Camp inmates are socially superfluous, unlike slaves who had defined value

Evidence

Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolutely tortured and he is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of their fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as property a definite value. The concentration-camp inmate has no price, because he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous, although in times of acute labor shortage, as in Russia and in Germany during the war, he is used for work. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 994

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘absolutely superfluous’ status of inmates connects directly to the race-thinking and statelessness toolkit in this foundation module — superfluity as a condition produced by exclusionary categories. — connects to: Southern convict-leasing camps killed convicts at catastrophic rates — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3468
• DEFINE: Contrasts slavery (price, property value, visibility to society) versus camp inmate (replacement, invisibility, superfluity) to define the camp’s specific social death.