e eagerly taken up by quite large numbers of people, none of whom need be acting irrationally.In fact, conditions are becoming more and more favourable for voluntary slavery. Management and free-market gurus lecture workers on the need to adapt to constant change, to be ready to change their job many times during the course of their working lives, to seek out creative business opportunities for themselves, and to re-train and re-educate themselves continuously. However quite large numbers of people are quite unsuited to this sort of quasi-entrepreneurial lifestyle. They cannot cope with constant unsettling change, and are frightened by the expanded freedom to take responsibility for themselves. In the past many of these gentler souls were sheltered in relatively unproductive but secure employment with governments and in protected industries. However, now that these niches are rapidly disappearing, the people who once occupied them would mostly be destined for failure and destitution unless, of course, the option of slavery is made available. For them the choice of slavery would make a great deal of sense.Karl Marx once said that the future contains only two possibilities - socialism or barbarism. If he was right, then we have chosen free-market barbarism as the fundamental structure of our societies. Within this structure we can only realistically hope as a society to do the best for people that suffer dehumanised conditions. A policy of re-instituting slavery would be one way of making the best we can out of bad (for some) circumstances.4. Slave-owners would have unlimited power over their slaves. Such enormous power would inevitably lead to abuse. Slaves would suffer cruelty and maltreatment, and have no recourse or protection against abuse.Slavery has sometimes been defined, in moral terms, as a relation in which slaves have no rights at all while their owners enjoy the right to do whatever they like to their slaves. Within that stru...
