HE INTERNET is being used to promote a modern day online slave market, where women and children are being sold into domestic servitude. This is an extremely lucrative online business, facilitated by Google, Apple and Facebook who allow the adverts to be shown, the UN special rapporteur has alleged.
‘What they are doing is promoting an online slave market,’ alleged Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery.
‘If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable,’ she added. The online human trafficking business is international.
Nine out of 10 Kuwaiti homes have a ‘domestic worker’. They come from some of the poorest parts of the world to the Gulf, aiming to make enough money to support their family at home.
Urmila Bhoola said: ‘This is the quintessential example of modern slavery. Here we see a child being sold and traded like chattel, like a piece of property.’
In most places in the Gulf, domestic workers are brought into the country by agencies and then officially registered with the government. Potential employers pay the agencies a fee and become the ‘official sponsor of the domestic worker’.
Under what is known as the Kafala system, a domestic worker cannot change or quit her job, nor leave the country without her sponsor’s permission.
One popular app promoting humans for sale is called 4Sale. The 4Sale app allows you to filter by race, with different price brackets clearly on offer, according to category.
‘African worker, clean and smiley,’ said one listing. Another: ‘Nepalese who never dares to ask for a day off.’ This is the true meaning of ‘free market capitalism’. Everything, including humans, is bought or sold to make a profit.
The northern states in the US all abolished slavery by 1804. Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (with the notable exception of India). The French colonies re-abolished it in 1848 and the US abolished slavery in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Capitalism today means a return to the barbaric practices of centuries gone by, using the most modern of technologies, the world wide web.
If there is any need for further proof that this system is rotten ripe for overthrow, then surely we need look no further than humans being trafficked into slavery around the world using the internet, with the big capitalist giants Google, Apple and Facebook allowing the adverts which promote this sickening business. The highest developments of science and technology are being used for the most backward and degrading exploitation of women and children.
This technology must be ripped out of the hands of the millionaires and billionaires and taken under the control of the people. This can only be done through socialist revolution.
Meanwhile, the rest of the capitalist world is locked into wage slavery. In this country, you have warehouse workers on zero-hours contracts and poverty pay, trying to keep up with robots which pack at three times the speed of humans, and collapsing of exhaustion in the process.
Ambulances were called to Amazon warehouses once every two days last year as workers collapsed and suffered broken bones. Eleven of the company’s 21 warehouses in the UK were attended by ambulances 606 times since 2016.
Tim Roache, the general secretary of the GMB trade union, said: ‘Behind the slick exterior lie working practices that owe more to Victorian workhouses than what we would expect of a reputable online retailer.’
All forms of slavery including wage slavery must be abolished and that means abolishing capitalism. It is through the victory of the world socialist revolution that science, technology and all the means of production will be expropriated, seized from the tiny minority who use it to enrich themselves, and put to work under public ownership where it can be used to enrich the whole of society.
Karl Marx called socialism the beginning of the real history of humankind. Everything before it will be considered a barbarous pre-history.
Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
