Forced labour

A crucial aspect of the ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development, and why.

During the 1960s and 1970s, unfree labour was regarded as incompatible with capitalist accumulation, and thus an obstacle to economic growth, an interpretation advanced by exponents of the then-dominant semi-feudal thesis.

From the 1980s onwards, however, another and very different Marxist view emerged, arguing that evidence from Latin America and India suggested agribusiness enterprises, commercial farmers and rich peasants reproduced, introduced or reintroduced unfree relations.

These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed.

Perhaps the most prominent example of chattel slavery was the enslavement of many millions of black people in Africa, as well as their forced transportation to the Americas, Asia, or Europe, where their status as slaves was almost always inherited by their descendants.

Examples are the Repartimiento system in the Spanish Empire, or the work of Indigenous Australians in northern Australia on sheep or cattle stations (ranches), from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.

[11][12] Blackbirding involves kidnapping or trickery to transport people to another country or far away from home, to work as a slave or low-paid involuntary worker.

Serfs typically have no legal right to leave, change employers, or seek paid work, though depending on economic conditions many did so anyway.

A truck system, in the specific sense in which the term is used by labour historians, refers to an unpopular or even exploitative form of payment associated with small, isolated and/or rural communities, in which workers or self-employed small producers are paid in either: goods, a form of payment known as truck wages, or tokens, private currency ("scrip") or direct credit, to be used at a company store, owned by their employers.

Others argue that truck wages were a convenient way for isolated communities, such as during the early colonial settlement of North America, to operate when official currency was scarce.

[13] By the early 20th century, truck systems were widely seen, in industrialised countries, as exploitative; perhaps the most well-known example of this view was a 1947 U.S. hit song "Sixteen Tons".

Though most closely associated with Medieval Europe, governments throughout human history have imposed regular short stints of unpaid labour upon lower social classes.

[14] A form of forced labour in which peasants and members of lower castes were required to work for free existed in India before independence.

About 12 million forced labourers, most of whom were Poles and Soviet citizens (Ost-Arbeiter) were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany.

[24] In Asia, according to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilised by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Kōa-in for slave labour in Manchukuo and north China.

The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population ("New People") into agricultural communes.

Australia received thousands of convict labourers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were given sentences for crimes ranging from those now considered to be minor misdemeanours to such serious offences as murder, rape and incest.

[30] A more common form in modern society is indenture, or bonded labour, under which workers sign contracts to work for a specific period of time, for which they are paid only with accommodation and sustenance, or these essentials in addition to limited benefits such as cancellation of a debt, or transportation to a desired country.

[32] In Belgium in 1964,[33] in Portugal[34] and in Greece from 2010 to 2014 due to the severe economic crisis,[35][36] a system of civil mobilisation was implemented to provide public services as a national interest.