Originally Posted by
Matthias
Her books are badly written drivel. You don't have to read them to get a grasp of her ideas. It would be a waste of summer reading time IMHO.
Well this would heavily depend on the type of slavery in the society as well, but I'll refer generally to slavery in the US and new world in general.
Impact on how societies organize themselves: Causes societies to organize themselves based on superficial things a person cannot control, like race and class. You are born into a certain class (slave, poor free person, aristocracy) and you generally stay there because laws reinforce these classes. These statuses become much more important in a slave society and form the basis for whatever political stability there is. This isn't much of a meritocracy.
Political sphere: The largest slave owners (and wealthiest and most powerful) will dominate politics. This means pursuing policies and laws that keep in place the slave system. Something many politicians did was play off classes against each other, so poor whites would be set against black slaves as to protect the slave aristocracy. Giving poor whites certain legal privileges over slaves and also creating laws that keep these classes distinct (no race-mixing) give some classes more social status than others. Also, slaves will be treated as not really human in many instances, as they were in the US, in order to preserve this class distinction. Race was a convenient invention for the aristocracy to use to preserve these economic classes, so that race/class became interchangeable in many instances. Discourages sufferage, for slaves obviously, but also for free laborers who are not part of the wealthy elite and therefore might not share their interests.
Economic sphere: Probably the most important, since this is what motivates even having the institution of slavery in the first place. As long as slavery is insanely profitable, and it was in the US when it came to large scale plantations of cash crops, then there is a huge incentive for the wealthiest and most politically connected/powerful to keep the institution in place. Slavery keeps other free laborers (like poor whites in the US) poor because they are essentially competing with slaves in the labor market, which makes it impossible to organize labor or improve working conditions in many ways. Free laborers will only have access to markets where slavery is unprofitable. This also means having a very large poor class and a small but incredibly wealthy slave-owning aristocracy.
Social sphere: Some of these overlap obviously. As I said, tends to discourage a meritocracy since your place in society is determined by your class status (or race). For slaves themselves, it means being uneducated to keep slaves in their place, having no family stability due to family members being sold off at any time, and losing many cultural practices as well. Encourages a class system of the super wealthy at the top, with poor free laborers in the middle being played off against slaves at the bottom. Encourages the creation of social markers like "race" that can easily define who is slave and who is not, and encourages religion to excuse the institution of slavery and justify it. It means having a society that lives in constant fear and paranoia in many ways, from the slaves themselves who fear their masters, from the free laborers who fear losing whatever social status they may have that keeps them above slaves, from the slave owners who constantly fear a slave uprising, and from free laborers and slave owners that fear things like race-mixing will destroy their social inventions, like race. Social stability is, therefore, quite fragile. If there is a war, then there is a large portion of the slave society which will be a potential liability to the government.
Impact on the well-being of the worker class and society overall: The "worker class", as mentioned above, will be competing with slaves, which is bad for them, and they will be poorer as a result. Also, the worker class becomes the "foot soldiers", mere tools, of the wealthy slave owning aristocracy. They do the dirty work in other words; fight the wars, keep the slaves in their place, at the behest of the slave aristocracy. Impact on society overall? Well it leads to a very fragile social system that can fall apart quite easily and often does. Fear and paranoia pervades. There isn't a meritocracy. You will not have a dynamic society (economically or otherwise) in other words, one that constantly is innovating and willing to try new ideas. Class/race distinctions trump all, even good policy/innovation. The priority is maintaining social stability, which is tough to do in all circumstances where such a large portion of the population is forced against their will to do some very horrible things. Causes society to invent dehumanizing markers like "race" and create mythologies that allow slave owners or free laborers that carry out their orders to feel they are doing right in the world and God is on their side. Basically, allows people to do some very dehumanizing things and gives them large social and material rewards for doing so.