How to End Slavery

We still live under slavery. Slavery is the coercive appropriation of another person's body, labor or the product of that labor. It happens whenever someone uses force to override a person's ownership of himself or of what he has legitimately acquired. A trafficker makes that claim when he keeps a passport until a recruitment debt is worked off. States make it when they draft young men into an army, and again when they impose a share of earnings and answer refusal with seizure and punishment. Means and degrees vary enormously, and a woman locked in a factory dormitory lives a far harder day than an accountant filing his income tax. Both face the same underlying claim: another party says it owns part of your working life and will use violence to collect.

Your body is yours

Hans-Hermann Hoppe found the firmest ground for self-ownership in the act of arguing. His argument begins with what every dispute requires. To propose any rule, including a rule of mastery, a person has to speak, give reasons and wait for an answer. That exchange presupposes that each side controls his own body and that the question will be settled by agreement. Whoever argues for a right to own other people contradicts the conditions of his own argument, because he asks a listener to judge freely a proposal that denies the listener any right to judge.

Property in external things grows from the same root. A person owns what he first put to use or received by voluntary exchange from someone with good title. Ownership comes from that visible history of use and consent. A decree adds nothing, since anyone can issue a decree about anything. Uniforms, seals and badges add force to a claim and leave its title exactly where it was. When a gang takes a passport, it seizes. When an agency empties a savings account for unpaid tax, it seizes. One rule judges both.

That rule binds private owners as firmly as officials. A factory owner holds real title to his machines and land, and that title stops at the skin of every person who works there. A worker who signs a contract has promised labor for pay. If he quits early he may owe what he agreed to, and a court can collect a valid debt from his property and earnings. He can still walk out the door with his papers in his pocket. A debt invented by a recruiter and enforced with threats against a family is a leash dressed as a contract. Consent marks the line between an obligation and ownership of a person.

What coercion buys

Picture a mechanic paid by the job, free to take his skills to another garage. Before he hands back the keys, he takes the car around the block to check his work, because a customer who drives away happy comes back and sends her friends. A boss over a captive mechanic can see whether he keeps moving, not whether he took care. Stefano Fenoaltea's model of slavery and supervision works through this difference: pain incentives can pay where tasks are simple and effort is easy to watch, and they grow costly where results depend on attention. Rewards suit that second kind of work, because a worker who gains from good results has his own reason to take care when nobody is checking.

That edge does not stop captors from getting rich. A captor profits whenever he takes more than holding people costs him, and he can push much of that cost onto others. The victim pays with injuries and lost years. When police arrest a runaway on an employer's complaint, the public pays for the cells and hearings that send him back. A person owns himself whatever he produces. The practical task is to make aggression expensive for those who commit it and make defense and exit cheap for those who need them.

How people escaped

People held as property did not wait for a law to free them. Those who got out chose their ground and their allies with care.

On Mauritius in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, runaways climbed Le Morne, a mountain whose isolated, wooded cliffs are nearly inaccessible. Enslaved people on the island had been brought from mainland Africa, Madagascar, India and Southeast Asia, and some of those who escaped chose this mountain as their refuge. They formed small settlements in the caves and on the summit, sheltered by the same wooded cliffs that made any approach to them difficult.

Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple in Macon, Georgia, escaped in December 1848 on public trains and steamers. Ellen, who was light-skinned, traveled as a sick white man, and William played her enslaved attendant. A sling on her arm excused her from signing her name, since she could not write, and a bandage hid her beardless face. Ordinary assumptions about race and rank became their cover, and the cover had gaps. A ticket clerk in Charleston refused to sign for her until a fellow passenger helped. In Baltimore an officer demanding proof of ownership nearly stopped them, until a conductor vouched for them and Ellen's illness persuaded the officer. They reached Philadelphia at Christmas and went on to Boston, then fled to England when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 put them at risk again.

Harriet Tubman escaped in 1849 with two kinds of knowledge. Her father and others had taught her to read the natural world, and her community kept contact with workers and travelers who moved along the roads and waterways. After her own escape she returned to bring others out, including members of her family. On about thirteen trips she guided around seventy people. She also gave instructions to some fifty or sixty more to help them escape. Her knowledge of the land and its contacts could extend beyond the journeys she could personally escort.

In the 1880s, Brazilian abolitionists known as the Caifazes planned escapes from plantations around São Paulo. Fugitives paused at a staging stop in the city, then came down the coastal mountains to the Quilombo do Jabaquara in Santos, founded in 1882 as a refuge. People from the quilombo met fugitives on the way and escorted them, ready to fight off recapture, and Quintino de Lacerda went up into the mountains at night to meet arrivals and face down slave catchers. The quilombo also served as a springboard. Santos was a port that needed workers, and Lacerda helped newcomers find paid jobs there before and after slavery ended in 1888. A guarded passage carried people far from the plantations, and a wage let them stay away as free residents while slavery was still legal.

Getting out now

A worker whose passport sits in a supervisor's drawer and a taxpayer whose wages are withheld at source share a principle, because in both cases someone takes part of their labor by force, and they face different immediate problems. The worker may need to leave within days, past locked doors and threats against family. The taxpayer faces withholding and penalties, and his route out runs through years of building independent income from direct customers and parallel markets. Both begin by putting their plans and resources under their own control.

Start with the phone, because a captor who can open it can read your plans. Use one currently outside his administration and access, such as a supported Pixel running GrapheneOS that still receives full security updates, and protect it with a strong passphrase and current updates. Keeping account recovery details in your hands alone helps prevent him from resetting his way back in. If he might retaliate, plan the timing of visible account or money changes with a trusted helper first.

For messages, use White Noise. It encrypts conversations end to end, and since you can register without a phone number or email address, your account stays separate from details a captor may already know. Exchange contact details with each trusted helper directly, in person where you can, so you know who you are talking to.

Keep your logins in KeePassXC, protected by a long, unique master passphrase you have memorized. Memory alone can fail, so keep a protected offline copy of that passphrase stored apart from the database, never on a sticky note or in an unprotected cloud. Back up the encrypted database itself and test restoring it on another trusted device. Then generate a unique password for each login and turn on auto-lock.

Photograph your passport, ID, visa, contract and pay slips, and store the copies where the captor cannot delete them, such as an encrypted file held by a helper. Copies help prove who you are when you apply for replacements, and they give a lawyer evidence of withheld wages. A photograph will not carry you across a border, so arrange through your consulate or a trusted advocate to recover the originals or have them replaced.

Research routes, shelters, lawyers and jobs in Tor Browser. The local network, such as a dormitory router, can see that you are connecting to Tor without seeing which sites you visit, and those sites see the address of a Tor relay in place of yours. Keep that browsing apart from any account in your own name, since logging in tells a site exactly who you are. On a shared computer, Tails runs from a USB stick, keeps the session in memory and discards it at shutdown unless you deliberately save something. Its encrypted Persistent Storage exists only after you create it and set a passphrase, and once configured it can hold your document copies and password database, unlocked with that passphrase each time Tails starts. Tails cannot defend against a hardware keylogger or tampered firmware on the computer itself, so boot it on a machine you have reason to trust, such as a helper's laptop, and keep it off any computer the captor owns, set up or can reach.

Leaving takes a trusted helper outside the captor's circle, a ride or a ticket, a bed for the first nights, food and emergency cash. Settle before the day who drives or buys the ticket, where you sleep the first night and who holds the cash, and pick people who have already proved reliable. Captors count on isolation because helping someone costs money and time, and a lone helper runs short of both. A network spreads that cost: one person gives a ride, another a few nights on a couch, and nobody has to carry the whole escape.

Skills that travel, such as repair work, translation, bookkeeping or code, let a person earn wherever he lands, and many paying customers reduce dependence on one employer. Keep cash for a ticket and food separate from longer-term savings, so a frozen account or seized card does not strand you. Bitcoin can hold part of those savings if you keep the keys yourself: a self-custodied wallet lets you sign transactions without a custodian's permission. If the captor can see your exchange account, he will see the withdrawal there too, so time it with your helper. Test with a small amount first: send it to a wallet on a trusted device you own, restore the wallet from its recovery phrase and confirm the balance. Keep the phrase offsite as an encrypted backup or a sealed paper copy held by a trusted person, and never restore it on a borrowed or shared device.

Geography belongs in the plan too. Governments differ in what they take and whether they conscript, and a good destination is a place where the voluntary economy can support you. You own yourself, so the right to leave is yours, and each direct trade builds the parallel markets of agorism. Before moving, line up contacts, accommodation, customers and the first months of payment. Avoid any arrangement where one employer controls both your documents and your shelter. Some claims follow people abroad, and the United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live. A credible exit gives a worker bargaining power, and when he uses it, governments and employers lose his future labor and revenue.

Building a world that refuses owners

Organizations can make escape cheap for people who cannot afford it alone. A group that offers emergency lodging, pays for the bus or plane ticket, hires a lawyer and feeds someone while his papers are replaced turns a desperate gamble into a plan. Employers hold real power here. They can recruit workers leaving abusive jobs and pay them well, refuse to hire through recruiters who charge fees, leave every worker's documents in his own hands and pay wages into an account the worker alone controls. Each practice removes a grip captors depend on, and an employer competing for labor this way pulls people out of bondage while running a profitable business.

The same groups can fund privacy tools and teach people to use them, buy from independent workers and accept payment from people who lack a local bank's blessing. Eric Hughes argued in A Cypherpunk's Manifesto that people who want privacy have to build it themselves, and free software in ordinary hands is how that building happens. Someone who has learned to verify a contact or restore a wallet can teach the next person in an afternoon.

Defense finally depends on refusal. Courts can enforce a valid debt against property and earnings and turn away any claim to a debtor's body. Border officers can decline to return a person to the employer who held his passport. A private security company that hunts runaways for a labor camp is a slave patrol with a logo, and an agency can win customers by doing the opposite: escorting a worker to collect his papers from a former employer and turning down contracts to bring anyone back. Each refusal withdraws a service the captor was counting on, whether from public officers or private hands, and he now has to find and pay someone else to do that work or go without it.

When enough people offer paid work and a bed to someone leaving, and refuse to track, report or return him, the captor has to overcome those obstacles on his own and the person leaving pays less to get out. A worker who reaches that help keeps what he earns, can turn down work he does not want, and decides what is done with his own body.