Free Britney: Slavery and Statism

The recent developments in the story of Britney Spears’ conservatorship have shown a particularly dark corner of the music industry and, to some, a shadowy aspect of a free and profit driven market: slavery. The truth however, is that the free market is in no way related to slavery, in fact the understanding of a market by its advocates consists of the themes of voluntary interaction and self ownership; such things run in direct contradiction with the concept of slavery, the ownership of another person for the purpose of deriving profit.

Firstly I must put to sleep any cries that Britney Spears was not enslaved by her father, she was. Her own testimony given before a court tells of how she was forced to work against her will, coerced into taking lithium after refusing to perform in Las Vegas and prevented from getting married and having children. All the while her ‘conservatorship’ gave total control over her life to her father, James, in the name of protecting her own mental wellbeing. Forced labour, mandatory birth control and a total inability to derive profit from said labour whilst being the legal property of another human being is slavery, anyone who rejects this assessment is a slavery apologist and does not deserve to be engaged with.

Now I must lay out the contradiction between ideological capitalism (as contrasted to the 19th century ‘capitalism’ analysed by Marx and his adherents) and slavery. Philosophical and ideological capitalism is simply an understanding of capitalism as free markets, private ownership and voluntary exchange and slavery has no commonalities here. To take a deontological and moral approach, we must first accept self-ownership to be true and any infringement upon it to be an infringement on your humanity and your consent, once this has been concluded it naturally follows that slavery is inherently wrong as it is the ownership of other people, typically for engaging in forced (involuntary) labour. Slavery has existed for a large portion of human history, people of all races have at different points been enslaved whether by those of other cultures or their own neighbours; for the sake of this analysis I will use the familiar example of the chattel slavery used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

This slave trade began in Africa as after conquest and victory in battle, the soldiers of the losing army would often be taken as temporary slaves by the winning army. This deprived them of their autonomy and was far from a voluntary exchange, however this was an occupational risk of being a soldier (a role akin to slavery itself) that was widely accepted by the culture in the region. The arrival of European merchants and militaries to the West African coast in the 15th century saw the Kings and Emperors of West Africa met with vast sums of money and, more crucially, weaponry and ammunition. In return they offered their captive enemies and in some cases their own people as slaves, this transaction was indeed voluntary between the merchants and the rulers, however the property being traded was a human of equal intellectual value who did not consent to the exchange. Generations would pass and the descendants of these first slaves would be born into captivity, born into service. For our deontological acceptance of self-ownership that means that slavery is wrong, it is clear that the act of owning another human being contradicts the principles of the free market philosophy.

The utilitarian, consequentialist approach to any philosophy is simply to support that which yields the best results and this is exactly how the concept of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery began. It was not initially believed that black people were inherently subhuman and genetically predisposed to being enslaved, it was an economic decision that seems to make sense at first glance. If you do not have to pay your workers and they cannot leave their job then surely this is economically beneficial. Naturally the development of anthropology, IQ, phrenology and more general racial science developed in order to set out a moral justification for slavery with these ‘sciences’ being centred around illustrating the inferiority of the black man. Despite the apparent economic benefits of slavery, the truth is much further away from the obvious assumption to make. Brazil is not a global superpower and yet was home to far more slaves than the USA; the industrialised northern states of the USA had drastically less slavery and far more wage-labour than the Confederate states and the northern economy prospered as a result. The 1619 Project’s revisionism attempts to paint America and American capitalism as being fundamentally founded on slavery when the economic truth of the matter is that slavery actually inhibited the development of America, being beneficial only to a minority of people who owned plantations.

So from the perspective of the deontological and consequentialist free-marketeer, slavery is wrong, slavery is economically and morally a terrible idea. So why then, was Britney Spears enslaved by her father to the benefit of the hyper-capitalist, toxically consumerist modern music industry? The answer is simple: statism. It is government mental health regulations that gave the courts the power to deprive Britney Spears of her liberty and right to self-ownership and this is not just a problem in the land of the so-called ‘free’ but a problem in the United Kingdom too. Section 2 of the UK’s barbaric 1982 Mental Health Act lays out provisions for someone to be detained by the police and held without charge or conviction for 28 days if they are arbitrarily deemed to be a risk of harming themselves. If you oppose slavery on moral grounds, you accept self-ownership and thus oppose such policy that attacks those society deems ‘mentally ill’. Britney Spears’ slavery has left her abused, traumatised, forced to use an IUD and unable to determine her own future — all of this has been in the name of her mental wellbeing.

This is the very same state structure that protected slavery in the Americas way into the 19th century, the same structure that has protected slave-owning institutions throughout human history. The consciousness of a human being gives them the ability to fight against their own captivity, should a human be enslaved in a truly free market they are able to walk away and seek protection from others. Should a human be enslaved as Britney Spears was they are legally bound to remain enslaved, she would have been detained and imprisoned if she had attempted to flee her captivity and this is all in the name of a benevolent government that seeks to look after its citizen’s wellbeing.