Slavery is bad. Today this is an entirely uncontroversial statement. We are perplexed by how there was once a time when human beings did not recognize this truth.

Since people today hold such firm convictions about slavery, many bad things are likened to slavery, though simile quickly slips into metaphor. If there is something bad happening and you want to mobilize an audience to stop that bad thing, you might want to call it a kind of slavery: the treatment of workers (whether they be janitors or sports stars), the treatment of children by their parents, the treatment prison guards mete out to those incarcerated, the treatment of peoples in the global South by corporations and organizations from the global North. In recent years, as sensitivities around the trans-Atlantic slave trade have increased, the broad use of slavery in popular discourse seems to have decreased, but it remains familiar. The language of slavery particularly attaches to human trafficking for sex work and bonded labor—the starting points of Chris Gooding’s new book. These are very bad things, indeed.

As Gooding points out, there are sociological definitions of slavery (most famously Orlando Patterson’s) and there are theological definitions of slavery (often associating slavery with the demonic). Many approaches to slavery start with empirical examples of slavery and look for a common denominator. However, sometimes it is helpful to start from the other direction, to conjure a picture of slavery in laboratory conditions, so to speak, and then to see that paradigm case imperfectly instantiated in our messy world. In laboratory conditions, slavery looks like arbitrary rule: the capacity of one to exert his will over another. (This is also a classical definition of domination, i.e., mastery, which is also, importantly, confusing oneself for god.) In the laboratory, there are just two individuals. At any moment, the master wishes for this or that; the enslaved must respond to those wishes, must be ready to respond to potential wishes. 

In real life, of course, things are much messier. Desires are not purely arbitrary. There are forms of resistance, ranging from confrontation to slow-walking. And of course there are more people around, intermediaries and collaborators and co-conspirators. To make things even more muddy, there is an instinct toward mastery in all of us, even the most marginalized, and there are ways in which each of us must respond to the arbitrary will of others, even those of us with the most power. With all these complications, it may seem as if the paradigm case of slavery is altogether useless. Yet we can see certain empirical examples which are, in fact, illuminated by the paradigm case—in particular, the trans-Atlantic slave trade seems to approach slavery in laboratory conditions. As connections to language, family, culture, land, and religion are violently severed in the Middle Passage, what is left is an enslaved individual reduced to responding to the arbitrary will of their enslaver. I take this to be an animating impulse behind much recent work in Black Studies: that there is something distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade that produces lasting effects and that is unlike other bad things humans do to each other. In my formulation, what is distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade is its similarity to the paradigm case of slavery, understood as pure domination.1

I think there are both secular and theological reasons to adopt this account of slavery. There is a long history of associating slavery, domination, and arbitrary rule in European political thought, since the ancients. Theologically, this account of slavery makes it, in a sense, the paradigm of sin as such. It is a violation of the First Commandment, elevating a human to a god-like position, and it names an impulse that turns people away from God since the beginning, since Eden. 

If this is the account of slavery we adopt, it creates limits to how widely the language of slavery can be applied, and it cautions us about the metaphorical use of slavery. This is counter-intuitive because I have also suggested that we can find slavery-like dynamics everywhere, in all people, at all times. We are slaves to sin. But that does not mean everything is slavery. It means that using the language of slavery draws our attention to particular dynamics, those illuminated by the picture we can draw of slavery in laboratory conditions. 

Ought we to use the language of slavery in contemporary cases of human trafficking? There is no question this is very bad behavior, and we should marshal resources at our disposal to stop it—so, as a matter of political practice, there is probably no need to be fussy about the language we use. (However, the fascination, even titillation, of a particular strand of Christianity with sex trafficking, sometimes described as “white slavery,” is rather troubling.) On the other hand, as an analytical matter, and so as a matter of discerning the right responses to individuals involved in human trafficking—and as a matter of theology—it is important to reflect on how well the language fits the circumstances.

As you can surely tell by now, I have worries about whether slavery is an apt language to describe sex trafficking. My main worry is quite simple. In empirical cases approaching laboratory conditions, slavery takes place in public. Indeed, the public nature of slavery seems essential: mastery is recognized not only by one particular enslaved person but by a whole community of the enslaved, and by a whole community of masters. In the case of human trafficking, however, secrecy is essential. The world at large cannot know that a certain person is a trafficker, that another person is being trafficked. Put another way, part of the harm of slavery is that it involves public degradation whereas part of the harm of human trafficking is that it involves public silencing. I think human trafficking is more productively labeled a species of abuse than a species of domination (although the language of abuse, especially in recent years, is itself used in confusingly loose ways). 

The contrast I am trying to make becomes clearer when we attend to the level of the individual will. In slavery, the will of the enslaved is suppressed, nearly stamped out entirely; all the enslaved person can desire is to fulfill the wishes of the master. The word of the master is a law that must be followed. In human trafficking, as adeptly portrayed by Gooding, the will of the trafficking victim becomes entangled with the will of her trafficker. She is, in a sense, seduced into willing her own entrapment. The trafficker, paradoxically, becomes a source of comfort, a private space of security set apart from the supposed dangers of the world. As Gooding demonstrates, a particular challenge that is not uncommon to encounter around human trafficking is former victims who become perpetrators themselves, who take up careers as mediators between traffickers and their victims. In such cases, the will of the trafficker and the trafficked are so entangled that the two roles become one. This is not a dynamic we find on a large scale as we approach paradigm cases of slavery.

Why does making such a conceptual distinction matter in responding to human trafficking? Gooding’s book addresses a number of puzzles around human trafficking that put pressure on the slavery model, and in a sense the project of his book is to formulate responses that are needed because the standard responses to slavery fall short. To put it rather simplistically, what needs to happen in cases of slavery is to remove the master. Once there is no longer external pressure on the enslaved, the enslaved can regain her humanity, no longer subject to the whims of another. But, as Gooding points out, when those who have been trafficked are ostensibly freed, they often do not feel free. They feel scared. At a disconcerting rate, they return to those who trafficked them. They are often rejected by their families and communities. To regain their humanity, they need structure and stability—creating a poignant paradox that Gooding describes where freeing trafficking victims very nearly means enslaving them again, this time in highly-structured rescue homes.

Gooding frames his argument as deepening a slavery framework to accommodate the particular example of human trafficking in India, but I wonder if it would be more productive to abandon the slavery framework and turn instead to a framework of response drawn not from slavery but from abuse. There are quite robust and quite practical literatures on responding well to abuse, though they often focus on just one form of abuse: substance abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, self-harm, or workplace abuse, for example. In each of these cases, there is an essential element of privacy. Morality and truth become distorted. And the abused victim’s will is twisted around another’s, or in on itself (in the case of self-harm and substance abuse), rather than suppressed. In each of these cases, we find dynamics similar to those Gooding identifies in human trafficking. That which causes harm also offers comfort, so ending abuse means a difficult separation and rebuilding new sources of community and so comfort. Similarly, in each of these cases it is widely recognized that there is something long-lasting about the way the personality is warped in abuse—as Alcoholics Anonymous puts it, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. 

Particularly important, in a theological context, is the way that abuse transforms care into something pathological. Self-harm is understood as care for the self. The abusive spouse acts violently in the name of care for his partner. The abusive priest—who is often portrayed as confusing himself with God, in the framework of domination and slavery—often presents himself as care-giver, particularly attentive to his victim, wanting the best for his victim. And so, too, in the cases that Gooding presents, something like care is part of the vocabulary of traffickers, but it is also part of the vocabulary of rescuers, of those who devote themselves to responding rightly to the evil that is human trafficking. 

Here is another point where sharpening our understanding of what is and what is not slavery pays off. Care does seem like the apt response to those who have been enslaved: we ought to identify and attend to their needs, to offer resources that open possibilities for flourishing. But in cases of abuse, where abuse and care are inextricable, a different orientation may be needed. The harm of abuse is confirmed and compounded by its privacy, so publicity is an essential element of response (rather than, say, the option to politicize harm once one is on the road to recovery). Publicity may mean public acts, but it may also mean building a community, a public, in which stories of abuse can be shared and recognized as such. All of these practices are mentioned by Gooding, but it strikes me as quite important to distinguish the practices and priorities that respond to slavery from those that respond to abuse—especially when we are thinking with Christian non-profits that default toward an easy embrace of care, because it seems like love.

Theologically, slavery is about false gods while abuse is about atheism, about eliminating the possibility of relating to the divine. As the will is warped through the dynamics of abuse, the sense of a stable normative universe, and of a source of normativity, fades away. The enslaved can imagine a master of her master; for the abuse victim, the dynamic of abuse leaves no room for imagining otherwise. This is a challenge that theologians have not yet fully confronted but that is becoming urgent as harm is increasingly privatized, increasing taking the form of abuse. We know how to think beyond slavery, which plots naturally around death and resurrection, but we struggle to think beyond abuse.

Humans enslaving other humans may well be one of the most heinous acts imaginable. For this reason alone, using the theological category of the demonic when engaging enslavement is certainly appropriate, and we owe Chris Gooding a debt of gratitude for spelling things out so clearly in relation to his work in India. 

Yet, “the devil is in the details,” as the saying goes, and it would be beneficial for us to take a closer look at what is going on here. Adding some perspective and looking at slavery throughout history, it looks as if things are getting progressively worse. The enslavement of Africans for labor in the plantation systems all over the Americas starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked a new stage in the history of slavery, as the commercialization of the slave trade as well as of the use of slaves for producing profits for the masters was more destructive of the lives of enslaved people than ever before. So-called chattel slavery in the Americas existed for the profit of various players in the economic system, from the slave traders to the plantation owners, with little regard for the well-being of the enslaved beyond the maintenance of their labor power. Even the lives of the enslaved only mattered as far as they could be considered investments. For the slave owners this meant that slaves were subject to an economic calculation that determined everything else.

Slavery today follows similar trajectories, although experts have argued that the situation of enslaved people is now worse than it was even in the American plantation economy because slaves are no longer the sizeable investments they once were and thus have increasingly become even more expendable than ever. Economic desperation around the globe has become so great that there is a ready supply of people to be enslaved. This means that slaves have become even more subject to economic calculations than ever before, with lives being worth even less. Add to that the fact that there are now more enslaved people than ever in history, and we have a perfect storm brewing.1 While Gooding’s account does not mention this broader situation and its urgency, it should be considered if the goal is to search for solutions to the problem of slavery.

Before addressing what it might take to move beyond slavery, we need to take another look at the big picture. While Gooding does not investigate why things are getting worse, a realistic response to the problem of slavery depends on it. Could it be that humanity is somehow deteriorating, as some seem to be assuming? Does the problem have to do with moral failure? Elsewhere, I have argued that we find ourselves in the Capitalocene, the geological age when capitalist exploitation and extraction is shaping everything, not only economics, ecology, and politics but also communities, interhuman relationships, and belief systems. Even images of God are affected by the Capitalocene, as images of God as the slave master, which Gooding observes, may not be unrelated to images of God as the heavenly CEO. Taking a closer look at what is going on in this era may help develop a sense for why slavery keeps getting worse.

For starters, at the heart of the Capitalocene is the imperative to produce profit. In Gooding’s project, two forms of enslavement are highlighted, sex trafficking and bonded labor in India, driven by the profit they produce for the owners, if necessary even at the expense of human life. What remains to be done in response to this observation is to draw a connection to the established capitalist logic that profits are for the benefit of owners and stockholders rather than for the benefit of the workers. This may come as a surprise to many, but capitalism has followed this logic at least since the Dodge brothers successfully sued Henry Ford for failing to privilege profit for stockholders.2 What if the logic of slavery were not an aberration but merely the logic of capitalism taken to its very extreme? 

Two interrelated phenomena come together here. The first is that, according to this logic, working people count less and less, which can be observed in everyday economic life where benefits keep getting slashed, salaries are kept artificially low, and people can be fired with little recourse. While this increasingly affects even people in the middle class, these dynamics get amplified in the extreme in the lives of enslaved people. The second phenomenon is that those at the very top of the economy continue to increase their power and wealth in exponential fashion, seen in everyday economic life where top-level compensations and benefits keep rising, the most important decisions are made by a few powerful individuals (not only in economics but also in politics and religion), and even if things do not work out, golden parachutes are awaiting for the few while the many are left to clean up the mess. 

To be sure, the problem here is not greedy individuals but a system that not only sanctions but stimulates growing inequalities, not only in terms of wealth but also in terms of power. Gooding’s account of sex trafficking and bonded labor hints at the system briefly when he notes the profound difference between the beneficiaries at the very top of this system and all others, including those in the middle, but the system disappears when he talks about solutions. Granted, his concern is for the victims, but without addressing and engaging the overall system, it is hard to see how true change might be possible long-term, and even victim care seems to fall short. 

In order to get to the question of what true change might require, take a look at another group at the heart of Gooding’s account. In both sex trafficking and bonded labor, there are people in the middle who are both victims and perpetrators. In the case of sex trafficking, he is especially interested in the roles of the managers who are running brothels, because many of them were enslaved sex workers themselves when they were younger; as they grew older and less desirable to their customers, they were forced to choose between begging and starvation on the one hand and staying in the business on the other, to make ends meet. In the case of bonded workers in India, there are the so-called mestris, who are bonded laborers promoted to overseers acting in the interest of the owners and who often identify with the owners to such a degree that they control the other bonded workers more harshly than even the owners would.

Gooding notes that while there are many programs that seek to help the victims, there are no programs that seek to help these people in the middle. His quest for restorative justice for these victim-perpetrators points in the right direction, but this conversation could be strengthened by keeping in mind the drivers of the system and the class that usually disappears when the foundational parameters of class analysis are missing. What might we learn by looking at the bigger picture?

Class analysis, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is not primarily a matter of stratification, of status, or of income levels but a matter of power.3 How much power someone has at work is a prime indicator for someone’s class. The members of the working class, which is always the majority of the population (even in the United States), have little or no power over their work—this class includes the underemployed and unemployed. The ruling class, by contrast, is the one in charge and usually well connected and organized. This leaves those in the middle who, like Gooding’s victim-perpetrators, have some privilege but little power because they are not ultimately in charge. In the situation of sex trafficking and bonded labor, it is those in the middle who are responsible for making things run smoothly, who do the dirty work for those on top, and who are taking the fall and go to jail if brothels and illegal bonded labor sites are raided by the police. 

For the sake of developing the bigger picture, without losing sight of the differences, some of these dynamics are surprisingly similar to the situation of the middle class in the United States. Take the example of a manager of a Walmart store, who is the agent of the company when it comes to dealing with the employees but whose power is kept in check by clear directives from the top. The basic role of this manager is to make sure that the store makes maximum profits by keeping benefits and wages as low as possible, enforcing discipline for workers who are kept below full-time work to avoid having to pay for benefits, and keeping the public eye, critics, and protestors at bay when necessary. These managers make fairly decent salaries that may put them in the top 10 percent of US incomes, but their compensation is only a small fraction of that of the top executives and the major stockholders of the company, reflected in the limited power they hold. 

While in all these cases mid-level managers are closer to their workers than to their bosses at the top, they usually do not identify with their workers but with those at the top. In the case of sex trafficking and bonded labor, there is also the phenomenon of captive mentality, according to which victim-perpetrators often tend to identify closely with their victimizers, a matter that might be worth exploring in relation to representatives of the middle class who cater to the ruling class.

Gooding’s suggestions for addressing the resulting conflicts for mid-level staff in brothels and bonded labor sites draw on the methods of restorative justice in contrast to retributive justice. Instead of punishing, condemning, and demonizing them, he suggests guided encounters between victims and perpetrators, with the goal of developing or restoring empathy in the perpetrators, leading to restitution. As studies have shown, these efforts are often successful in the criminal system in the United States, where victims have a better chance of getting some justice and perpetrators are more likely to confess, change, and relapse less often. 

Applied to the middle class in the United States, this approach also might hold some promise. That mid-level leaders typically have more in common with the working class than with the ruling class can be shown by simple numbers based on compensation levels (even tenured full professor salaries at major universities are always significantly closer to campus cafeteria workers than to top university officials) but even more so by the level of actual power that people in various mid-level positions wield. What prevents many from seeing this is a faulty assumption that mid-level privilege translates into power.4

While developing empathy between those in the middle and those at the bottom is promising and can help develop solidarity, what is typically missing, both in Gooding’s restorative justice project and in the logic of the middle class in the United States, is a more profound awareness of the role of the ruling class. Put in terms of Gooding’s theological analysis, what is missing is a deeper encounter with he calls the demonic—in this case what is demonic about slavery, which mirrors what is demonic in the Capitalocene. To be sure, zeroing in on the demonic in these cases does not mean demonizing wealthy individuals or even individual overlords of slavery. Such widespread demonizing of individuals is usually due to the lack of class analysis, which overlooks that the demonic is manifest in distorted relationships that are systemic.

How to engage this demonic? Restorative justice has some good advice, but the systemic aspect is surprisingly absent. If profound problems like slavery cannot be addressed at the level of individual victims and mid-level perpetrators, as I am suggesting, justice will need to engage the system itself. Developing a systemic perspective, in turn, will also help address more appropriately restorative justice’s concerns for criminal acts from petty theft to murder. Note that what I am arguing for here is not some utopian notion of justice that promises complete liberation from enslavement but a different way of engaging victims and mid-level perpetrators in terms of developing bonds of solidarity in light of systemic entanglements. Here is where class analysis and the analysis of slavery can join forces. If we can figure out what solidarity might mean for the American middle class, we might be also able to figure out what solidarity might mean for the system of slavery. 

A couple of suggestions by way of conclusions: If the middle class can break its deep-seated infatuation with the ruling class and realize that its fate is linked up with the fate of the working class (whether this relates to questions of climate change, the future of one’s children, or the viability of retirement), solidarity emerges that is not built on moral appeals but on the simple recognition that “an injury to one is an injury to all” (as the saying goes in the labor unions). Gooding observes how deep-seated infatuation with the masters also ties down the mid-level victim-perpetrators of slavery, so this is where some of the most important work will need to be done if solidarity is to be an option. Part of the work of solidarity for the middle class is realizing that what is happening to the most exploited and oppressed is ultimately happening to 99 percent of us as well. For the context of slavery, this means that those in the middle need to remind themselves that by moving up within the system of slavery they are still subject to its destructive dynamics and that ultimately this system is likely to lead to the untimely death of all involved, except for the bosses and owners. This opens the way to developing deeper solidarities among all the injured parties, not losing sight, of course, that some are much worse off than others. This also means that solidarity needs to be guided from the perspective of where the pressures are greatest, which is why I have coined the notion of deep solidarity in my work.

Solidarity, therefore, is necessary for overcoming demonic structures at all levels. For theologians who dare to engage the demonic in these ways, the gain is a new awareness of a God who is completely unlike “that which nothing greater can be perceived” (Anselm of the Canterbury) envisioned in the image of the slave masters or the ruling elites produced by the system.