Given that, at the time, slaves were legally considered property, and not entirely people, I would have to respectfully disagree. You can't get much more powerless than being classified as livestock or furniture.
Yes, everything follows from the fact that slaves didn;t own productive property and then were forced into a wage labor system where they still didn't. But the narrative of racial progress I don't think follows the nice slope we'd like to think so we can pat ourselves on the back and say how far we've come.
The fact is, prison labor is a new form of slavery in its dimensions and the fact that it is increasingly for corporate profit. We are headed right back to where we were 150 years ago if we aren't careful.
But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property. Slaves were in many cases property. How can property "own" anything? Can the table in front of me own the things I put on it? Does a cow have any right to dispute being sent to the slaughterhouse? It would have been absurd to even consider in the South at the time.
No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league. Although I would agree with you that prisons are about as close to slavery as we can probably get. But even then, everyone involved is legally 100% human in all 50 states.
> But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property.
Sorry, I was unclear. I am talking about the end of the Civil War and that the wage labor system was billed as the way forward for former slaves, instead of the land reform that Gen. Sherman and others pushed for.
> No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league.
Define slavery for me. I think the best definition is when someone is compelled under force of law to labor for the profit of another. In this regard having prisoners work on jobs that generate profit for private companies, and penalizing those who refuse with longer sentences is slavery. There is no other real word for it. Additionally, as long as convicted felons are then exiled from the polity (unable to vote, discriminated against in private employment, etc), then you have something while, not as harsh as American slavery before the civil war, is quite a bit worse, in terms of denying whole demographics political and economic power, than Roman slavery was.