I cannot voluntarily not work, and I don’t get to choose who gets the benefits of my work. And I am in a privileged situation because I could lose my work and still pay rent for long enough to find another one, but this is not the case for a vast class of people in western countries. These people are effectively bound to their employer because losing their job means losing their home and means of subsistence.
The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.
> These people are effectively bound to their employer because losing their job means losing their home and means of subsistence.
Even in this case it is still significantly better than being enslaved.
Even with the worst wage labour people still have option to leave it. Slave owner can force slaves into mine and never let them out and force them to work in horrific conditions until they die. Happened in many places across history, likely still happens somewhere.
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
> The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.
Definitely! I am not claiming that oppression does not exist but "wage labour is tantamount to slavery" is an absurd claim.
You work for somewhere between 6 and 14 hours per day, and the rest of the time you can choose to spend anywhere you're able to go, and tie relationships with whomever you're able to attract, and your owner can't decide these things for you. That's a categorical difference, not one of degree.
Mandatory on-call duty exists, as do drug tests, background checks, security clearances, etc. Employers can certainly decide how "free time" is spent and with whom you associate.
For employees under such rules, it certainly is a notch closer to slavery. I would guess the vast majority of people on this site are not under such rules.
There are plenty of people on this site whose free time is constricted by their employers because of things like non-compete agreements and anti-moonlighting clauses.
The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject of wage labor[1]:
> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other
From Wikipedia[1]:
> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"
That's an interesting quote from Douglass. If you follow the reference, it continues
> It gives the shopkeeper a customer who can trade with no other storekeeper,
and thus leaves the latter no motive for fair dealing except
his own moral sense, which is never too strong. While the
laborer holding the orders is tempted by their worthlessness,
as a circulating medium, to get rid of them at any sacrifice,
and hence is led into extravagance and consequent destitution.
> The merchant puts him off with his poorest commodities
at highest prices, and can say to him take these or nothing.
Worse still. By this means the laborer is brought into debt,
and hence is kept always in the power of the land-owner.
When this system is not pursued and land is rented to the
freedman, he is charged more for the use of an acre of land
for a single year than the land would bring in the market if
offered for sale. On such a system of fraud and wrong one
might well invoke a bolt from heaven red with uncommon
wrath.
> It is said if the colored people do not like the conditions
upon which their labor is demanded and secured, let them
leave and go elsewhere. A more heartless suggestion never
emanated from an oppressor. Having for years paid them in
shop orders, utterly worthless outside the shop to which they
are directed, without a dollar in their pockets, brought by
this crafty process into bondage to the land-owners, who can
and would arrest them if they should attempt to leave when
they are told to go.
I can think of modern power relations this reminds me of, but an ordinary job in the U.S. is not one of them.
Slavery means lots of things. Chattel slavery, yes, but also forced labor like in us prisons. Indentured labor, child soldiers, forced marriage, etc etc.
The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". It's also easy to draw parallels between the commodification of ones labor and slavery.
It's a term that is not new, is widely used, and debated plenty. The incorrect response is to say, "that's a useless way to think". Show some intellectual curiosity - why do people believe that, what values do they hold, what are their reasons, which arguments do I disagree with, etc.
I'm a socialist, I don't think capitalists have a "useless way to think about the world", I have fundamental critiques of specific policies and different values on certain social behaviors.
Struggle slavery; you're not free not to struggle on the face of the Earth, otherwise you will not survive. Man, how dare the universe spring forth creatures, yet foist that on them.
Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
It isn't a dichotomy between wage labor and living in the woods picking berries. You can have extremely similar production and economies that we have now, but without wage labor. One other option is worker ownership, as owning the fruits of one's own labor is not the same thing as wage labor. There are plenty of examples of historical and contemporary worker ownership, and none of them involve living in the woods.
Worker cooperatives are legal and there are some around today. There's nothing stopping workers from owning the fruits of their own labor. Yet most workers choose not to join or start cooperatives, and instead prefer wage labor. Why is that?
It seems that most workers prioritize a steady wage without the risk of being an owner. And it's difficult for worker cooperatives in capital-intensive industries to attract outside investors; investors who put in significant amounts of money quite rationally want some control over the enterprise rather than leaving the decisions up to workers.
One of the most prominent examples of employee ownership was with United Airlines. Employees gained majority ownership in 1994. That kind of worked for a while but ultimately failed, ironically partly due to labor union disputes. It seems the workers had trouble deciding how to share the fruits of their labor.
This really is the same as the YouTuber "how I bought a house within a week of watching this video"
"Ownership is so easy, imagine if you not only have to work, but also have to deal with ownership problems such as maintenance, insurance, business and real-estate, logistics, marketing, depreciation, and management. - and, best of all, you don't own any of it if you stop working!"
In order to own the fruits of your labor, you have to pay for all the tools and materials you need, and the space where you apply the tools to the materials.
The material suppliers and toolsmiths also own the fruits of their labor, and don't owe them to you.
Capitalism exists because individual worker ownership doesn't scale beyond simple trades. If a worker gets enough wherewithal to scale his or her operation to just a small shop, there are going to be workers there, who are either wage labor, or else customers who pay to use the shop.
> People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
They don't exactly choose.
If a person wants to live by hunting and gathering, or by subsistence agriculture, he first has to acquire fertile land. And all that land is taken. In the United States, you don't even have the Right to Roam. Nor, on the public rights-of-way, do you have any right to so much as a sidewalk.
The ability to live an "indigenous" lifestyle no longer exists. The whole place has been terraformed.
You are trapped by the actions of everyone else. Mathematically, it's some kind of game theoretic equilibrium. But what it feels like is a prison.
Now you're just making excuses. In the USA at least, there are still small parcels of fertile land available very cheaply in isolated rural areas where no one else wants to live. Look for places in Alaska or Appalachia. If someone wants to live the 18th Century subsistence farmer lifestyle then it's totally possible. Get off the Internet and go live your dream.
Worker ownership is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor bifurcates people into an asset owning class and laborers who don't own the assets they're forced to depend on to eat. Wage labor divorces workers from owning the fruit of their labor in place of wages, whereas worker ownership doesn't.
Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that people had relied on for centuries to provide for themselves. It was imposed because people voluntarily chose not to become wage laborers, as they preferred their lifestyles as is. To rectify this, a landless class of people was created, that could only rely on selling their labor to survive, through the enclosure of the land they had relied on in the past. People did not freely accept becoming factory workers, for example, they were forced into situations where it was the only option, and in many places, those that chose not to work were arrested and forced to work anyway.
Worker ownership is at least a respectable alternative. But it has a problem with capital-intensive industries. The workers typically don't have the resources to pool their funds and build a semiconductor fab.
They "freely accepted" it as an alternative to starvation when they were forced off of the land they were previously farming so that it could become a large private farm.
A lot of the land that was enclosed wasn't even productive after privatization. Some of it just stood (and still stands) idle, despite previously providing sustenance prior to enclosure. Big estates with an abundance of non-productive land was a popular thing at one point.
There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
There are an incredible variety of careers to choose from and there are countless unconventional jobs out there that people have never heard of. There is no small portion of people creating a pre-approved selection of roles that we have no choice but to follow. Even if there were, it definitely begs the question of 'who are these people' and 'how do they have this power'?
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve".
This is the baseline for basically pretty much all life on earth. You will die unless you perform labor to interrupt death. Your body itself must perform labor in order to generate the energy and to allocate the resources you provide it to survive as well. If you expand the definition of slavery to encompass labor, then all living things are inherently enslaved until they die. Philosophically that might be interesting in its own right but it's not actually a very cogent critique of labor nor does it justify the use of the word, "slavery."
Wage labor isn't a natural baseline, though. It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others. Those kind of relations eventually erupted with the advent of agriculture that allowed people to settle and accumulate assets.
> It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
Yeah, but for a person coming into it, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just earn a wage and buy existing goods, rather than be self-sufficient and grow your own crops, plant your own trees to harvest lumber and mine your own ore to make steel.
Nor is the shift back to hunting/gathering even possible at this point. The population of the planet is such that we would consume all animal and plant matter within months, if it were not replenished in highly structured ways on farms.
> Wage labor isn't a natural baseline, though. It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
Labor having value is in fact wholly arbitrary, which is why its value fluctuates depending on various market conditions. Fundamentally, it depends on people valuing living, which is why what I'm saying is not unnatural.
"Wage labor" is just "labor."
> If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others.
Asset owning people do work, though. This notion falls apart under minute scrutiny. There's of course people that inherit wealth that only ever exchange it for consumption of goods or services, but those people are still inheriting labor from people that chose to give them it.
Yes, but with the invention of private property, people are no longer allowed to labor directly for their own survival as subsistence farmers without first working for wages and then purchasing land.
It seems strange now that wage labor is so normalized, but at the start of the industrial revolution, many subsistence farmers were forced off of the land they had farmed for generations as it was turned into large private farms and instead had to seek wage labor.
It might help to read more about Marxism to avoid a reductio ad absurdum.
The general argument as laid out in Capital vol 1 is highlighted in the working day[1]. This section introduces the contradiction between laborer and capitalist, namely, that a laborer is paid for his or her time, while the capitalist in turn receives the product of creation.
The point is that this is a rather strange exchange. Instead of the laborer's product of creation being bought as a commodity, the capitalist pays the laborer for their time. The capitalist makes a profit (in their subsequent transactions[2]) because the the money gained by reselling what the laborer produces nets a profit[3]. Were that this was a fair trade, there would be no profit to make.[4]
Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why. All life on earth doesn't participate in economy of labor and earn wages. If you agree, and I hope you do, that such a proposition is absurd, then I kindly refer back to the first sentence of this comment as we're now on the same page.
1. Vol 1 Chapter 10. Section 1
2. The C-M in the M-C-M circuit.
3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
4. If you're yelling at the screen, "But that's the point!" then yes, we're also in agreement. This maybe one of those "so so so close" moments.
> The point is that this is a rather strange exchange. Instead of the laborer's product of creation being bought as a commodity, the capitalist pays the laborer for their time. The capitalist makes a profit (in their subsequent transactions[2]) because the the money gained by reselling what the laborer produces nets a profit[3]. Were that this was a fair trade, there would be no profit to make.[4]
> 3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
Even if you just presume this to be true, which is ridiculous, it fails to acknowledge that 1) resources are a finite and scarce, 2) supply and demand are variable, and as such, so is the value of labor and goods (money is a representation of labor), and 3) that the "capitalists" in this situation are performing labor by performing transactions (but also probably many other things as well).
Your argument basically hinges on the notion that the value of goods is static and that certain types of labor have zero value.
I regret to inform you that this argument is not mine; it's Marx's. You're more than welcome to direct your complaints to him, but he may take a while to respond.
Be assured though, if you take the time to read Capital, your criticisms are addressed. I'd encourage you to read it. It's a much better way to understand the argument than a HN comment section. Good luck!
If it were simply about Marx's argument, then you wouldn't suggest that we (you and I, not Marx) could be in agreement, which you mentioned in your previous comment.
This is like me telling you to go read a textbook on economics. Obviously it's a better way to learn about economics than from me, but that's not really the point, is it?
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve".
Slavery usually includes ownership and force. I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it. Like "chicken holocaust" isn't really a holocaust, even though some chicken farms are terrible places, but it's really not the same.
You wouldn't talk of nutritional slavery even though you're not free not to get nutrition, because you'll die. "Wage slavery" very much falls in the same corner, I think. Take away everything else, and imagine an individual being alone on earth. There's fruits to eat and wood around to build a shelter. If the individual doesn't reach for those fruits, and doesn't use the wood, they'll be hungry and cold, and eventually they'll starve. Are they a slave?
Ownership applies very specifically to chattel slavery, and does not apply to the vast majority of extant slavery today.
> I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it.
No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that workers are forced to do labor which enriches others—in an involuntary exchange for a disproportionately small fraction of the fruits of that labor—rather than doing either the direct labor which would satisfy their own needs or the collective labor whose fruits would be shared by all.
The force is rooted in private property; importantly: private in this usage is jargon, meant as ownership of productive means, not as individual personal ownership of arbitrary stuff. To the extent productive property ownership is concentrated and pervasive, which is a nearly total extent in most of the world, this force is practically unavoidable for the vast majority of workers.
Your likening, along with several others, of waged labor to basic labors like nutrition or shelter is not wrong but misses the point. For “wage slaves” (quoted not to dismiss its validity but to indicate I’m still engaged with clarifying the term), the only options available to acquire food and shelter are:
- work to enrich others in exchange for a fraction of their productive output
- become an owner of productive private property and an employer of other “wage slaves”
- become an owner of some productive private property and voluntarily share it with others (to the extent that’s achievable, practical and sustainable)
- reject productive private property claims (which itself may be punishable by more explicitly forced labor! but in any case is a high risk to other aspects of one’s autonomy however limited)
If there truly are fruits to eat and woods around from which to build a shelter, from which anyone could freely choose that lifestyle rather than wage labor, then the term “wage slavery” would definitely be as sensational as you suggest. But for, well, nearly everyone who works for wages, that isn’t true. The options above are the only ones available, and acquiring private productive property is an exceedingly limited pursuit regardless of how one wants to use or share it. For the nearly everyone else remaining, they must toil so others profit or they must do crimes.
> No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that workers are forced to do labor which enriches others—in an involuntary exchange for a disproportionately small fraction of the fruits of that labor—rather than doing either the direct labor which would satisfy their own needs or the collective labor whose fruits would be shared by all.
You say that, but that's not at all how it worked when that very thing has been tried by groups like the Khmer Rouge. Who, incidentally, took people from their homes at gunpoint in Phenom Penh, forced them to work for nothing, and even stole their kids from them. You can claim that's an implementation detail, but when you point out that workers collectives have trouble working on a very small scale, that's an indictment of the idea that this idea could work on a national scale, because organizational problems only get harder the bigger you are.
And despite the Khmer Rouge ostensibly doing that for the "collective good", being marched out of your home to farm rice at gunpoint seems to me to be a lot closer to what most people think of as "slavery" than choosing an employer, choosing what type of work to do, being able to obtain free education online for nearly anything, being able to start a business of one's own (including worker collectives, if you wish), and being able to get loans to start that business. All of which are regular activities for us "wage slaves" here.
It seems I haven't made my point very clearly: I wasn't suggesting that there's ample self-maintaining land for everyone, that's clearly not the case. But if there was, would its inhabitants be slaves? And who's slaves would they be? Nature's? God's? Their own?
Is a self-employed black smith who owns everything downstream a slave? He'll mine the ore, smelt the iron, produce his own coal for his fire etc etc. Still, he'll have to sell his product at a fraction of what it's worth it to his customers. Like your "wage slaves", it'll be a very large fraction of it, but it's a fraction, they wouldn't buy it if it cost more than it's worth to them. Is the black smith a slave?
I've seen that as a meme and/or talking point, here on HN, far too many times.
Your alternatives are to be independently wealthy, own your own business, to be a subsistence farmer, to work in a co-op, to be on welfare, or to work for wages. Those who trot out this line never specify which option they think is better. Either they haven't thought that far, or they're thinking we're all going to work in co-ops, or they're thinking the rest of us should support them. But that just turns into more slavery for everyone else...
(I will give the more thoughtful ones the credit that they seem to want co-ops, or full-on communism, which could be considered co-ops on a larger scale.)
It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working." Eg if you don't have a viable alternative to working, did you choose work freely? Everyone using this comparison from that time period knows it's an extreme metaphor and is using it at least partially for the shock value of the comparison, to jar people into seeing the everyday pressures in a different way.
They aren't comparing the conditions of slavery to the conditions of wage labor, just that the force that compels a proletarian worker to work is on the same continuum with the force that compels a slave to work.
Adding to this, there are employers who do what they can to ramp up the coercive aspect. This happens mainly in low-wage jobs where there is lots of usually low-quality labor. The usual dynamic is to seek out job hunters with family or other commitments to employ, and then constantly threaten them with all the people who apply. Make them feel trapped and precarious by threatening their ability to feed kids, and that can go a long way.
Obviously, the legal system no longer supports outright slavery outside of prison, and the tactics and conditions are consequently less severe than historic chattel slavery in the US.
But the opposite conclusion - that all labor is voluntary - has to use a specific sense of the word 'voluntary', more similar to the IRS definition than the picking-from-a-menu sense.
> It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working."
In case of slavery one is forced to work (and that is basically the best case).
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
And forces even horrible employees to be better option than begging friends/family/strangers for help. Slave owners have no need even for such bare minimum. To say nothing about less pathological cases where employees at least sort-of compete for workers.
I suspect calling it slavery is more shocking today than it would have been at the time when slavery was still an acceptable practice in major countries. Certainly people have a more visceral reaction to the term in general today than at that time.
The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.