Slavery and Economics

In recent centuries, Slavery has become synonymous with racial bigotry, treated by Hegel and Nietzsche as a Psychological category, and implicated in sexual role-playing.  These developments have tended to obscure the long history in which it is fundamentally an Economic condition.  Now, the involuntariness of Slavery is not unique to it--any conditioned behavior, e. g. the target of advertising, is involuntary.  Rather, the essence of Slavery is that it is ownership of one person's Labor by another, for whom it is the cheapest form of Labor.  In other words, the Slave is a means to the Owner's profit.  Slavery is thus the prototype of Exploitation involving Private Property.  Thus, as not only not precluded by, but perhaps even promoted by, Capitalism, it is a more direct target for the Socialist criticism of the latter than the one presented in the German Ideology, which unnecessarily implicates Division of Labor. Accordingly, the non-Economic connotations of Slavery that have emerged in recent centuries can be diagnosed as distractions from such a criticism.