Concentration Camp Labor

Cannot Become Normal

With the passage of Trump's death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.

Concentration camps are sites of tempting slave labor. Among many other aims, the Soviets used concentration camp labor to build canals and work mines. The Nazi German concentration camp system followed a capitalist version of the same logic: it drew in businesses with the prospect of inexpensive labor.

We know this and have no excuse not to act.

What happens next in the U.S.? Workers who are presented as "undocumented" will be taken to the camps. Perhaps they will work in the camps themselves, as slaves to government projects. But more likely they will be offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful. Trump has already said that this is the idea, calling it "owner responsibility."

We should remember what drew I.G Farben into Auschwitz: profit. But there are of course precedents for extreme exploitation in American history, including but not limited to the history of chattel slavery. And slavery is not entirely illegal in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment allows slavery if only as punishment for a crime. The people described as "undocumented" or "denaturalized" (and other categories sure to be invented soon) are portrayed as criminals.

If the Trump regime tries to enslave such people on a large scale, there will be a court case. But waiting for the Supreme Court to do the right thing is, to put it gently, no substitute for action. It would be good if there were explicit legislation banning slave labor in all circumstances. But such a law is unlikely without a movement behind it.

The government is putting before us the temptation to cooperate in fascist dehumanization on a grand scale. But that does not mean we must do so. This is an area where actions by individuals, by civil society, by the professions, and by companies can be decisive.

The first action is simple. CEOs should now, this summer, this month, next week, sign a pledge not to use labor from concentration camps. It could be as simple as that: "On behalf of my firm I promise not to use labor from concentration camps nor to cooperate with any firm that does."

I can hear the first objection: "it's too soon." If this is not done now, some Americans companies will start using slave labor from concentration camps, and then others will claim that they must do so as well so as not to lose competitiveness or shareholder value or something. The appropriate euphemisms will be found, and all will soon seem normal. But everything will have changed. We will all be implicated. And we will all be more vulnerable.

The second objection: "it's politics." Yes, it is. The creation of a network of concentration camps is indeed politics. It is a politics, among other things, designed to draw businesses into a fascist order by normalizing dehumanization. It is a politics that creates incentives for ever wider groups of people to be excluded from legal protection, on the logic that this needed for economic growth. If there is no learning from the past, if there is no statement of principle, then cheap labor will corrupt companies and their shareholders, and indeed their consumers.

While the CEOs should act first and with explicit clarity, we are all implicated. Americans who shop, which means most of us, should avoid companies that employ labor from camps. Americans who invest should not invest in companies that use labor from concentration camps. And, like CEOs, they can take public action. They can sign a pledge not to invest in companies that use concentration camp labor.

Like any initiative, this one could go further. There are concentration camps in other countries as well, and we should also not be buying from companies that profit from them. There is forced labor now in existing American prisons, and that is wrong. But right now we are confronting a major change in how our country will work. If we can respond, we can build on a victory here to create more freedom for more people.

These policies should be named for what they are. And they should be protested for what they are. But aside from the naming and the protesting, we must exercise our awareness of how people and companies are drawn by profit and silence into the normalization of horror.

Just signing a petition might seem like a disproportionately small reaction to huge funding for American concentration camps. But it is the small choices now that open the broad, bright terrain of action later. If we miss these opportunities, that terrain closes and darkens.