time, was a different story. Many in the ruling class realized that allowing slaves even the freedom to choose their employers and to keep any part of the money they earned would tend to erode the complex systems of social control which allowed slavery to function. Wade quotes a South Carolina grand jury on the subject:

[T]he practice of slaves being permitted to hire their own time or labor for themselves [is] an evil of magnitude … it is not to be denied that it is striking directly at the existence of our institutions. It is but the beginning of the end and unless broken up in time, will result in the total prostration of existing relations.⁷

And yet this immensely profitable practice turned out to be impossible to eliminate. Slaves, after all, were capital investments, and capitalists ultimately will not stand for being prevented from maximizing their returns. Neither local nor state governments could put an end to slaves hiring their own time, which grew inexorably over time and only ceased with the general abolition of slavery in 1865. The profit motive and the social and political power of the enslavers proved stronger than legislative attempts to eliminate this form of hiring out.⁸

Once slaves were allowed to find their own employers there was no compelling reason for them to continue to live with their owners. Generally slaves hiring their own time lived away from their owners’ households and were responsible for their own housing, which was called “living out”. As with slaves hiring their own time living out tended to erode the stability of the slave economy and thus was also nominally outlawed. But as with hiring out the economics were too attractive for such laws to have much effect and the practice was widespread. So much so, in fact, that white investors built shacks and tenements expressly to rent to slaves who were hiring their own time.⁹

It’s crucial to note that the very possibility of slaves hiring their own time relied on a complex web of government affordances. Governments ensured an available and sufficient supply of people to be enslaved, at first through government-sponsored slave trading, e.g. as practiced by the Royal African Company. Later on governments facilitated both the external and internal slave trades through laws, courts, and other such means. Without government action it’s unlikely that there would have been slaves in the first place.

Additionally, government-run control systems made slavery viable as a business model. Without the constant threat of physical punishment, either administered or sanctioned by governments there would have been no reason for hired-out slaves to continue to give part of their earnings to their owners, let alone to have remained enslaved. The very systems of control necessary for the existence of slavery created the conditions under which slaveholders could rely on this form of return on their investments in slaves. The fact that it could be done ensured that it was done. The government-created possibility of hiring out led to the existence of hiring out.

And it’s easy to see why the practice was so widespread.¹⁰ Enslavers with the money to invest in hired-out slaves could guarantee a reliable return on their capital without any of the many difficulties involved in directly controlling or even housing the slaves required by more direct forms of appropriation, e.g. plantations. It was almost a passive investment. After the initial purchase the money just flowed in. They could buy as many slaves as they could afford, unrestricted by the difficulties of scaling up direct control and finding profitable ways to employ their slaves, and receive a government-enforced right to a significant fraction of the value of the slave’s labor with little or no effort on their part.

The benefits to the capitalist of this means of exploitation — its passivity, its relative anonymity, the fact that all enforcement could be easily outsourced to the state, its unbounded scalability — are as attractive to modern day capitalists as they were to nineteenth century slaveholders. It’s not surprising therefore to find contemporary parallels. The modern-day market in residential rental housing turns out to be essentially a drop-in replacement for slaves hiring their own time. It has the same benefits for the capitalists without any of the drawbacks that literal slavery had for slaveowners. For this reason it is, as are all modern means of exploitation, far, far more stable and sustainable.

One side of this parallel is easy to see. When a tenant signs a lease with a landlord the landlord acquires a legally enforceable right to a specific fraction of the tenant’s income. For the term of the lease, then, that same fraction of the work the tenant is paid for by an employer belongs to the landlord. The landlord doesn’t have to worry about how to employ the tenant profitably and he has legal recourse through the police and courts if the tenant doesn’t pay. The enforcement is effective because of the threat of violence.

No one gets whipped for not paying their rent, but they get evicted and put at risk of being violently arrested and jailed and potentially made homeless if they resist. Unlike in slavery times the violence is extremely well-concealed. The landlord can hide behind an LLC and a property manager. No one even has to know their name. Once the eviction process is started the application of violence is controlled by judges, police, and bureaucrats of various kinds, all of whom are able to hide behind a socially granted assumption of impartiality. Everyone involved is just doing their job. There’s no one person to blame.

If this were the end of the story, though, my argument wouldn’t be convincing. The parallel would break down. After all, slaves hiring their own time weren’t only violently coerced to hand over some of their earnings, they were also violently coerced to continue to be slaves. Slaves had no choice in either of these aspects of hiring their own time and both were enforced by violence. Whereas, it might be said, tenants sign voluntary contracts with landlords. No one, this story goes, forces tenants to be tenants. In fact, on this version of things, landlords need tenants in order to make a profit, so they’re incentivized to attract them with desirable living spaces.

This is a conventional, well-known, and widely-accepted story about capitalism in general. Capitalists, including landlords, provide consumers with all necessary goods, including housing, because that’s how they earn their profits. A place to live is a basic human need and so, seeking profit, landlords provide people with living places. In this version of things the violent enforcement of the landlord’s right to receive rent is necessary for the system to function and if it has to be used it’s the tenant’s fault. If tenants didn’t have to pay they wouldn’t and that, the story goes, would drive landlords out of business and people wouldn’t have places to live. It’s not like slavery at all in that slaves were forced to be slaves but tenants aren’t forced to be tenants.

But as a practical matter, regardless of theory, tenants are in fact forced to be tenants, and they’re forced, as exploited people always are, directly by state violence. Operating in parallel with the violence that forces tenants to pay rent on pain of eviction there’s an entirely different form of violence necessary to keep landlords in business. As I said above both slaveowners and landlords share the desire to hide the violence required by their exploitative projects, and this other strain of violence is so well hidden that it’s essentially invisible. Without a great deal of reflection it’s very difficult even to see it as violence.

There is a great deal of unused land in the world, but all of it is owned by someone. For the purposes of this discussion it doesn’t matter if the owners are private parties or governments, because either kind of ownership includes the rights to exclude people from the land and to control how the land is used. Both public and private land are essentially private in that respect. And those two rights, the right of exclusion and the right of use-control, are vigorously and violently enforced by the police. It’s just not possible for tenants to squat in vacant buildings or to live on vacant lots or in national forests. They can’t even camp out on a sidewalk or in a city park. They’re forbidden from doing so by laws and the police that enforce them.

If they want to avoid being victims of the violent means of enforcement they have no realistic choice other than to pay rent to a landlord. To understand just how violently these laws are enforced consider the rate at which homeless people die. In Los Angeles alone about three homeless people die every day. In LA County the life expectancy of homeless women in 48 and homeless men 51 compared to 83 and 79 for California residents as a whole. Living on the street is deadly, and yet Los Angeles has more than three times as many vacant homes as homeless people. Those homes are just sitting there empty and yet the homeless choose to die on the streets rather than break in and squat in them.

What kind of violence does it take to make people choose to shorten their own lives by more than 30 years rather than taking immediate action to save themselves? What kind of terror leads to a decision like this? The threatened violence is overwhelming. When slavery was legal in the United States the extreme violence worked by laws and police prevented slaves from freeing themselves from slavery, and now the extreme violence worked by laws and police prevent tenants from freeing themselves from being tenants.¹¹ That is, tenants are violently forced by the law to hand over a certain fraction of their income to a landlord, just as slaves hiring their own time were to their owners.

And the enforcement of private property rights isn’t the only way tenants are forced into tenancy. In my own state of California landlords have arranged for laws essentially making it impossible for any new public housing to be built. Nationwide the federal government subsidizes rent payments to private landlords in lieu of providing public housing. Again in California, it’s practically impossible for tenants to reduce the burden imposed on them by landlords because rent control is outlawed at the state level. There are even laws forbidding more than a few unrelated people to share living spaces so that tenants are unable to lower the tribute they owe to landlords beyond a certain level. Modern landlords use all the coercive power of the state to ensure that they continue to be able to appropriate the labor of tenants, just as slaveowners did before 1865.

By the way, a common objection to the kind of parallel I’m drawing here is based on the fact that modern-day lawmakers have granted tenants some legal rights to protect them against extreme forms of victimization by landlords. This, the argument goes, is in stark contrast to the legal framework of slavery, which granted slaves “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But the parallel stands up to this objection. American slave codes are full of laws forbidding slaveowners from torturing their slaves, requiring them to provide adequate food and clothing, and so on.

These laws were never enforced in ways that interfered with slaveowners’ profits and had nothing to do with legislative concern for the well-being of slaves. Their explicitly acknowledged purpose was to preserve the viability of slavery by forbidding practices which were likely to provoke rebellion. And the same is true today with respect to tenants’ rights, which are broadly unenforced, which require tenants to hire expensive lawyers, and which in no way interfere with landlords’ profits. They serve precisely the same purpose that various laws putatively protecting slaves did. They make rebellion less likely, and therefore ultimately serve the class interests of landlords even if from time to time they work against individual landlords.

In this sense tenants are enslaved by landlords. Landlords aren’t slaveowners in the sense that they don’t have a right to appropriate the labor of specific individual wholly owned people. Instead they have what amounts to a right to appropriate a certain amount of labor from some tenant. The government enforces this right in two ways, as I said. First by ensuring that tenants pay up or get evicted. Second by ensuring that there is a ready and sufficient supply of tenants, so that landlords don’t have to go without. Tenants aren’t slaves in the sense that they aren’t coerced into laboring for the benefit of a specific individual landlord, but they are coerced into laboring for some landlord.

From the landlord’s point of view this system is a great improvement over owning slaves. If a slave got sick or died it was a huge loss to their owner. If a tenant gets sick or dies there’s always another tenant to take their place. Slaves were aware enough of their own subjugation to rebel in various ways, sometimes by rising up and killing their owners. Tenants rebel too from time to time, but the justifying mythology is so much more robust that rebellions rarely end in dead landlords or similarly violent outcomes. For the most part the violent coercive appropriation of tenants’ labor by landlords is socially invisible.

Tenants are better off than slaves hiring their own time in that they have some choice in who appropriates their labor, although of course they must choose someone to pay tribute to. They’re also not subject to being whipped, raped, or killed by their landlords as slaves were by their owners, although this kind of direct violence between individuals wasn’t, as far as I can see, much of a factor for slaves hiring their own time and living out. But just like slaves they’re violently forced to work for someone else’s benefit. Just like slaves they will be beaten, imprisoned, or killed if they refuse. Just like slaves they’re forced into this situation by laws written by and for their capitalist masters. Just like slaves their only options are submission or revolution.

Unlike slaves, though, their captivity is so well-hidden that it’s all but invisible, even to tenants themselves. Unlike slaves, who at least always knew who their enemies were, tenants are held captive by the vast impersonal web of modern capitalism rather than by an individual identifiable slaveowner. Their enemy is made almost invulnerable by the radical invisibility of the violence that supports it. To defeat it it’s first necessary to see it for what it is. I hope this essay makes that slightly more possible.

1. There are basically three classes in this analysis. The ruling class consists of people who live solely by exploitation and don’t have to do actual productive labor, also called capitalists. In the US at least they control the state apparatus, including legislation and enforcement. The middle class, the petite bourgeoisie, control some capital but also have to work. The working class lives solely by productive labor.
2. A lot of people nowadays take comfort in the fallacious theory that non-enslaved people during slavery times didn’t know slavery was wrong. This is nonsense — everyone knew it was wrong. Some people didn’t care, some people couldn’t stand the wrongness of it and were open abolitionists, I’m sure many tried their best not to think about it, just like we do now with similarly uncomfortable aspects of capitalism, some people worked hard to rationalize their participation, either active or passive, in the slave system, but everyone knew it was wrong.
3. Richard C. Wade‘s seminal text Slavery in the Cities is an essential introduction to this still-neglected subject. I learned a lot of the stuff in this essay from Wade. See in particular pp. 38-54.
4. The fact that American police forces had their origin in slave patrols is important for modern arguments in favor of abolishing the police. Less discussed is the role urban nineteenth century police forces, which along with slave patrols are the ancestors of modern policing, played in the physical control of urban slaves. Of course this fact merely strengthens the abolitionist arguments.
5. Wade pp. 39-40.
6. James Redpath. The Roving Editor: Or Talks With Slaves in the Southern States p. 183. Quoted in Wade, Slavery in the Cities, p. 48.
7. Quoted in Wade, p. 50.
8. The fact that ruling class slaveowners allowed their slaves to hire their own time concurrent with governments’ attempts to outlaw the practice is superficially contradictory, but in fact it’s completely consistent with the way power operates. It’s absolutely correct that the practice undermined the social control necessary to maintain the institution of slavery, and many in the ruling class sought to forbid it for this reason. But the profit motive was too strong and other enslavers prioritized short term profits over the stability of the institution of slavery. This was a debate between members of the ruling class who disagreed on the most effective ways to exploit their slaves. You can see the same dynamic playing out repeatedly throughout U.S. history, even to the present day, in debates over regulating capitalism. Such discussions are never about the welfare of capital’s victims, even if they’re framed that way for public consumption. They’re universally about the conflict between short term profits and long term stability or other similar intra-ruling-class disagreements.
9. See Wade pp. 62-75 for general details of living out and information on white-owned rental properties designed for slaves.
10. The fact that allowing slaves to hire their own time was generally illegal makes it hard to measure the extent of the practice, but Wade argues from census data that it was in fact widespread. Municipalities in the decades before emancipation counted many, many slaves whose owners were unknown, for instance, but if they had been working for their owners their owners would have been identifiable.
11. Rags-to-riches narratives, the idea that poor people can become rich by hard work and frugality, are essentially nonsense. Yes, some people manage this, but not many, and it’s really not possible for most people. This is a statistically insignificant objection.