2.   Because of the disutility of slavery to the slave, he or she can also be expected diligently to seek opportunities to rebel or escape. For this reason, the master or overseer finds it necessary to discourage intelligence and independent thinking in slaves, and frequently seeks to confuse them as to their true interests. (In the ante-bellum South, for example, education of slaves was subject to legal restrictions, and religion was used to encourage them to submit.) A side-effect of the repression of intelligence, of course, is that slaves must be consigned to relatively menial (and therefore less value-productive) tasks.

For both of these reasons, a slave cannot be expected to operate on a normal mental level and therefore typically functions, at best, in a manner more comparable to a machine than a human being.

Subject to these limitations, the master usually obtains some immediate benefit from the slave labor, applied as a means to the master's ends. This benefit is offset, not only by the purchase cost of the slave, but also by the costs of continuing sustenance for the slave and payments to the overseer. In addition, masters incur the risk of harm to themselves or their property in the event of a slave rebellion (another major fear in the ante-bellum South).      Next page

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