“We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity.”
—Bob Avakian, from Up Close and Personal With Bob Avakian: Heart and Soul & Hard-Core For Revolution

 

Part 1: The Story of Vannak Anan Prum

Vannak Anan Prum is from Cambodia. He has written a graphic memoir of the years he spent as a modern-day slave worker: first on a fishing boat for three years, and then on an agricultural plantation in Thailand for another year. He escaped and his memoir (for which he did the drawings) documents the horror of what he had been through.  

Prum's story is not some exceptional “outlier” experience in today's world-capitalist economy. His ordeal is representative of what happens at a horrific link in the supply chains of globalized production and trade: largely unknown to (or not wanting to be known by) consumers in the affluent global North, but essential to the profitable functioning of the imperialist world economy.

Prum was living in extreme poverty, with no money or job, his wife pregnant and needing medical help. So he left his Cambodian village looking for work. He crossed the border into Thailand, finding what he thought (and was led to believe) would be paid work on a fishing boat. Instead, he was lied to and tricked—and became a slave worker.

Once at sea, the boat never went to shore but unloaded its catch onto another boat, so he could not escape. He was paid nothing for backbreaking and extremely dangerous work. He recounts a conversation soon after getting on the boat: “... an older man sat down next to me and asked ‘if I have been sold, what will my children do?’ He didn’t sound angry, but shocked, like a man who had lost his soul. ‘What will they eat,’ he asked, ‘and how will they survive?’ His story was like mine, and we both began to weep.”

Others on the boat were from Laos, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. Prum saw people thrown overboard; he saw a head hacked off by a hatchet; he witnessed devastating injuries. Part of the reason he survived was because of his skill at drawing. He taught himself to do tattoos and became popular among the other fishermen.

Prum recounts: “The greatest threat was the boat itself, snapping cables, cages and containers sliding around on the deck, the ship lurching in a swell. Splinters and broken bones, and men knocked unconscious. Once a man’s foot got tangled in the net as it was being dropped into the sea and he was dragged overboard. Men died this way, their necks broken, dead by the time they were pulled aboard.”

Prum escaped by jumping overboard and risking his life in a long swim to shore. He then went to the police—who sold him into slavery again! Following a second escape, he was sent to prison because he didn’t have legal papers in Thailand. When he finally returned to his village, his wife was furious because she hadn’t heard from him in four years. He drew the pictures (now in the published memoir) to explain and vividly illustrate to her—and to the world—what had been done to him.

Part 2: Fishing Today: Barbaric Conditions for Fishers, Threat to Fish Survival

Seafood is one of the biggest commodities on the planet, a global industry valued at $152 billion in 2017. In some countries, fishing accounts for 40 percent of the total value of the commodities traded.¹ The relentless competition for profits among the capitalists invested in fishing has driven an increasingly intense battle—more powerful fishing equipment including radar, massive nets that scrape the bottom of the ocean, satellite imaging, and much more. And this has forced some fish to the brink of extinction.

The environmental activist group Greenpeace estimates that two-thirds of the large fish in the ocean are now gone, and one-third of the species of fish are in danger.² As the fish have come under threat, the drive to catch what is left has gotten even more intense.

The conditions for the “free laborers” doing the fishing are barbaric. Some 100,000 people every year are estimated to die on fishing boats. The boats can go far out on the open ocean and may not come to shore for years, bringing their catch to a “mother ship,” which then takes it to shore for sale. And fishers, most of them from the poor countries of the global South, face low pay and/or wages promised but never paid, wages stolen to pay off “debts,” and on and on. Here is the basic reality in commercial fishing: powerful boats and high-tech equipment alongside unspeakably cruel working conditions.³

And Many Fishers Are Outright Slaves in Global Supply Chains

The outright slavery you see in the story of Vannak Prum goes on all over the world. People are forced, or lured, onto boats that they cannot leave and are paid nothing for what can be many years of extremely hard labor, even death.⁴

Slave labor, as experienced by Prum, is an integral element of the way capitalism in fishing operates today. The countries at highest risk for slavery in fishing made up 39 percent of the world’s catch in 2018.⁵ And these countries are a big source of fish for the U.S. market.

Just which fish in the market are slave-caught is almost impossible to trace. On the boat Prum was on, “free” labor and slave labor were working side by side. Fish caught by slave boats are thrown into the same storage holds on “mother ships” as fish caught by “free” boats. The supply lines are complex, the fish are sold and resold, and pass through many hands.

And the capitalists who run fishing make no attempt to keep track of slave-caught fish—it is in their interest NOT to know. A major study of the Pacific tuna industry⁶ in 2019 exposed that the tuna fishing fleets were full of “human rights abuses,” including slavery. The report sounded the alarm, even after a number of companies made “commitments” to opposing such slave labor. Yet not a single company voluntarily reported a single instance of slavery in their own supply chain! Major companies with cans of tuna on sale in every supermarket in the U.S.—like Bumble Bee Foods, American Tuna, Wild Planet, and Starkist—were found to have done almost nothing to determine whether their suppliers used slave labor.

The Thai fishing industry is very much ground zero. This is one of the world’s most notorious users of slavery in fishing and in the processing of fish and shrimp.⁷ Thailand is economically dominated by imperialist powers, especially the U.S., but is relatively more prosperous and developed than its neighbors. It draws people desperate for work from nearby countries like Cambodia and Myanmar. Many are tricked and forced into fishing, seafood processing, and various types of farming (fish farming). You see in Prum’s memoir that he was enslaved by a powerful Thai police commander—which is to say that slavery is deeply intertwined in Thai government and politics. In recent years, there have been highly touted government campaigns supposedly to clean up slavery—but this is mostly bullshit public relations, and slavery continues to be widespread.⁸

And the U.S. Fishing Fleet

And as for the U.S., it poses as a global “good guy” in relation to questions like slavery, but that is more bullshit. Apart from benefiting from the kinds of brutal “free” and slave labor described in Prum's memoir, slave boats actually operate in U.S. waters.

In 2016, the Associated Press published a major exposure of slavery in fishing in the Hawaiian fishing fleet: some 140 boats that caught expensive tuna and other fish for the high-end global market. While on these fishing boats based in the U.S., some of the fisher workers are paid like American workers, the AP revealed that feeding into the Hawaiian fleet was a network of agents and fishing companies that brought in migrants from places like the Philippines, confiscated their passports, did not let them leave guarded areas, and in some cases failed to pay them at all or paid them very low wages.⁹ Even though a big stink was raised, later investigation showed that efforts to end this kind of treatment were blocked by major capitalists in fishing, and powerful government officials, and there has been little real change.¹⁰

Part 3: The Expansion of Modern-Day Slave Labor in the World Capitalist Economy

Slavery in fishing is just one part of the slavery that is growing around the world. Outright slavery is widespread not just in fishing, but also in mining, agriculture, and the industrialized sexual degradation of women and children euphemistically called the “sex industry.”¹¹

A major expression of the global savage inequalities of this capitalist-imperialist system is the exploitation of migrants driven from their homes by the dire poverty, civil wars, environmental destruction and other effects of international capitalism. They face desperate conditions as they seek to survive in other countries. And many end up in outright slavery.

It has been estimated that, as of 2022, over 49 million human beings were enslaved. This is more slaves than at the peak of chattel slavery in the 1800s.¹²

Now, today's slave-labor force is a smaller portion of the global labor force as compared to that earlier period. And modern slavery has some different features from the chattel slavery that existed in the U.S. before the Civil War (and also in Latin America at the time) in which the enslaved and their children and their children’s children were the legal property of the slave owner and could be legally bought and sold. Modern slavey involves forced and unpaid labor, and includes things like forced marriage and sexual slavery. BUT modern slavery is widespread. It is growing. And it is one more sign that this is a system that has long passed its expiration date and must be driven from the earth.

Part 4, Conclusion: The Truth That Must Be Faced

The reality is, if you consume fish purchased in the market, you are most likely eating fish that has been caught, or processed, through global supply chains that incorporate slave labor at some level. And this is especially true in the U.S.¹³

Further, the “best” fish—those most profitable for sale on the capitalist market—have been increasingly fished out of the seas. The intense hunt for further profits in fishing in some places is focused on “junk fish”—fish which cannot be sold and are ground into fishmeal. Junk fish are even more likely to be caught by slave labor. An article in the scientific journal Nature explains that millions of tons of this fishmeal, transported all over the world by global capitalism, are then fed to farmed fish, farmed shrimp-prawns, farm animals, and even pets. The article concludes that this fishmeal “eventually end up on consumer plates as farmed salmon, tuna, prawns, or even pork, chicken, eggs or beef.”¹⁴

What This Says About What We Must Do

Step back and think about the picture revealed here: modern-day capitalism-imperialism is expanding outright slavery—and the products of this slavery are on your dinner plate. Those “high on the food chain” in a country like this do not see, or may not want to see, the hand of slavery in their food, or feel the pain of the severed heads and broken necks that Vannak Prum wrote about in his graphic memoir. But that is the reality. Under this system, the people are lashed, driven, murdered, and raped while the oceans are pillaged and despoiled and the planet burns.

If you don’t want to be part of the system that ravages the people and the natural world, then there is only one basic answer: learn about and become part of making the revolution to put an end to this.