October 27, 2023 • 47 mins
To begin spooky week we walk through the 500 years of unfathomable horror that produced the chocolate we eat today
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. It's spoky week that can happen here. It's
spooky week, the week where things are spooky. I'm your host,
Mia Wong, and with me is Garrison. Hello, and today
(00:27):
all right, right, we've gotten we've gotten, we've gotten the
preliminary spooky out and so today we're gonna be talking
about one of the sort of key elements of Halloween,
and that is chocolate and so on. On a very
basic level, we're going to ask what is chocolate? And
the answer, and it pains me to say this to
(00:47):
someone who really loves chocolate is really really bleak. Yeah,
but before we get into exactly how bleak it is, uh,
we're gonna look at sort of the early history of chocolate.
So most so, okay, there's there's a lot of disagreement
about exactly how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that
(01:09):
say three thousand BC. I've seen sources that say seventeen
hundred BC. The seventeen hundred BC is the one that's
pretty consistent. It seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate.
That's it. It's a sort of bitter drink that they
sometimes to put vanilla or red pepper.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
In Yeah, it was, it was. It was. It was
like a bitter slurry that you from what I hear,
not very enjoyable, but it got you like really high,
like not high like like like weed, but like kind
of like cocaine. It was. It was like it was
it was a massive stimulant.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Is yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, from what I hear about these kind of early
gross bitter chocolate slurries.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, And you know, I mean this is a thing
that's this is not a regular consumption drink. Basically everyone
he uses this and this and chocolate is consumed by
a bunch of different civilisations, like across like most of
South America. There's something sort of like the Mayans obviously,
the Mayans and the Aztecs too. There's a lot of
(02:09):
places where where this is being used, and it's everyone
seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah. I think
at some point the I think it was the the
Olemex at some point we're doing these like they were
making fermented alcohol out of so so normally with with chocolate,
you're using like the cocoa beans, right, but there's like
(02:30):
a flesh and the flute fruit around the beans and
they were making like a fermented thing out of that,
and I don't know, I leave as an exercise to
the reader with you count that as chocolate. But the
sort of conventional story goes okay. So like several thousand
years after the Olmes, the Assex and the Mayans using
it for ritual purposes and the story basically is okay.
So Herman Cortes drink chocolate with stick King Maktazuma. Cortes goes,
(02:55):
this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he
brings it back to Europe anyways, and in Europe they
mix it with sugar and also with honey, but mostly
with sugar, and it becomes, you know, it becomes very
very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is
like the eighteen forty so like like takes some about
like three hundred years to figure out how to make
(03:17):
cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, you can
It's not it ceases to be bitter like it in
the in the way that it sort of is naturally.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
You can you can process it with like like like
basic solutions, which which neutralizes some of the acidic and
bitter bitter tastes, which is why you should always buy
a Dutch process cocoa powder, which is unfortunately hard to
find these days. But it is, it is, it is,
it is the shit.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, so that's let's that's actually yeah, so the that's
that's Dutch cocoa. And then twenty years later someone figures
out how to make them into a chocolate bar, and
you know, sort of a law, you have chocolate. Now.
The conventional histories are missing something very, very imp which
is something that defined has defined the production of chocolate
since Europeans got a hold of it and continues to
(04:07):
define it today. And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes, yeah,
And you know this is slavery is a very sort
of important part of the history of chocolate because slavery
is what transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a
bunch of different indigenous societies for several thousand years, into
modern chocolate. And this is this is a point that
(04:29):
I want to make because most most histories of chocolate tend,
you know, when they're trying to find the origin of
modern chocolate, they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I
think they're wrong. I think they're very wrong. I think
the distinct European innovation of chocolate is to add sugar
to it. Yes, and this raises the very bleak question
(04:49):
where does sugar come from? And the answer, of course
is slavery. Sugar is one of the primary crops of
slave economies in both the colonies and the West Indies.
It is one of the key elements of the so
called triangle trade where you know, you may have you
probably have learned this in school, but you know, for people,
for people who've been out of school for a long time.
So the triangle trade is Europe. Since manufacturer goes to Africa.
(05:12):
It trades that fruit enslaved people and slave people taken
from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America, sometimes
to the colonies in the West Indies. Uh. And then
they take you know, the products of slavery from plantations
back to Europe. And that's you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum,
and critically sugar back to Europe. Actually, wait, did did
(05:35):
they Did they teach you the triangle trade?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah? Yes, I mean I I I did learn. My
Christian Homescholling curriculum wasn't the best, but we did, we did.
We did cover some basic things.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
It's interesting because the triangle trade as a model, like
isn't that old, even though even though like this is
the way that we all understand, like Tyler sort of
colonial trade work, it's a kind of recent thing. Yeah.
So sugar. Sugar is a very very key part of
this entire thing. And there's a very very famous this
sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is Sydney W.
(06:12):
Mintz's Sweetness and Power, which is a fundamental tax and
a lot of sort of uh a lot of the
sort of fields around the study of slavery. And one
of his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is
fueled by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant
that you know, they're putting it in tea, which another stimulant.
They're putting it in whatever they drink, and this is
(06:32):
a thing that allows them to keep working for longer
than they otherwise would have been able to.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, and this also was the origin of Britain's probably
largest cultural trait, bad teeth.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah. And you know, so so this is this is
this is a many aspects of British culture I've are
descended from from slavery and you know, but the the
other the other important thing for our stories that sugar
is what makes chocolate sort of palatable to Europeans. And
and this isn't a sort of interesting thing that Europeans do.
(07:11):
You know they do this with tobacco too. You haven't
you have something that you're only supposed to use in
fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right, And the Europeans
are like, okay, but what if we purified the shit
out of it and they just ate it literally every day?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah? Have you ever tried like unsweetened on like chocolate liquor?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Fucking sucks? I hate it. It's not good.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
You can certainly nibble, it can be a fun novelty
to nibble, but you certainly wouldn't want to eat like
a whole bar of it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, it's it's some real hope boy. Yeah. So, like,
I mean, it makes sense that they added sugar to it.
But the consequence of this is that we can ask
we can finally ask the question right now now, now
that it's been transformed by sugar into this object a
sort of popular consumption, we can ask the question what
is chocolate? And the answer is that chocolate is colonialism
(08:01):
plus slavery. It is a fusion of coca, which is
an indigenous ritual drink sees is a part of the
wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar a
slave crop that drove the colonial prontation economy. And you know,
you might say me, you know you're being harsh here, right,
even if we accept your argument about chocolate and the
sixteen hundred, surely, surely that's not sure. Now, wasn't wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Wasn't slavery abolished in the eighteen hundreds, And now I assume,
I assume Nestle's barving practices are totally above fort see.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
And this is I think the interesting part of the
story is gare like our readers is assuming a thing
I'm about to launch into here is the Mars Nestley
Child slavery lawsuit. And we will because that is a
critical elements of slavery and chocolate production. But there is
also still slavery and sugar production capitalism. And not only
(08:55):
is there slavery and sugar production, there is slavery in
sugar production in the exact same place there were slavery
in sugar production five hundred years ago. And this is
one of the sort of stunning things about you know,
the miss of capitalism, right, which is that, Okay, capitalism
has had four hundred you know, I'm gonna give them
a bit of credit and be like, Okay, I don't know,
(09:18):
like I'm gonna I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit
of credit and give it only was being responsible for
four hundred years of this and not five hundred years
of this because you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether
the capitalist transition is in the fifteen hundred and sixty hundreds,
but you know, they have had four hundred years to
solve the problem of slavery on Hispaniola. Has it done that? No,
(09:39):
it is there is still slavery on the island of
Fifthpaniola four hundred years later. We're going to be discussing
in a second. Still the best possible thing here is
that maybe and this is it is arguable, maybe last
year they're stopped being slaves there. Now I don't even
(10:02):
think that. I don't think that's true. And we're going
to get into that, but you know, before before we
sort of launch into you know what, like whether or
not there are so slaves on Tecker replantations, in the
Dominican Republic. If you have had four hundred years to
solve a problem and you have not solved it, you
are never going to solve it.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Hey, hey, let's not let's not visionhole ourselves here. There's
a lot of things that have been around for four
hundred years that ought not to be.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
That's true. But if you are an economic system and
your economic system has been you are supposed to have
you are supposed to have dealt with this at least
two hundred years ago. But you know, we've arrived here,
and this is something we've talked about before in the
show at least a bit. We've arrived here at one
of the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and
(10:53):
radical accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both
sets of accounts as their starting point the fact that
capitalism is based on free labor, that it's free people
who enter into contracts to sell you their labor, and
that forced labor is this sort of like hauled over
from older economic systems.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
No.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
I actually just saw a thing today on the dying
Remains of Twitter about how capitalism is the only economic
system that's not based on exploitation of violence.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
It's based on free trade between markets. It's like people
really believe this shit. It's like I don't know, Like
I don't know. So at some point I'm going to
do an episode about really good.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Book whose name I'm forgetting right now because I didn't
look this up beforehand. But there's a really good book
on the sort of dueling forced labor systems driving the
tea economy in the late eighteen hundred, so that there's
there's one forced labor system in China and a different
forced labor system in India that are both warring in
each other to control the tea market.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It is certainly interesting how much tea has impacted like geopolitics.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Oh yeah, yeah, we'll do an episode on that one day. Yeah,
tea's not.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That great, guys. I'm sorry, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Not ta rips. I would not we just don't have
good tea here.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
I would not do as much killing as people have done.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
It's not worth killing anyone over the number of people
who've been killed over it is like early.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Gray is fine on like a rainy afternoon, but come on.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, it's not. It's not worth like conquering continents for huh.
But okay, so well, back back back to this sort
of main plot that is not tea, that is in
fact chocolate. So one of the things that we can
learn that we learn from this is that, you know,
forced labor is not just a holdover. It's been a
It's been a central part of capitalism for as long
as capitalism has existed, and given its current track record,
(12:42):
it will be a part of capitalism for as long
as it exists. And you know, so, there's always been
a racial component to this, right And this is like
trivially obvious, right, Like, there's a racial component of slavery, Like,
holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know,
we can we can expand this a little bit and
it gets you to a some sort of interesting things,
(13:03):
which is that race is one of you know, so
like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor,
but race is what mediates your access to wage labor
in the first place. So, you know, white, like if
you're an American, right like, white Americans have basically always
been able to get access to to wage labor, you know,
And as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not
(13:25):
as bad as the other things you can get forced
into you know. But yeah, so like if you're black,
like you know, you get as successive forms of slavery.
If you're indigenous, they tried to enslave you and then
either sort of kept doing it or gave up and
just killed did the genocide Asian people like who came
to this continents and also sort of the West Indies
(13:46):
largely get debt pion engine and entered service to you
and you can you can sort of work this out
so on and so forth. There's there's different like modes
of stuff that are the normal sort of like what
you by default have access to if you are ex race, right, Yeah,
And obviously this this sort of racial access to wage
labor is spread across the world. You know, your your
access to wage labor is dependent on sort of your
(14:07):
subject position as colonizer colonize as well as you know,
your sort of global and also you're like local racial
hierarchies because oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up.
But the upshot of this is that many of the
descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today
on sugar plantations than making republic. And so we're gonna
(14:31):
we're gonna tell that story. But first word, oh god,
do you know what doesn't know? I cannot guarantee that
our products and services are slave free like I wish
I could.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
But well, do you know what is also here for
a spooky time this Halloween. That's right, these products and services.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Okay, we are back.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
I'm drinking my not mocha coffee, drinking my regular unsweetened coffee.
Is therefore totally fine.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Yeah, I'm everything. Nothing bad, nothing bad has ever happened
in the history of coffee.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
No, I'm here, no tea, no chocolate. I'm safe. I'm good.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Anyway. So unfortunately, the people who are not safe is
uh a Haitians in the Jamaican Republic. So we are
not going to do an entire history of slavery in
the Jamaican Republic because.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Because this is a chocolate episode, and yeah, we have
so much time.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, you know, for many reasons. But one of the
things that happened in in So we're gonna we're gonna
look at sort of the like the modern history of this,
and by modern, I'm starting it in I'm starting it
in the eighties because I have to pick up place now.
One of the things that happens in the nineteen eighties
is that the Dominican Army effectively so goes into Haiti
(16:09):
or just recruitation people who are in the Dominican Republic
and are like, hey, you're gonna okay, we have like
jobs for you, like come like do this work. And
so a bunch of people get in like these like
army vans and then they get there and they get
worshed out of the van. A bunch of guys point
guns at them and go, you're gonna work for free
or we're gonna or like or we're gonna kill you.
So this is really bad. And this is this is
(16:32):
how a lot of like through the eighties and kind
of early nineties, this is how a lot of sugar
production worked in the Dominican Republic. And you know, it's
it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot
of sugar, and it produces a lot of sugar that
specifically the US uses. Now, this is like state run
slavery right on, sort of like state run plantations. So
(16:53):
then we had neoliberalism and so the state run plantations
get privatized. However, come they still run on slave labor.
So there's a very good Mother Jones report about this.
I'm gonna read some of it here. Kakata is one
of about one hundred, according to a local missionaries estimate,
(17:15):
isolated camp scattered around Central roman. Central Romana is a
giant sugar plantation. Central Romana's one hundred and sixty thousand
acres of sugar cane attract almost as big as New
York City. Most of the workers and their families live
in these battaiyas, rising in the morning to work the
cane and the punishing heats, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying
the stalks. Nearly all are men of Haitian descent. Some
(17:38):
were traffic back in the day of the journalist is
doing this was the guy who basically uncovered a bunch
of the original armies like the military slavery program in
the nineties, and so he went back like a couple
of years ago. So he's talking himself of Some of
the people were traffic back touring the military slavery program.
Others were born and lived stateless, and others came from
(17:59):
hating Moore recently paying smugglers to sneak them across the
border for years, the government has resisted providing legal status
to people of Haitian heritage in the country, even though
born there and estimated two hundred thousand people who for
generations have been to mean by race and class are stateless.
For the men in the camps, Sentra Romana is the state.
(18:21):
Their villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict.
Centraro Romana owns the land or the Haitians work the
railcars where they wigh and load the can and stocks,
and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from
the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. So
things going great here and the conditions you know, okay,
(18:43):
so the sort of the capitalist reforms and ioliberalism has
brought to this system are the number of child slaves
has decreased dramatically, because that was a big thing when
the first reporting, when everyone was like, holy shit, there's
a bunch of child slaves. This is a terrible Yeah,
so we have less child slaves, right, and you know,
(19:05):
so instead of the child slaves, right, it's now mostly adults.
But the conditions here are still effectively slavery. Even even
after this sort of child slavery stuff like is driven under.
On a good day, these workers make three dollars a
day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now,
(19:27):
there are a lot of reasons for this. One of
the big ones is that most of the workers there
are most like basically all like you might find a
worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're caught
in these debt traps by Central Romana, who and these
are like classic company but they're not. They're worse than like,
you know, the classic American company town because at least
(19:47):
an American company town, you can go to another town
that is not controlled by the company, whereas these people
like cannot, and so they're caught in these debt traps
by Central Romana, which is the company that owns these plantations.
And because they're so in debt, they're constantly forced to
work for the company in order to pay off their debt.
But you know, they never actually make enough money to
(20:08):
pay the debt off, and so they have to take
on more debt to survive until you know, and largely
what happens is these people work there in debt until
they die. This is classic debt Pia nine where it
sort of debt transforms people into the effective property of
the debt holder, who exacerbate the debt by denying them
the ability to live without taking on more debt. A
very common way this happens is with medical debt, which
(20:28):
is something you know, I think we're familiar with to
some extent here, but is egregiously worse. And the other
thing that I was realizing about this is that this
is actually really eerily similar to the way that Cortez
and the Conquistadores and slaved indigenous people during the genocide.
They would do the same thing of like, well, okay,
(20:49):
now you're in debt to me, and because you can't
pay the debt, you have five hundred percent interest per week,
and so you know, that just accumulates, and now you
work for me for the rest of your lives. And
this is you know, this, this is one of the
one of the sort of ways in which this the
long shadow of Spanish imperialism like looms over the Dominican Republic,
even in what has really been about two hundred years
(21:11):
of the age of the American Empire. You know, and
as you know, obviously like as much of an effect
as the Spanish empire has had here and oh god,
it's not good today. It is the American empire that
lines the pockets of the slavers of the Dominican Republic.
So such a Romana is owned by this this family
(21:33):
called the Funjewel family, who are these Cuban expats who
run this like enormous resort in shit where they live
in Florida and are handed. This is really fun. One
hundred and fifty million dollars for the American state every
year in the form of price supports for sugar. So like,
(21:54):
you're an American, right, Like obviously your tax money very
obviously goes to support slavery because we have prisons, and
so your taxes are paying to enslaved people, but your
taxes are also paying for slavery and other countries. It's incredible,
really really great stuff from the American political system here.
(22:15):
And you know, and the way this has been maintained
is through like two I think in the last twenty years.
Mother Jones reported they've they've spent the sugar lobbyist spent
two hundred and twenty million dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying,
and it works really well. They've been able to influence
the system for a very very long time. The other
funny thing about the Fundtural family is that they've created
(22:36):
the perfect political trap, which is so one of one
of the brothers is like a Trump guy and the
other person is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like
incredibly a mesh in both of the circles. So it's great.
Things are going very good. So after so the Mother
Jones investigation was like in the last I think it
(22:56):
was like last year the year before, and when the
Mother Jones investigation about the fact that like all of
this shit was still happening came out, uh, there was
a there was a giant uproar about it. And a
couple of things happened. One is that so the village
of the journalists had visited, uh CenTra Romana, Like they
(23:17):
didn't even bulldoze the villages. They blew everyone's houses down
with like sledgehammers and forcibly move them to like other
villages and separated people's families. So that's that's great. And
then so in late twenty twenty two, under under pressure
from this reporting, the US government like banned imports from
that specific company. And okay, it's unclear what is going
(23:42):
to happen with it, if you know, if if they're
gonna get unbanned eventually, uh, if it's gonna stick, if
they're just gonna like, I don't know, like transfer the
assets to another company or something and use that instead.
As so, as of right now, this specific set of
plantations is not able to export sugar to the US.
(24:06):
So this is this is as much of a victory
over slavery as we're going to get in this episode.
And this victory is that it's only gonna get work.
This is this is the peak of anti slavery stuff
we're gonna see here. Yeah, so enjoy it while you can.
(24:26):
And do you know what else you should enjoy?
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Oh these products and services that support this podcast. That's good. Yes,
this is this is the real peak of the episode, folks.
All right, I am rejuvenated by the advertising industrial complex.
(24:53):
I feel ready to hear other tales of great progress.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Woo Okay, So now we're now we're going to turn
to the type of slavery that everyone, I think expected
this episode to mostly be about, which is the fact
that cocoa bean production is also largely produced by slave labor.
So Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a bit from
a report by the Food Empowerment Projects, which has done
(25:19):
some very good work on most but like specifically slavery
in West Africa. They're also one of the only media
people I've ever seen talk about the fact that a
lot of this stuff, it's not exactly the same, but
a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also seems
to be happening on plantations in Brazil, but there's effectively
no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I don't know.
(25:40):
So like, eventually, one day, I guess, like the fact
that other places other than West Africa have slavery will
hit the anglophone media class or whatever. But until then,
I'm going to read this section. In West Africa, coco
is a commodity crop grown primarily for x Coco is
(26:01):
the Ivory Coast primary export. It makes up about half
the country's agricultural export and volume. Most coco farmers earn
less than one dollar a day and income below the
extreme poverty line. As a result, they often resort to
the use of child labor to keep their prices competitive.
In many cases, yeah, yeah, this is one of the
(26:23):
things that happens when you're reading about child slavery stuff
is even people who like are trying to you know,
draw attention to how bad this is. You get stuff
like that that's like Jesus Christ. Yeah, so you know
they're making sub one dollar a day, they're using child labor.
In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization
(26:44):
calls quote the worst form of child labor. These are
defined as practices quote likely to harm the health, safety,
or morals of children. Approximately two point one million children
in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most
of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of
child labor. Which is also really good that like we've we've, we've,
(27:08):
capitalism has finally reached the you know, the apex of
its its control of the commanding heights of the world economy,
which means that we're talking about we're trying to make
tear lists of how bad child labor is.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Well, yeah, I mean a whole bunch of child labor
laws just got like rolled back across many states here. Yeah,
it's a real great country. So it's very exciting. The
children are for the mind.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah, it's it's it's it's great, you know. So, so
obviously a lot of the child slavery on cocoa farms
are from sort of like larger I mean, I guess
they are corporate, but from sort of like larger plantations,
but also less. You think that it's better on family farms,
No family farms, I mean, I guess it is technically
(27:54):
better than like being kidnapped and enslaved, is merely doing
child labor on your family, like.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Just being born into these pretty pretty uh not great
labor practices that you really have no say it or
any agency whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, yeah, And like you know, this is one of
these things where like the economic conditions are so bad
that people are people are facing impossible choices, and I
think we can say that they make the wrong choice,
which is a lot of Okay, So, like there are
there were sort of different ways that children get trafficked
into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by
(28:36):
their own families who do not have enough resources to
take care of them, and are like, okay, we'll basically
sell these people so they can go do this job.
And these families don't know that, like their child is
about to be enslaved, right, they're just like, Okay, well
they're going to go off and do work. But the
other way that this happens is that kids from like
villages in other countries. But there's a lot of focus
(28:58):
on Mali as one of the places this happens for him.
But yeah, so there's a lot of these effects what
are effectively raids into into Molly from the Ivory Coast
to like steal children. And it's also happens to Bikina Fosso,
you know, and this gets to the point where, you know,
I'm gonna read a quote from of these from from
this report again. In one village of Bikina Fosso, almost
(29:22):
every mother in the village has had a child trafficked
onto cocaine farms. Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers.
So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every
American right winger, except it's you know, this is just
how chocolate is made.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, this is you know, all of all of the
Sound of Freedom guys, with all of you know, the
whole uproar around that movie earlier this year, versus all
of them, yeah, enjoying their little Eminem said, KitKat said, Hey,
I like the occasion kid cats too. This is this
(30:02):
is a massive profle.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I I don't know, I really love chocolate. I have
not eaten any chocolate since I started researching this, and
I like and it's and it's but it sucks because
it's like you can't you can't. And we're gonna get
into board of this in a second, but like you
can't like ethically consume your way out of this, right,
like because the conditions.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
But free trade cocoa exists.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Oh boy, Yeah, we're gonna get into that. But yeah,
like there's there's no there's no actual systemic like there's
no way that you can, like you can't change this
stuff with your individual consumption habits. And you know that's
something that's just really fucking bleak about this because these
conditions are, I mean, as bad as you can possibly imagine.
(30:49):
But the Food and Powerment Project describes like children as
young as five are forced to work up to fourteen
hours a day, like chopping down cocoa pods and then
chopping them open with machetes. And sometimes these people get
Sometimes these kids are using chainsaws to like clear wood,
they clear down like forests. Yeah, and you know, okay,
so this goes exactly how you expected to go, which
(31:10):
is a bunch of these kids just have a bunch
of fucking scars from when they've been slashed by machetes
because again you're handing the machetes to children, some of
whom are as young as five. And then they have
to carry one hundred pound bags of cocoa beans through
the jungle. And this is the thing that's also happening
in the Tamaican Republic, and this happens a lot in
a lot of places, is that they just get you know,
(31:31):
when when companies want to spray like they're fars with pesticides, right,
they don't even bother even like clearing people out, which
might you know, help like a tiny bit to make
them not like die from fucking poison. But no, these
fucking dipshits just like spray them with toxic chemicals as
they just like spray them with pesticides like a lot
(31:53):
of whom are christinogiens a lot of And this is
happening in the Dominican the surcane fields in the Dominican
Republic too, and a lot of those people just fucking
died because you know, they were stayed with these chemicals.
There was a really terrible story of a guy who
was trying to sue Central Romana and just fucking died
from the like he wasn't able to get a pay
(32:13):
off for a lawsuit because he died in twenty twenty
before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great
quote from the Food Empowerment Project. The farm owners using
child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food available,
such as corn paste or the cassava and bananas that
grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases, the children
sleep on wooden planks and small windless buildings without access
(32:35):
to clean water, sanitary bathrooms. And you know, another key
part of this, right is like, okay, so the conditions
are obviously unbearably bad, but you know, a key part
of this, like any system of slavery, is the physical
violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly and often
beaten and abused and tortured in ways that are very
(32:58):
reminiscent of sort of like older epik of slavery if
they try to escape. Now, this is the companies care
about this to the extent that is bad. Pr Yes,
and the charcot companies repeated, like the charcoal companies. Okay,
they they signed a thing in the year two thousand
where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst
(33:20):
forms of child slavery by two thousand and five.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah, like this is this has been a known issue
for like over two decades.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Now, Garrison, Yes, what year is it right now?
Speaker 2 (33:32):
The year of our Lord to us in twenty three.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, they have been they have been promising to end
child slavery in the Originally they're supposed to be end
child flavery and then and then they scaled it down
to the worst forms the worst. But they have been
promising you could do this for longer than you have
been alive, yes, correct, which is terrifying.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
And and as we'll get into later, right, the number
of child slaves is higher than it was when they
started doing these child slave reduction efforts, so quote unquote
reduction efforts which are just sort of pr bullshit. So
industry lobbying groups are also very very powerful, and this
(34:20):
is part of how this stuff persists. So the University
of Chicago has a center called Norak, which is like
a public Research Center. I don't know. I went to
that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers
and ne or should you, because it turns out there
was so okay. So they released this report on how
bad child slavery is, right, but there was a leak
(34:42):
of the original version of the report that was supposed
to come out, and the original version of the report
has the number of child slaves at like two point
two million. Now, when the report actually comes out with
no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers for
child slavery that are from before COVID nineteen, the Noak
report was like, ah, there's only like one point six
(35:03):
million child slaves. So six hundred thousand child slaves just
sort of vanished in an editorial process after they got
they came under fire from uh, the they came under
fire from the chocolate lobby.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah yeah, let's uh, let's route that down. Makes it
makes it easier to palace.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
And the other thing that it hides is that there's
been a ten to fifteen percent increase in the number
of child slaves working in like in the coat in
Cocoa since COVID started. Because COVID has been a giant
sort of you know, the economic damage that COVID caused
forced a bunch of people into into, you know, increasingly
(35:43):
desperate things. And you know, Okay, so we tease this
a little bit, and you might be thinking, well, I
can eat fair trade chocolate, right, I can pay ten
dollars for a chocolate bars as a fair trade on it,
and it will and that will make sure that I'm
only eating chocolate produced by free labor. Nope, the certifications
for the chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate.
(36:07):
The follow was an excerpt from a study conducted by
the Corporate Accountability Lab on the failure of initiatives in
the chocolate industry like certifications quote. In order to understand
the gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we
brought certified chocolate bars to villages where some or all
of the farmers were certified. We held up the bar
(36:28):
with the label and explained to the farmers what consumers
expected out of the label, primarily that farmers were paired
a fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices
like child labor and deforestation were not present. We also
explained the difference in retail price between fair trade and
uncertified chocolate. The overwhelming response from farmers to this information
(36:49):
was shock and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn
shirt in front of him and asked if it looked
like he earned a decent living. A woman in one
village said, you can hardly afford to send to your
children to school, so how could anyone think she earned
a fair price? Are farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences
(37:09):
between certified and uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education,
access to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So, yeah,
all the people who are telling you they're doing some
fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places
they're getting it from are as fucked as her. She's yeah,
(37:31):
so this is bad. Now. You might also think, Okay,
we can get out of this by buying from coco cooperatives.
Except except, and this is a wonderful thing that capitalism
is brought on the world. Most coco collectives aren't actually
like workers collect like aren't actually co ops.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
They're just all people's republic of chocolate farmers. I'm sure
they're all a little red book.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
This is something actually, this is something that China actually pioneered,
because there's there's a bunch of firms in China that
are also technical. I talked about this in my episode
of Bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk
company that poisoned three hundred thousand babies, and that company
was technically a co op, but like it was a
co op in the sense that there was a small
group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares,
(38:20):
and then they just hired every source everything out to
independent contractors, so it functioned like a normal company. Yeah,
and this is the thing. A lot this the cocoa
trade stuff is actually worse because most of these things
that are called co ops aren't even co ops at all.
They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake
co ops. And there they are like a very very
small number of of these coco farms that are actually
workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which one
(38:43):
is which unless you spend a bunch of time like
actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's no
sort of like ethically way out of this, right, You're
just kind of you're you know, like you can't. You
can't eat your way out of this problem. And of
course everything across the board, all the these conditions have
(39:04):
gotten worse since the pandemic. So you know it's it's
not only is capitalism not making things better every like,
things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I
promised you the lawsuits. We're gonna talk a bit about
the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There
were eight people from Mali who were enslaved by cocoa
(39:26):
plantations after being traffic from Mali sued Nestley, Cargill, Berry, Caliba,
I don't know, some French shit mars Alam, Hershey's and
Modeleas to try to get conversations from the companies by
virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made
by their child slave labor.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Now there's also a separate lawsuit against slightly different companies,
so a lot of the same company is slightly different
that's using a different set of legal arguments. Both of
the lawsuits have been thrown out, and I want to
take a second to look at the reasoning here, both
of which is are just amazing. So I think the
most famous one is the Supreme courts eight to one
decision that said, well, so, like, all this stuff happens,
(40:07):
but it happened outside the US, so you can't sue
companies for it here, which is an amazing piece of logic,
which is just like, oh yeah, no, actually, like corporations,
like American corporations could just go everywhere else and do crimes.
And this is and the American legal system is specifically
written in such a way that like, if an American
corporation enslaves you in like the Ivory Coast, there's nothing
(40:32):
you can do about it in the US. And then
a judgment do you see throughout the other case because
you know, their argument was, well, you can't prove that
the companies knew you were being enslaved on those farms.
There's no quote traceable connection between the people who enslaved
you in the company, so there's nothing we can do.
And the reason both these arguments work is the reason
(40:54):
for the structure of the chocolate market, right, the reason
cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast and all so Brazil
can get away with this, you know, well, the reason
that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast or Brazil
or other places The reason they're happening there and not
in the US is because these are places where you
can get away with that level of exploitation in corporate
violence that you know in the US would be a
(41:16):
lot more difficult, and this shields them from legal liability. Furthermore,
instead of just you know, jumping, instead of just running
the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies could easily do, right,
this is a very very large trade. They could just
sort of like they could invertially vertically and not even
vertical integrate, they could just actually make chocolate, like they
could just run the process, and they they very specifically
(41:39):
choose not to do it. And the reason they choose
not to do it, this isn't one hundred billion dollar industry, right,
but instead they what they choose to do is to
just buy cocoa from the chocolate market where all these
sort of nebulous producers sell, which allows the chocolate companies
to go, oh, well, these people don't work for us.
We just buy chocolate from the market. How are we
supposed to know which these plantations use slave labor?
Speaker 2 (42:03):
So it puts like a one degree of separation.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Yeah, well it's actually two degrees it's an additional degree
of separation from the way something like Walmart works. Right,
where Walmart has a bunch of independent contractors, this isn't
even contractors. They're just buying finished products from things they're
like they're completely unaffiliated with. And this gives them, like,
it gives them like two degrees of legal separation, because
(42:26):
it's not just that their contractors are doing something that
they didn't know about, it's that they're just buying it, right,
And this fucking sucks. And you know, since laws exist
to protect the ruling class, judges and courts can just
wave their hands and go, well, these companies definitely enslaved you,
(42:46):
but we have no choice but to let them off
completely scot free. So sorry about that. And I want
to end today with something that has been running through
my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which
is that the worst onisie must pay for their times.
The state has failed, the court has failed, the NGOs
have failed, and if anything is ever going to fucking
(43:07):
happen that forces these companies to be in any way,
there there is to be like a single iota of
justice for the fact that all of these companies have
been fucking gorging themselves on the profits of slave labor.
At all, we are going to do it or no
one is, So congratulations you. The American worker is unfortunately
(43:29):
incumbent on you to deal with these fucking corporations that
have been destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky
week everyone.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yes, this is very scary. Yeah, well thank you for
that lovely, uh depressing presentation. Uh via. I mean, I
guess is there is there is there a sort of
takeaway besides, there's no ethical conception to under capitalism.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
I mean, like, I mean, capitalism will never abolish slavery,
and I don't think one.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
I know, there is one US state where they grow chocolate,
which is Hawaii, which has its own problems of colonization.
So even if you try to buy from a place
that is you know, arguably has less chocolate slavery, it's
generally better produced, it still is you're still implicating yourself
in all of the problems relating to like the independence
(44:28):
of that island and the US's colonization. So it's it's
it's we're really just really just kind of trapped on
all sides. Here is what it feels like. I mean,
this is this Halloween chocolate problem.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Yeah, I mean, and I think I think the way
to think about this, right is that this this is
an actual systemic issue, right, This is a systemic thing
capitalism has been doing for about four hundred years, like CeNSE,
its entire existence, and if you want to, if you
want to end it, we have to. You have to. Actually,
it's not it's not even enough to destroy these companies,
(45:04):
right because even if you brought down every single one
of these chocole companies, right, there would just be another
round of chocolate companies. It will be doing exactly the
same ship. So you have to you have to destroy
the system of property by which these things are allowed
to exist. And at that point maybe you can start
on being able to eat food that isn't produced by
slave labor.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
It turns out Willi Wogka was the villain the whole time.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
You know. I was trying to think about the amount
of slave labor that we see from him versus the
amount of slave Wonka. It's a it's I think Wonka
is using more slave labor, but not by as much
as it should be.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
I don't know, I don't know. It's it's it's hard
to say, I I think it's pretty clear that Walka's
use of slave labor is just an accurate representation of
the real life industry.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yes, so yeah, go go, go enjoy your weekend, and then.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
You enjoy that new fucking twig Walka movie that looks
I have to say dog shit.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Oh yeah, bad herod.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Bad idea anyone's had since capitalism twin Kwonka. I'm sorry
it doesn't slap I here out of ten anyway, Well, uh,
tune in in the next few days for two more
Spooky Week episodes for you. We only got three this
week because there's a lot of other news happening, but yeah,
we at least have two other Spooky Week episodes that
(46:29):
I am about to finish working on, so stay tuned
for that. Good Bye.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Thanks for listening.
Also media. It's spoky week that can happen here. It's
spooky week, the week where things are spooky. I'm your host,
Mia Wong, and with me is Garrison. Hello, and today
(00:27):
all right, right, we've gotten we've gotten, we've gotten the
preliminary spooky out and so today we're gonna be talking
about one of the sort of key elements of Halloween,
and that is chocolate and so on. On a very
basic level, we're going to ask what is chocolate? And
the answer, and it pains me to say this to
(00:47):
someone who really loves chocolate is really really bleak. Yeah,
but before we get into exactly how bleak it is, uh,
we're gonna look at sort of the early history of chocolate.
So most so, okay, there's there's a lot of disagreement
about exactly how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that
(01:09):
say three thousand BC. I've seen sources that say seventeen
hundred BC. The seventeen hundred BC is the one that's
pretty consistent. It seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate.
That's it. It's a sort of bitter drink that they
sometimes to put vanilla or red pepper.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
In Yeah, it was, it was. It was. It was
like a bitter slurry that you from what I hear,
not very enjoyable, but it got you like really high,
like not high like like like weed, but like kind
of like cocaine. It was. It was like it was
it was a massive stimulant.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Is yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, from what I hear about these kind of early
gross bitter chocolate slurries.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, And you know, I mean this is a thing
that's this is not a regular consumption drink. Basically everyone
he uses this and this and chocolate is consumed by
a bunch of different civilisations, like across like most of
South America. There's something sort of like the Mayans obviously,
the Mayans and the Aztecs too. There's a lot of
(02:09):
places where where this is being used, and it's everyone
seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah. I think
at some point the I think it was the the
Olemex at some point we're doing these like they were
making fermented alcohol out of so so normally with with chocolate,
you're using like the cocoa beans, right, but there's like
(02:30):
a flesh and the flute fruit around the beans and
they were making like a fermented thing out of that,
and I don't know, I leave as an exercise to
the reader with you count that as chocolate. But the
sort of conventional story goes okay. So like several thousand
years after the Olmes, the Assex and the Mayans using
it for ritual purposes and the story basically is okay.
So Herman Cortes drink chocolate with stick King Maktazuma. Cortes goes,
(02:55):
this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he
brings it back to Europe anyways, and in Europe they
mix it with sugar and also with honey, but mostly
with sugar, and it becomes, you know, it becomes very
very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is
like the eighteen forty so like like takes some about
like three hundred years to figure out how to make
(03:17):
cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, you can
It's not it ceases to be bitter like it in
the in the way that it sort of is naturally.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
You can you can process it with like like like
basic solutions, which which neutralizes some of the acidic and
bitter bitter tastes, which is why you should always buy
a Dutch process cocoa powder, which is unfortunately hard to
find these days. But it is, it is, it is,
it is the shit.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, so that's let's that's actually yeah, so the that's
that's Dutch cocoa. And then twenty years later someone figures
out how to make them into a chocolate bar, and
you know, sort of a law, you have chocolate. Now.
The conventional histories are missing something very, very imp which
is something that defined has defined the production of chocolate
since Europeans got a hold of it and continues to
(04:07):
define it today. And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes, yeah,
And you know this is slavery is a very sort
of important part of the history of chocolate because slavery
is what transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a
bunch of different indigenous societies for several thousand years, into
modern chocolate. And this is this is a point that
(04:29):
I want to make because most most histories of chocolate tend,
you know, when they're trying to find the origin of
modern chocolate, they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I
think they're wrong. I think they're very wrong. I think
the distinct European innovation of chocolate is to add sugar
to it. Yes, and this raises the very bleak question
(04:49):
where does sugar come from? And the answer, of course
is slavery. Sugar is one of the primary crops of
slave economies in both the colonies and the West Indies.
It is one of the key elements of the so
called triangle trade where you know, you may have you
probably have learned this in school, but you know, for people,
for people who've been out of school for a long time.
So the triangle trade is Europe. Since manufacturer goes to Africa.
(05:12):
It trades that fruit enslaved people and slave people taken
from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America, sometimes
to the colonies in the West Indies. Uh. And then
they take you know, the products of slavery from plantations
back to Europe. And that's you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum,
and critically sugar back to Europe. Actually, wait, did did
(05:35):
they Did they teach you the triangle trade?
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah? Yes, I mean I I I did learn. My
Christian Homescholling curriculum wasn't the best, but we did, we did.
We did cover some basic things.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
It's interesting because the triangle trade as a model, like
isn't that old, even though even though like this is
the way that we all understand, like Tyler sort of
colonial trade work, it's a kind of recent thing. Yeah.
So sugar. Sugar is a very very key part of
this entire thing. And there's a very very famous this
sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is Sydney W.
(06:12):
Mintz's Sweetness and Power, which is a fundamental tax and
a lot of sort of uh a lot of the
sort of fields around the study of slavery. And one
of his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is
fueled by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant
that you know, they're putting it in tea, which another stimulant.
They're putting it in whatever they drink, and this is
(06:32):
a thing that allows them to keep working for longer
than they otherwise would have been able to.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, and this also was the origin of Britain's probably
largest cultural trait, bad teeth.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah. And you know, so so this is this is
this is a many aspects of British culture I've are
descended from from slavery and you know, but the the
other the other important thing for our stories that sugar
is what makes chocolate sort of palatable to Europeans. And
and this isn't a sort of interesting thing that Europeans do.
(07:11):
You know they do this with tobacco too. You haven't
you have something that you're only supposed to use in
fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right, And the Europeans
are like, okay, but what if we purified the shit
out of it and they just ate it literally every day?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah? Have you ever tried like unsweetened on like chocolate liquor?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Fucking sucks? I hate it. It's not good.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
You can certainly nibble, it can be a fun novelty
to nibble, but you certainly wouldn't want to eat like
a whole bar of it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, it's it's some real hope boy. Yeah. So, like,
I mean, it makes sense that they added sugar to it.
But the consequence of this is that we can ask
we can finally ask the question right now now, now
that it's been transformed by sugar into this object a
sort of popular consumption, we can ask the question what
is chocolate? And the answer is that chocolate is colonialism
(08:01):
plus slavery. It is a fusion of coca, which is
an indigenous ritual drink sees is a part of the
wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar a
slave crop that drove the colonial prontation economy. And you know,
you might say me, you know you're being harsh here, right,
even if we accept your argument about chocolate and the
sixteen hundred, surely, surely that's not sure. Now, wasn't wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Wasn't slavery abolished in the eighteen hundreds, And now I assume,
I assume Nestle's barving practices are totally above fort see.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
And this is I think the interesting part of the
story is gare like our readers is assuming a thing
I'm about to launch into here is the Mars Nestley
Child slavery lawsuit. And we will because that is a
critical elements of slavery and chocolate production. But there is
also still slavery and sugar production capitalism. And not only
(08:55):
is there slavery and sugar production, there is slavery in
sugar production in the exact same place there were slavery
in sugar production five hundred years ago. And this is
one of the sort of stunning things about you know,
the miss of capitalism, right, which is that, Okay, capitalism
has had four hundred you know, I'm gonna give them
a bit of credit and be like, Okay, I don't know,
(09:18):
like I'm gonna I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit
of credit and give it only was being responsible for
four hundred years of this and not five hundred years
of this because you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether
the capitalist transition is in the fifteen hundred and sixty hundreds,
but you know, they have had four hundred years to
solve the problem of slavery on Hispaniola. Has it done that? No,
(09:39):
it is there is still slavery on the island of
Fifthpaniola four hundred years later. We're going to be discussing
in a second. Still the best possible thing here is
that maybe and this is it is arguable, maybe last
year they're stopped being slaves there. Now I don't even
(10:02):
think that. I don't think that's true. And we're going
to get into that, but you know, before before we
sort of launch into you know what, like whether or
not there are so slaves on Tecker replantations, in the
Dominican Republic. If you have had four hundred years to
solve a problem and you have not solved it, you
are never going to solve it.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Hey, hey, let's not let's not visionhole ourselves here. There's
a lot of things that have been around for four
hundred years that ought not to be.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
That's true. But if you are an economic system and
your economic system has been you are supposed to have
you are supposed to have dealt with this at least
two hundred years ago. But you know, we've arrived here,
and this is something we've talked about before in the
show at least a bit. We've arrived here at one
of the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and
(10:53):
radical accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both
sets of accounts as their starting point the fact that
capitalism is based on free labor, that it's free people
who enter into contracts to sell you their labor, and
that forced labor is this sort of like hauled over
from older economic systems.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
No.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
I actually just saw a thing today on the dying
Remains of Twitter about how capitalism is the only economic
system that's not based on exploitation of violence.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
It's based on free trade between markets. It's like people
really believe this shit. It's like I don't know, Like
I don't know. So at some point I'm going to
do an episode about really good.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Book whose name I'm forgetting right now because I didn't
look this up beforehand. But there's a really good book
on the sort of dueling forced labor systems driving the
tea economy in the late eighteen hundred, so that there's
there's one forced labor system in China and a different
forced labor system in India that are both warring in
each other to control the tea market.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It is certainly interesting how much tea has impacted like geopolitics.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Oh yeah, yeah, we'll do an episode on that one day. Yeah,
tea's not.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That great, guys. I'm sorry, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Not ta rips. I would not we just don't have
good tea here.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
I would not do as much killing as people have done.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
It's not worth killing anyone over the number of people
who've been killed over it is like early.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Gray is fine on like a rainy afternoon, but come on.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, it's not. It's not worth like conquering continents for huh.
But okay, so well, back back back to this sort
of main plot that is not tea, that is in
fact chocolate. So one of the things that we can
learn that we learn from this is that, you know,
forced labor is not just a holdover. It's been a
It's been a central part of capitalism for as long
as capitalism has existed, and given its current track record,
(12:42):
it will be a part of capitalism for as long
as it exists. And you know, so, there's always been
a racial component to this, right And this is like
trivially obvious, right, Like, there's a racial component of slavery, Like,
holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know,
we can we can expand this a little bit and
it gets you to a some sort of interesting things,
(13:03):
which is that race is one of you know, so
like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor,
but race is what mediates your access to wage labor
in the first place. So, you know, white, like if
you're an American, right like, white Americans have basically always
been able to get access to to wage labor, you know,
And as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not
(13:25):
as bad as the other things you can get forced
into you know. But yeah, so like if you're black,
like you know, you get as successive forms of slavery.
If you're indigenous, they tried to enslave you and then
either sort of kept doing it or gave up and
just killed did the genocide Asian people like who came
to this continents and also sort of the West Indies
(13:46):
largely get debt pion engine and entered service to you
and you can you can sort of work this out
so on and so forth. There's there's different like modes
of stuff that are the normal sort of like what
you by default have access to if you are ex race, right, Yeah,
And obviously this this sort of racial access to wage
labor is spread across the world. You know, your your
access to wage labor is dependent on sort of your
(14:07):
subject position as colonizer colonize as well as you know,
your sort of global and also you're like local racial
hierarchies because oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up.
But the upshot of this is that many of the
descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today
on sugar plantations than making republic. And so we're gonna
(14:31):
we're gonna tell that story. But first word, oh god,
do you know what doesn't know? I cannot guarantee that
our products and services are slave free like I wish
I could.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
But well, do you know what is also here for
a spooky time this Halloween. That's right, these products and services.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Okay, we are back.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
I'm drinking my not mocha coffee, drinking my regular unsweetened coffee.
Is therefore totally fine.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Yeah, I'm everything. Nothing bad, nothing bad has ever happened
in the history of coffee.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
No, I'm here, no tea, no chocolate. I'm safe. I'm good.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Anyway. So unfortunately, the people who are not safe is
uh a Haitians in the Jamaican Republic. So we are
not going to do an entire history of slavery in
the Jamaican Republic because.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Because this is a chocolate episode, and yeah, we have
so much time.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, you know, for many reasons. But one of the
things that happened in in So we're gonna we're gonna
look at sort of the like the modern history of this,
and by modern, I'm starting it in I'm starting it
in the eighties because I have to pick up place now.
One of the things that happens in the nineteen eighties
is that the Dominican Army effectively so goes into Haiti
(16:09):
or just recruitation people who are in the Dominican Republic
and are like, hey, you're gonna okay, we have like
jobs for you, like come like do this work. And
so a bunch of people get in like these like
army vans and then they get there and they get
worshed out of the van. A bunch of guys point
guns at them and go, you're gonna work for free
or we're gonna or like or we're gonna kill you.
So this is really bad. And this is this is
(16:32):
how a lot of like through the eighties and kind
of early nineties, this is how a lot of sugar
production worked in the Dominican Republic. And you know, it's
it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot
of sugar, and it produces a lot of sugar that
specifically the US uses. Now, this is like state run
slavery right on, sort of like state run plantations. So
(16:53):
then we had neoliberalism and so the state run plantations
get privatized. However, come they still run on slave labor.
So there's a very good Mother Jones report about this.
I'm gonna read some of it here. Kakata is one
of about one hundred, according to a local missionaries estimate,
(17:15):
isolated camp scattered around Central roman. Central Romana is a
giant sugar plantation. Central Romana's one hundred and sixty thousand
acres of sugar cane attract almost as big as New
York City. Most of the workers and their families live
in these battaiyas, rising in the morning to work the
cane and the punishing heats, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying
the stalks. Nearly all are men of Haitian descent. Some
(17:38):
were traffic back in the day of the journalist is
doing this was the guy who basically uncovered a bunch
of the original armies like the military slavery program in
the nineties, and so he went back like a couple
of years ago. So he's talking himself of Some of
the people were traffic back touring the military slavery program.
Others were born and lived stateless, and others came from
(17:59):
hating Moore recently paying smugglers to sneak them across the
border for years, the government has resisted providing legal status
to people of Haitian heritage in the country, even though
born there and estimated two hundred thousand people who for
generations have been to mean by race and class are stateless.
For the men in the camps, Sentra Romana is the state.
(18:21):
Their villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict.
Centraro Romana owns the land or the Haitians work the
railcars where they wigh and load the can and stocks,
and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from
the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. So
things going great here and the conditions you know, okay,
(18:43):
so the sort of the capitalist reforms and ioliberalism has
brought to this system are the number of child slaves
has decreased dramatically, because that was a big thing when
the first reporting, when everyone was like, holy shit, there's
a bunch of child slaves. This is a terrible Yeah,
so we have less child slaves, right, and you know,
(19:05):
so instead of the child slaves, right, it's now mostly adults.
But the conditions here are still effectively slavery. Even even
after this sort of child slavery stuff like is driven under.
On a good day, these workers make three dollars a
day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now,
(19:27):
there are a lot of reasons for this. One of
the big ones is that most of the workers there
are most like basically all like you might find a
worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're caught
in these debt traps by Central Romana, who and these
are like classic company but they're not. They're worse than like,
you know, the classic American company town because at least
(19:47):
an American company town, you can go to another town
that is not controlled by the company, whereas these people
like cannot, and so they're caught in these debt traps
by Central Romana, which is the company that owns these plantations.
And because they're so in debt, they're constantly forced to
work for the company in order to pay off their debt.
But you know, they never actually make enough money to
(20:08):
pay the debt off, and so they have to take
on more debt to survive until you know, and largely
what happens is these people work there in debt until
they die. This is classic debt Pia nine where it
sort of debt transforms people into the effective property of
the debt holder, who exacerbate the debt by denying them
the ability to live without taking on more debt. A
very common way this happens is with medical debt, which
(20:28):
is something you know, I think we're familiar with to
some extent here, but is egregiously worse. And the other
thing that I was realizing about this is that this
is actually really eerily similar to the way that Cortez
and the Conquistadores and slaved indigenous people during the genocide.
They would do the same thing of like, well, okay,
(20:49):
now you're in debt to me, and because you can't
pay the debt, you have five hundred percent interest per week,
and so you know, that just accumulates, and now you
work for me for the rest of your lives. And
this is you know, this, this is one of the
one of the sort of ways in which this the
long shadow of Spanish imperialism like looms over the Dominican Republic,
even in what has really been about two hundred years
(21:11):
of the age of the American Empire. You know, and
as you know, obviously like as much of an effect
as the Spanish empire has had here and oh god,
it's not good today. It is the American empire that
lines the pockets of the slavers of the Dominican Republic.
So such a Romana is owned by this this family
(21:33):
called the Funjewel family, who are these Cuban expats who
run this like enormous resort in shit where they live
in Florida and are handed. This is really fun. One
hundred and fifty million dollars for the American state every
year in the form of price supports for sugar. So like,
(21:54):
you're an American, right, Like obviously your tax money very
obviously goes to support slavery because we have prisons, and
so your taxes are paying to enslaved people, but your
taxes are also paying for slavery and other countries. It's incredible,
really really great stuff from the American political system here.
(22:15):
And you know, and the way this has been maintained
is through like two I think in the last twenty years.
Mother Jones reported they've they've spent the sugar lobbyist spent
two hundred and twenty million dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying,
and it works really well. They've been able to influence
the system for a very very long time. The other
funny thing about the Fundtural family is that they've created
(22:36):
the perfect political trap, which is so one of one
of the brothers is like a Trump guy and the
other person is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like
incredibly a mesh in both of the circles. So it's great.
Things are going very good. So after so the Mother
Jones investigation was like in the last I think it
(22:56):
was like last year the year before, and when the
Mother Jones investigation about the fact that like all of
this shit was still happening came out, uh, there was
a there was a giant uproar about it. And a
couple of things happened. One is that so the village
of the journalists had visited, uh CenTra Romana, Like they
(23:17):
didn't even bulldoze the villages. They blew everyone's houses down
with like sledgehammers and forcibly move them to like other
villages and separated people's families. So that's that's great. And
then so in late twenty twenty two, under under pressure
from this reporting, the US government like banned imports from
that specific company. And okay, it's unclear what is going
(23:42):
to happen with it, if you know, if if they're
gonna get unbanned eventually, uh, if it's gonna stick, if
they're just gonna like, I don't know, like transfer the
assets to another company or something and use that instead.
As so, as of right now, this specific set of
plantations is not able to export sugar to the US.
(24:06):
So this is this is as much of a victory
over slavery as we're going to get in this episode.
And this victory is that it's only gonna get work.
This is this is the peak of anti slavery stuff
we're gonna see here. Yeah, so enjoy it while you can.
(24:26):
And do you know what else you should enjoy?
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Oh these products and services that support this podcast. That's good. Yes,
this is this is the real peak of the episode, folks.
All right, I am rejuvenated by the advertising industrial complex.
(24:53):
I feel ready to hear other tales of great progress.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Woo Okay, So now we're now we're going to turn
to the type of slavery that everyone, I think expected
this episode to mostly be about, which is the fact
that cocoa bean production is also largely produced by slave labor.
So Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a bit from
a report by the Food Empowerment Projects, which has done
(25:19):
some very good work on most but like specifically slavery
in West Africa. They're also one of the only media
people I've ever seen talk about the fact that a
lot of this stuff, it's not exactly the same, but
a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also seems
to be happening on plantations in Brazil, but there's effectively
no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I don't know.
(25:40):
So like, eventually, one day, I guess, like the fact
that other places other than West Africa have slavery will
hit the anglophone media class or whatever. But until then,
I'm going to read this section. In West Africa, coco
is a commodity crop grown primarily for x Coco is
(26:01):
the Ivory Coast primary export. It makes up about half
the country's agricultural export and volume. Most coco farmers earn
less than one dollar a day and income below the
extreme poverty line. As a result, they often resort to
the use of child labor to keep their prices competitive.
In many cases, yeah, yeah, this is one of the
(26:23):
things that happens when you're reading about child slavery stuff
is even people who like are trying to you know,
draw attention to how bad this is. You get stuff
like that that's like Jesus Christ. Yeah, so you know
they're making sub one dollar a day, they're using child labor.
In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization
(26:44):
calls quote the worst form of child labor. These are
defined as practices quote likely to harm the health, safety,
or morals of children. Approximately two point one million children
in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most
of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of
child labor. Which is also really good that like we've we've, we've,
(27:08):
capitalism has finally reached the you know, the apex of
its its control of the commanding heights of the world economy,
which means that we're talking about we're trying to make
tear lists of how bad child labor is.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Well, yeah, I mean a whole bunch of child labor
laws just got like rolled back across many states here. Yeah,
it's a real great country. So it's very exciting. The
children are for the mind.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah, it's it's it's it's great, you know. So, so
obviously a lot of the child slavery on cocoa farms
are from sort of like larger I mean, I guess
they are corporate, but from sort of like larger plantations,
but also less. You think that it's better on family farms,
No family farms, I mean, I guess it is technically
(27:54):
better than like being kidnapped and enslaved, is merely doing
child labor on your family, like.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Just being born into these pretty pretty uh not great
labor practices that you really have no say it or
any agency whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, yeah, And like you know, this is one of
these things where like the economic conditions are so bad
that people are people are facing impossible choices, and I
think we can say that they make the wrong choice,
which is a lot of Okay, So, like there are
there were sort of different ways that children get trafficked
into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by
(28:36):
their own families who do not have enough resources to
take care of them, and are like, okay, we'll basically
sell these people so they can go do this job.
And these families don't know that, like their child is
about to be enslaved, right, they're just like, Okay, well
they're going to go off and do work. But the
other way that this happens is that kids from like
villages in other countries. But there's a lot of focus
(28:58):
on Mali as one of the places this happens for him.
But yeah, so there's a lot of these effects what
are effectively raids into into Molly from the Ivory Coast
to like steal children. And it's also happens to Bikina Fosso,
you know, and this gets to the point where, you know,
I'm gonna read a quote from of these from from
this report again. In one village of Bikina Fosso, almost
(29:22):
every mother in the village has had a child trafficked
onto cocaine farms. Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers.
So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every
American right winger, except it's you know, this is just
how chocolate is made.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, this is you know, all of all of the
Sound of Freedom guys, with all of you know, the
whole uproar around that movie earlier this year, versus all
of them, yeah, enjoying their little Eminem said, KitKat said, Hey,
I like the occasion kid cats too. This is this
(30:02):
is a massive profle.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I I don't know, I really love chocolate. I have
not eaten any chocolate since I started researching this, and
I like and it's and it's but it sucks because
it's like you can't you can't. And we're gonna get
into board of this in a second, but like you
can't like ethically consume your way out of this, right,
like because the conditions.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
But free trade cocoa exists.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Oh boy, Yeah, we're gonna get into that. But yeah,
like there's there's no there's no actual systemic like there's
no way that you can, like you can't change this
stuff with your individual consumption habits. And you know that's
something that's just really fucking bleak about this because these
conditions are, I mean, as bad as you can possibly imagine.
(30:49):
But the Food and Powerment Project describes like children as
young as five are forced to work up to fourteen
hours a day, like chopping down cocoa pods and then
chopping them open with machetes. And sometimes these people get
Sometimes these kids are using chainsaws to like clear wood,
they clear down like forests. Yeah, and you know, okay,
so this goes exactly how you expected to go, which
(31:10):
is a bunch of these kids just have a bunch
of fucking scars from when they've been slashed by machetes
because again you're handing the machetes to children, some of
whom are as young as five. And then they have
to carry one hundred pound bags of cocoa beans through
the jungle. And this is the thing that's also happening
in the Tamaican Republic, and this happens a lot in
a lot of places, is that they just get you know,
(31:31):
when when companies want to spray like they're fars with pesticides, right,
they don't even bother even like clearing people out, which
might you know, help like a tiny bit to make
them not like die from fucking poison. But no, these
fucking dipshits just like spray them with toxic chemicals as
they just like spray them with pesticides like a lot
(31:53):
of whom are christinogiens a lot of And this is
happening in the Dominican the surcane fields in the Dominican
Republic too, and a lot of those people just fucking
died because you know, they were stayed with these chemicals.
There was a really terrible story of a guy who
was trying to sue Central Romana and just fucking died
from the like he wasn't able to get a pay
(32:13):
off for a lawsuit because he died in twenty twenty
before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great
quote from the Food Empowerment Project. The farm owners using
child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food available,
such as corn paste or the cassava and bananas that
grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases, the children
sleep on wooden planks and small windless buildings without access
(32:35):
to clean water, sanitary bathrooms. And you know, another key
part of this, right is like, okay, so the conditions
are obviously unbearably bad, but you know, a key part
of this, like any system of slavery, is the physical
violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly and often
beaten and abused and tortured in ways that are very
(32:58):
reminiscent of sort of like older epik of slavery if
they try to escape. Now, this is the companies care
about this to the extent that is bad. Pr Yes,
and the charcot companies repeated, like the charcoal companies. Okay,
they they signed a thing in the year two thousand
where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst
(33:20):
forms of child slavery by two thousand and five.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah, like this is this has been a known issue
for like over two decades.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Now, Garrison, Yes, what year is it right now?
Speaker 2 (33:32):
The year of our Lord to us in twenty three.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, they have been they have been promising to end
child slavery in the Originally they're supposed to be end
child flavery and then and then they scaled it down
to the worst forms the worst. But they have been
promising you could do this for longer than you have
been alive, yes, correct, which is terrifying.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
And and as we'll get into later, right, the number
of child slaves is higher than it was when they
started doing these child slave reduction efforts, so quote unquote
reduction efforts which are just sort of pr bullshit. So
industry lobbying groups are also very very powerful, and this
(34:20):
is part of how this stuff persists. So the University
of Chicago has a center called Norak, which is like
a public Research Center. I don't know. I went to
that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers
and ne or should you, because it turns out there
was so okay. So they released this report on how
bad child slavery is, right, but there was a leak
(34:42):
of the original version of the report that was supposed
to come out, and the original version of the report
has the number of child slaves at like two point
two million. Now, when the report actually comes out with
no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers for
child slavery that are from before COVID nineteen, the Noak
report was like, ah, there's only like one point six
(35:03):
million child slaves. So six hundred thousand child slaves just
sort of vanished in an editorial process after they got
they came under fire from uh, the they came under
fire from the chocolate lobby.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah yeah, let's uh, let's route that down. Makes it
makes it easier to palace.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
And the other thing that it hides is that there's
been a ten to fifteen percent increase in the number
of child slaves working in like in the coat in
Cocoa since COVID started. Because COVID has been a giant
sort of you know, the economic damage that COVID caused
forced a bunch of people into into, you know, increasingly
(35:43):
desperate things. And you know, Okay, so we tease this
a little bit, and you might be thinking, well, I
can eat fair trade chocolate, right, I can pay ten
dollars for a chocolate bars as a fair trade on it,
and it will and that will make sure that I'm
only eating chocolate produced by free labor. Nope, the certifications
for the chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate.
(36:07):
The follow was an excerpt from a study conducted by
the Corporate Accountability Lab on the failure of initiatives in
the chocolate industry like certifications quote. In order to understand
the gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we
brought certified chocolate bars to villages where some or all
of the farmers were certified. We held up the bar
(36:28):
with the label and explained to the farmers what consumers
expected out of the label, primarily that farmers were paired
a fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices
like child labor and deforestation were not present. We also
explained the difference in retail price between fair trade and
uncertified chocolate. The overwhelming response from farmers to this information
(36:49):
was shock and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn
shirt in front of him and asked if it looked
like he earned a decent living. A woman in one
village said, you can hardly afford to send to your
children to school, so how could anyone think she earned
a fair price? Are farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences
(37:09):
between certified and uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education,
access to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So, yeah,
all the people who are telling you they're doing some
fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places
they're getting it from are as fucked as her. She's yeah,
(37:31):
so this is bad. Now. You might also think, Okay,
we can get out of this by buying from coco cooperatives.
Except except, and this is a wonderful thing that capitalism
is brought on the world. Most coco collectives aren't actually
like workers collect like aren't actually co ops.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
They're just all people's republic of chocolate farmers. I'm sure
they're all a little red book.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
This is something actually, this is something that China actually pioneered,
because there's there's a bunch of firms in China that
are also technical. I talked about this in my episode
of Bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk
company that poisoned three hundred thousand babies, and that company
was technically a co op, but like it was a
co op in the sense that there was a small
group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares,
(38:20):
and then they just hired every source everything out to
independent contractors, so it functioned like a normal company. Yeah,
and this is the thing. A lot this the cocoa
trade stuff is actually worse because most of these things
that are called co ops aren't even co ops at all.
They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake
co ops. And there they are like a very very
small number of of these coco farms that are actually
workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which one
(38:43):
is which unless you spend a bunch of time like
actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's no
sort of like ethically way out of this, right, You're
just kind of you're you know, like you can't. You
can't eat your way out of this problem. And of
course everything across the board, all the these conditions have
(39:04):
gotten worse since the pandemic. So you know it's it's
not only is capitalism not making things better every like,
things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I
promised you the lawsuits. We're gonna talk a bit about
the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There
were eight people from Mali who were enslaved by cocoa
(39:26):
plantations after being traffic from Mali sued Nestley, Cargill, Berry, Caliba,
I don't know, some French shit mars Alam, Hershey's and
Modeleas to try to get conversations from the companies by
virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made
by their child slave labor.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Now there's also a separate lawsuit against slightly different companies,
so a lot of the same company is slightly different
that's using a different set of legal arguments. Both of
the lawsuits have been thrown out, and I want to
take a second to look at the reasoning here, both
of which is are just amazing. So I think the
most famous one is the Supreme courts eight to one
decision that said, well, so, like, all this stuff happens,
(40:07):
but it happened outside the US, so you can't sue
companies for it here, which is an amazing piece of logic,
which is just like, oh yeah, no, actually, like corporations,
like American corporations could just go everywhere else and do crimes.
And this is and the American legal system is specifically
written in such a way that like, if an American
corporation enslaves you in like the Ivory Coast, there's nothing
(40:32):
you can do about it in the US. And then
a judgment do you see throughout the other case because
you know, their argument was, well, you can't prove that
the companies knew you were being enslaved on those farms.
There's no quote traceable connection between the people who enslaved
you in the company, so there's nothing we can do.
And the reason both these arguments work is the reason
(40:54):
for the structure of the chocolate market, right, the reason
cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast and all so Brazil
can get away with this, you know, well, the reason
that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast or Brazil
or other places The reason they're happening there and not
in the US is because these are places where you
can get away with that level of exploitation in corporate
violence that you know in the US would be a
(41:16):
lot more difficult, and this shields them from legal liability. Furthermore,
instead of just you know, jumping, instead of just running
the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies could easily do, right,
this is a very very large trade. They could just
sort of like they could invertially vertically and not even
vertical integrate, they could just actually make chocolate, like they
could just run the process, and they they very specifically
(41:39):
choose not to do it. And the reason they choose
not to do it, this isn't one hundred billion dollar industry, right,
but instead they what they choose to do is to
just buy cocoa from the chocolate market where all these
sort of nebulous producers sell, which allows the chocolate companies
to go, oh, well, these people don't work for us.
We just buy chocolate from the market. How are we
supposed to know which these plantations use slave labor?
Speaker 2 (42:03):
So it puts like a one degree of separation.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Yeah, well it's actually two degrees it's an additional degree
of separation from the way something like Walmart works. Right,
where Walmart has a bunch of independent contractors, this isn't
even contractors. They're just buying finished products from things they're
like they're completely unaffiliated with. And this gives them, like,
it gives them like two degrees of legal separation, because
(42:26):
it's not just that their contractors are doing something that
they didn't know about, it's that they're just buying it, right,
And this fucking sucks. And you know, since laws exist
to protect the ruling class, judges and courts can just
wave their hands and go, well, these companies definitely enslaved you,
(42:46):
but we have no choice but to let them off
completely scot free. So sorry about that. And I want
to end today with something that has been running through
my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which
is that the worst onisie must pay for their times.
The state has failed, the court has failed, the NGOs
have failed, and if anything is ever going to fucking
(43:07):
happen that forces these companies to be in any way,
there there is to be like a single iota of
justice for the fact that all of these companies have
been fucking gorging themselves on the profits of slave labor.
At all, we are going to do it or no
one is, So congratulations you. The American worker is unfortunately
(43:29):
incumbent on you to deal with these fucking corporations that
have been destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky
week everyone.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yes, this is very scary. Yeah, well thank you for
that lovely, uh depressing presentation. Uh via. I mean, I
guess is there is there is there a sort of
takeaway besides, there's no ethical conception to under capitalism.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
I mean, like, I mean, capitalism will never abolish slavery,
and I don't think one.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
I know, there is one US state where they grow chocolate,
which is Hawaii, which has its own problems of colonization.
So even if you try to buy from a place
that is you know, arguably has less chocolate slavery, it's
generally better produced, it still is you're still implicating yourself
in all of the problems relating to like the independence
(44:28):
of that island and the US's colonization. So it's it's
it's we're really just really just kind of trapped on
all sides. Here is what it feels like. I mean,
this is this Halloween chocolate problem.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Yeah, I mean, and I think I think the way
to think about this, right is that this this is
an actual systemic issue, right, This is a systemic thing
capitalism has been doing for about four hundred years, like CeNSE,
its entire existence, and if you want to, if you
want to end it, we have to. You have to. Actually,
it's not it's not even enough to destroy these companies,
(45:04):
right because even if you brought down every single one
of these chocole companies, right, there would just be another
round of chocolate companies. It will be doing exactly the
same ship. So you have to you have to destroy
the system of property by which these things are allowed
to exist. And at that point maybe you can start
on being able to eat food that isn't produced by
slave labor.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
It turns out Willi Wogka was the villain the whole time.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
You know. I was trying to think about the amount
of slave labor that we see from him versus the
amount of slave Wonka. It's a it's I think Wonka
is using more slave labor, but not by as much
as it should be.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
I don't know, I don't know. It's it's it's hard
to say, I I think it's pretty clear that Walka's
use of slave labor is just an accurate representation of
the real life industry.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yes, so yeah, go go, go enjoy your weekend, and then.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
You enjoy that new fucking twig Walka movie that looks
I have to say dog shit.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Oh yeah, bad herod.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Bad idea anyone's had since capitalism twin Kwonka. I'm sorry
it doesn't slap I here out of ten anyway, Well, uh,
tune in in the next few days for two more
Spooky Week episodes for you. We only got three this
week because there's a lot of other news happening, but yeah,
we at least have two other Spooky Week episodes that
(46:29):
I am about to finish working on, so stay tuned
for that. Good Bye.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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