rss feedWage Slavery?
I still have to admit that the whole concept of “wage slavery” escapes my little confused brain.
Wage slavery, as it seems to me, is based on the following understanding:
People working for less compensation then they think would be just. This does not only include the monetary wage but also often the demand for being directly in control of the means of production and even to be paid “the full value of the product”. Often the “control of the means of production” extends to “not being bossed around and treated as property”.
While I do understand all of the above concerns, and sympathize with them (which is one of the reasons I became self-employed), I do not fully understand how to call it “unjust” or even slavery.
Slavery to me means: A person becomes property of another, and this relationship is manifested in the tools of coercion that the owner can legitimately use against the slave: Corporal punishment, incarceration, threat of killing, killing. By these tools of coercion a slave can be forced to remain a slave, he can be kept from walking away.
I might be disconnected from today’s working environment, but while I was employed at a steel company, we were all free to go, cancel our job, any time. No one with a whip was waiting to drive us back into the plant. No death squads were visiting the homes of those that quit. And there was no dungeon where under-performing “slaves” were kept. If you didn’t like your wage, you could petition to the bosses, or even organize a strike. And if that didn’t help, you could quit and look for other employment, or become self-employed. You could walk away anytime, and if you underperformed you might get fired by the “slave-masters”. This, if I may say so, did not look, feel or even smell of slavery. So, I quit, took another job (at a software company), and later even went self-employed.
Wage-slave activists usually step in at this point and say: Yeah, but if you loose your job, you will die of hunger. Since you do not own property and means of production you cannot start your own business. And without work you will starve. So, loosing your job means that you die, which is the same as being forced to work under the threat of being killed.
There are several responses I have to that:
- No one kept me from owning property or procuring means of production. When I decided to leave employment and become my own boss, I drastically reduced my expenses, moved into a 12 sqm shit-hole of an apartment, stopped smoking etc. and started to save as much cash as I could. It took me about two years to have enough money at hand to buy the necessary tools for my job, to train me on some necessary things like book-keeping, and to have enough cash to survive a few months should business be low. It did work out ok, though it was for sure one of the non-so-funny times of my life. But, I created freedom for myself. Something a slave couldn’t do.
- “Loosing your job means to starve”. That statement sounds to me like “people are entitled to life”. I don’t think so. This planet is a pretty cruel place. Only few areas really support comfortable survival of humans. Humans are actually born to die, and they extend their years on this planet by subdue nature by the pure force of their work, intellect and will. We carbon units are entitled to nothing. We must wrestle from nature the necessities of survival, cradle to grave. So, why should I then be entitled to force others to sustain my life in a way I prefer? The same is true for your “fully owned” farm where you are owner, boss and worker. If the farm doesn’t produce as much as you like, you can either stick with it and reduce your wishes, increase production by working harder and more intelligent, or to leave the farm and starve to death. In most western countries nothing but myself can keep me from surviving on my own. Yes, there are other, tougher places on the planet were farmers are driven from their plot and such. But I don’t see many of those people complaining in this forum (cause they really have to fight for their survival all day, no time to type some messages to cozy westerners).
Based on my thoughts so far I petition anyone using the word “wage slavery” to find a new term. Why? Because I see it as an affront against anyone who was ever a “real slave”. Wage slaves are not even close to what slavery really means, far from it. Yes, maybe the situation of “wage slaves” is not ideal, which is why I support lots of worker activism, walkouts, even unions. It is why I support good property rights so that individuals can remain on their plot of land to do farming (or whatever). And it is why I support free markets and no welfare, so that the residuum unemployment goes away to give more power to worker action. It is also why I am against minimum wages, simply because they keep workers and employers to settle down on the “right price” for work.
But please, don’t call it wage slavery, cause it aint slavery at all.
Slavery is a prohibitive activity. It does not just increase barriers, it makes them deadly. This does not apply to wage work today in the west. It does however apply to taxes, cause if you are a moral person (not taking welfare without paying taxes), and you work, they will force you to pay taxes or kill you (if you don’t agree to jail). No employer does have that power, not even through the help of the state (so far).
” It does however apply to taxes, cause if you are a moral person.. and you work, they will force you to pay taxes or kill you (if you don’t agree to jail)”
This is false. You can chose to leave the country. By staying, you agree to the laws which include laws that pay for roads, bridges, military, etc. So it is *false* to say you have no other option: you have the option to live in another country.
To stay in the country and get the roads, bridges, monitoring of waterborn and other poisons,etc, and want to get all of that, and pay nothing, that’s where the real “parasite” label belongs. Not for folks who paid taxes last year but this year are broke and *deserve* to get welfare (since that’s what they paid taxes for last year, in part: as a safeguard in case they were ever unemployed). So don’t be a parasite who demands all the services of government while expecting not to pay a cent for it. If you think you can do it better, go to another country or a deserted island.
Second, what you claim the argument is, namely “Yeah, but if you loose your job, you will die of hunger. Since you do not own property and means of production you cannot start your own business. And without work you will starve. So, loosing your job means that you die, which is the same as being forced to work under the threat of being killed.” is only small part of the criticism. Fundamentally, it’s about the extremely totalitarian and anti-democratic nature of wage slavery.
In the 1840s young women, called “Factory girls” back then working in the mills in Lowell Mass. Noam Chomsky quotes form the labor press in those days:
“When you sell your product, you retain your person. But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress.
“THOSE WHO WORK IN THE MILLS OUGHT TO OWN THEM, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.” (emphasis added)
This is American workers talking about their experiences in the 1840s”. And that one of the early leaders of the AFL, about a century ago, expressed the standard view when he described the mission of the labour movement as “to overcome the sins of the market and to defend democracy by extending it to control over industry by working people.” That is, you extend democracy from being merely in the political arena (it’s very limited and emaciated there, but that’s another story), to be also in the industrial/workplace arena — to extend democracy there too.
If you think about it, what we have in the workplaces, with bosses giving orders to employees, if you translated that into the political arena, what would it be the equivalent of? Of some kind of despotism, certainly not of political democracy…
Now the silly counter-argument is,”but it’s not fair to expect you to get full democratic voice when it was not you the workers, but the owners,who paid for the factor”..To see what the reply is to this silly criticism, ask yourself what your reply would be if someone said, “it’s not fair to eliminate slavery, after all, the slave-owner paid for the slave! so it’s not fair to have the slave owner pay for the slave and then take away this slave!” the obvious reply is, we advocate a system in which slavery doesn’t exist, and in that system no slave-owner would be paying for the slave,either (a third question is how do you transition away…in which case it’s ok to discuss possible compensation of the former slave owners, and also free the slaves..but that’s a question of how-to-transition, not giving any defense to slavery). Now the system one advocates is one in which private property is allowed for personal items, that you personally use, but that does not allow private ownership of mountains or the air we breathe or the ocean or our DNA (things that are still mostly not allowed but they are even trying to change this..) and ALSO doesn’t allow it for a factory..ownership and control would be by workers and communities in which they are located.
More at http://economicdemocracy.org/lowell.html
or for that matter, http://economicdemocracy.org/nc-enlightenment.html