Wage slavery Totally Explained

Everything about Wage Slavery totally explained

Wage slavery is a term first coined by the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836, though articulated as a concept at least as early asCicero and elaborated by subsequent thinkers, particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution. It refers to the similarities between buying and renting a person, and denotes a hierarchical social condition in which a person chooses a job but only within a coerced set of choices (primarily working for a boss under threat of starvation, poverty or status diminution), which make that "person dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood," "esp[ecially] with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from...[wage] labor" Wage slavery, in the pervasive socialist and anarchist usage of the term, is often understood as the absence of 1) democratic or non-hierarchical worker's control of the workplace and the economy as a whole,, 2) unconditional access to non-exploitative property and a fair share of the basic necessities of life and 3) the ability of persons to have say over economic decisions in proportion to the degree they're affected by those decisions. In terms used by some critics of capitalism, statism and various authoritarian systems --particularly anarchists-- wage slavery is the condition where a person must sell his or her labor power, submitting to the authority of an employer in order to prosper or merely to subsist.

Comparison with chattel slavery

The first articulate description of wage slavery was made by Simon Linguet in 1763, describing how it undermined self-ownership in the sense of individual autonomy, by basing it on a materialistic concept of the body and its liberty for example as something that can be sold, rented or alienated in a class society:
1. The chattel slave is property ("capital"). As such, its value to an economically rational owner is in some ways higher than that of a wage slave who can be fired, replaced or harmed at no (or less) cost. For this reason, in times of recession, slaves couldn't be fired like wage laborers. American chattel slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living from the 18th century and, as historians Fogel and Engerman's reported, slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free [for examplewage] urban laborers at the time". This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an economic system different from capitalist wage slavery:
Similarly, various strategies and struggles adopted by wage slaves are deemed to have created extra-capitalist structures (unions, welfare institutions etc) that can constrain the destructive mechanisms of wage slavery. These institutions could test the limits of wage systems and eventually lead to their overthrow, though they can temporarily also appease the masses; preventing the overthrow of the elites that often take credit for the creation of these institutions.
   2. A wage slave's direct choice is "work for a boss or face poverty/starvation". Indirectly, prison, beatings, insults and other punishments, including death lay in store for those who try to survive without working for (or becoming) a boss (workers trying to democratically run a capitalist's factory, live freely in buildings or grow and collect food, medicine and other goods freely from the land and factories capitalists own etc). If a chattel slave refuses to work, a number of punishments are also available; from beatings to food deprivation- although an economically rational slave owner would likely try positive reinforcements (offering women, gifts etc) before killing an expensive slave and losing his investment.
   3. Unlike a chattel slave, a wage slave can sometimes choose his boss, but he can't choose to have no boss unless he wants to face poverty or starvation.
   4. “The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.” (Karl Marx)
   The similarities between chattel and wage slavery were certainly noticed by the workers themselves; for example, the 19th century Lowell Mill Girls, who, without any knowledge of European radicalism, condemned the "degradation and subordination" of the newly emerging industrial system, and the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self", maintaining that "those who work in the mills should own them." In their 1836 strike, this was one of their protest songs:
Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? Oh! I can't be a slave, I won't be a slave, For I'm so fond of liberty, That I can't be a slave. Noam Chomsky, who believes that such sentiments are "just below the surface", has used the militant history of labor movements, Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom", Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and Marc Hauser's evidence supporting an innate and universal moral faculty, to explain the incompatibility of such oppression and greed with certain aspects of human nature.
   Supporters of wage and chattel slavery have linked some of the unavoidable features of reality (the subjection of man to nature) with the seemingly avoidable conditions of social structures (the subjection of man to man); arguing that hierarchy and their preferred system's particular relations of production represent human nature and are no more coercive than the reality of life itself, which therefore can't be improved upon by social structures--only made worse. Consequentially, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the status quo is naively utopian and will result in more oppressive conditions.Bosses in both of these long-lasting systems argued that their system created a lot of wealth and prosperity. Both did, in some sense create jobs and their investment entailed risk. For example, slave owners might have risked losing money by buying expensive slaves who later became ill or died; or might have used those slaves to make products that didn't sell well on the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses; sometimes by working hard. It may be the "rags to riches" story which occasionally occurs in capitalism, or the "slave to master" story that occurred in places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom and become slave owners themselves Social mobility, or the hard work and risk that it may entail, are thus not considered to be a redeeming factor by critics of capitalist wage slavery:
"The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorise, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology." In Propaganda (1928), the father of public relations Edward Bernays argued that "[t]he conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we've never heard of." Similarly Walter Lippmann argued that "the manufacture of consent" amounted to "a revolution" in "the practice of democracy" and allowed the "bewildered herd" to be controlled by their betters.
   Some supporters of chattel slavery claimed that those who hadn't studied in depth the economic and social aspects of slavery, couldn't form a reasoned opinion on the matter. Similarly, some modern economists believe that the uneducated are not in a position to reject economic systems involving wage slavery. For example Paul Samuelson asks: "…without the disciplined study of economic science, how can anyone form a reasoned opinion about the merits or lack of merits in the classical, traditional economics?".

Role in the development of the modern nation-state

Wage slavery played a very important role in the modern consolidation of the nation-state structure that originated in the pre-capitalist "...feudal period with battles for power between feudal lords, kings, the Pope and other centers of power which gradually evolved into systems of nation states in which a combination of political power and economic interests converged enough to try to impose uniform systems on very varied societies...In the course of the development of the nation state system, there also developed on the side various economic arrangements which about a century ago turned into what became contemporary corporate capitalism, mostly imposed by judicial arrangements, not by legislation, and very tightly integrated and linked to the the powerful states, [whichare] [un]distinguish[able]...from the multinational corporate system, the conglomerates that rely on them, that have a relation of both dependency and domination to them...[T]heir intellectual roots...come out of the same neo-Hegelian conceptions of the rights of organic entities that led to bolshevism and fascism." The close link between property and the state has been noted by many outstanding thinkers. For example John Locke, who in 1690 wrote that "[t]he great and chief end...of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property" or Adam Smith who described how "...as the necessity of civil government gradually grows up with the acquisition of valuable property, so the principal causes which naturally introduce subordination gradually grow up with the growth of that valuable property... Wherever there's great property there's great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions...The appropriation of herds and flocks which introduced an inequality of fortune was that which first gave rise to regular government. Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor"This tight link between property and state was also noted by US Founding Father James Madison, who said that government "...ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."
In this respect, statist welfare measures can be seen as a consequence of the elite's fear of dispossession--yielding to some degree in order to appease the organized pressure of wage slaves.
Though seemingly paradoxical, the most prominent current critic of wage slavery, the anarchist Noam Chomsky, has defended the temporary use of state power on the grounds that it prevents even more oppressive forms of authority and wage slavery:
"I don't think the federal government is a legitimate institution. I think it ought to be dismantled, in principle; just as... I don't think people ought to live in cages. On the other hand, if I'm in a cage and there's a saber tooth tiger outside, I'd be happy to keep the bars of the cage in place -- even though I think the cage is illegitimate...The centralized government authority is at least to some extent under popular influence... The unaccountable private power outside is under no public control. What they call minimizing the state -- transferring the decision making to unaccountable private interests -- isn't helpful to human beings or to democracy... so there's a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage."

Treatment in various economic systems

Wage slavery exists in various systems, including communist states, but given the prevalence of modern capitalism, it's often described as a lack of rights in the market system; especially in the absence of extra-capitalist structures stemming from some degree of democratic input (welfare system, retirement income, etc.). The concept seeks to point out how the only rights a worker has are the rights he or she gains on the labor market. S/he faces starvation when unable or unwilling to rent him/herself to those who own the capital and means of production. The capitalists own the means of life (land, industry etc) and make profit simply from granting permission to use them. This they do in exchange for wages. Though most anti-capitalists favor possessions for non-exploitative personal use, they oppose the "freedom" to use property for the exploitation of others; claiming that private ownership of the means of life is theft and that sometimes a person's freedom ends where another person's begins (for example my freedom to opress, kill, steal etc violates yours). Given that workers are the majority, they believe that the elite maintain wage slavery and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry, educational institutions, harsh laws, nationalist and corporate propaganda, pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure, state violence (the police will arrest workers who freely collect food & medicine or try to democratically run a capitalist's factory), fear of unemployment and a historical legacy of exploitation under prior systems:

Similarly, the President of the Continental Congress and first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, John Jay said repeatedly that "The people who own the country ought to govern it."
   This ideology has often been rationalized with appeals to "the tyranny of the majority"; self-servingly assuming that 1) rule by the minority is better because the masses are incapable of organizing themselves effectively; and 2) democracy always mean majority rule, rather than "people having a say over decisions in proportion to the degree they're affected" — which entails respect for the legitimate rights of minorities. Noam Chomsky believes that the rationalizations for this elite government function have been fallacious:
"The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge...the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilization of which they're the mercenary vindicators....The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar." More generally, Marx perceived that "[y]our very ideas [offreedom, culture, law, etc] are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class." wage slavery, so long as it exists, will remain a strong factor ensuring the resiliency of a system of law that overcriminalize the powerless and decriminalizes the powerful. The law can ensure that moral principles are applied, but will tend to do so only when it doesn't fundamentally alter the hierarchical status quo that's at the root of most crime in society. Given that most lawyers and judges will resist the idea that they maintain a system of injustice, this double standard will be maintained by ignoring the corrupting influences of elite rule on the general population, and through the application of rationalizations, selective rationality and morality (for example criminalizing marijuana and other drugs rather than the more lethal tobacco, punishing petty thieves rather than big exploiting corporations, prosecuting subnational terrorists rather than state war criminals, criminalizing individual support for terrorist groups, but not state support for dictatorships or terrorist groups like the Contras, etc). Wage slavery also contributes to making powerful groups unaccountable to the law (for example US violations of international law, police brutality etc). The capacity to unjustly and arbitrarily influence or violate the law is related to the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. Those who advocate the elimination of wage slavery and the decentralization of power and wealth, (for example anarchists) maintain that the law —together with the general culture—should more pervasively reflect human instincts of justice and freedom and should therefore be used not to maintain hierarchy, but to maintain an absence of hierarchy by placing a heavy burden of proof on those who advocate authoritarian measures such as violence and exploitation.
   That is because anarchists and other advocates of decentralization believe that hierarchical institutions magnify the worst features of human nature (violence, greed etc) and that by relinquishing their subordinate role as subservient, unthinking and insentient "cogs in a machine", people would feel more independent, responsible and aware of their actions; they wouldn't be indoctrinated by centers of power, and would become appalled by behavior that now is condoned within the hierarchical institutional structures. That's why the root causes of war and environmental destruction are deemed to lie in the hierarchical mechanisms of society— capitalist and statist wage slavery being a central part of them. Anarchists believe that if the state was eliminated and people directly controlled the economy democratically, they'd use it for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of elites, and would therefore foster values of solidarity, equality, peace, generosity, creativity and long term survival of the planet.
   Generally speaking, in hierarchies there's an incentive to not be completely honest with one's superior and to tell him/her want s/he wants to hear. This lack of honest communication accumulates the higher it goes up the hierarchy and is reflected once again onto the society by those powerful enough to exert influence — primarily the elite who, having a lot to lose, have strong incentives to subordinate and atomize the general population by spreading untruths. It is easy to abuse someone when one has power over them, and human beings often numb their independent sense of morality when they subordinate themselves to arbitrary decree from above (one can dismiss one's complicity in a destructive system by simply saying "I'm just following orders" or "I'm just doing my job, earning my bread", "My superiors are good and know what they're doing" etc). Under authority people tend to become instruments of someone else, instead of free agents directing their own destiny, discovering and gaining a taste for more freedom. This entails that even when the outcome of actions is positive, the framework in which they're undertaken will remain to a large extent amoral and fortuitous. From this point of view, hierarchical structures like the state and capitalism foster dependence and a lack of personal responsibility vis a vis humanity and the environment—allowing those on top to influence the lives and thoughts of society, and corrupting human behavior:

   According to some thinkers, however, there's something called the "bad apple theory" that argues states are natural structures. Yale anthropologist David Graeber explains it:
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Similarly, Noam Chomsky explained how
The struggle against wage slavery has often been linked to other anti-hierarchical struggles. For example, Mujeres Libres (English:Free Women) was an anarchist women's organization with over 20,000 members in Spain that aimed to empower working class women by pushing the idea of a "double struggle" for women's liberation and (anti-capitalist anti-statist) social revolution. The organization argued that the two objectives were equally important and should be pursued in parallel. In revolutionary Spain of the 1930s, many anarchist women were angry with what they viewed as persistent sexism amongst anarchist men and their marginalized status within a movement that ostensibly sought to abolish domination and hierarchy. They saw women's problems as inseparable from the social problems of the day; while they shared their compañero's desire for social revolution and vehemently opposed the Nationalists, they also pushed for recognition of women's abilities and organized in their communities to achieve that goal. Citing the anarchist assertion that the means of revolutionary struggle must model the desired organization of revolutionary society, they rejected mainstream Spanish anarchism's assertion that women's equality would follow automatically from the social revolution. To prepare women for leadership roles in the anarchist movement, they organized schools, women-only social groups and a women-only newspaper so that women could gain self-esteem and confidence in their abilities and network with one another to develop their political consciousness. Despite these activities, the group refused to identify itself as feminist due to feminism's perceived association with upper class, conservative women in Spain who called for capitalist political reform. Unlike other leftist women's organizations in Spain at the time, the Mujeres Libres was unique in that it insisted on remaining autonomous from the male-dominated CNT, FAI, and FIJL and fought for equal status with these established anarchist organizations.

Environmental destruction

According to Murray Bookchin, "all our notions of dominating nature stem from the very real domination of human by human." The "domination of human by human preceded the notion of dominating nature. Indeed, human domination of human gave rise to the very idea of dominating nature." This means that "it isn't until we eliminate domination in all its forms … that we'll really create a rational, ecological society." [MurrayBookchin, Remaking Society, p. 44] In other words, to save the planet, people must "emphasise that ecological degradation is, in great part, a product of the degradation of human beings by hunger, material insecurity, class rule, hierarchical domination, patriarchy, ethnic discrimination, and competition.". "[N]ature, as every materialist knows, isn't something merely external to humanity. We are a part of nature. Consequently, in dominating nature we not only dominate an 'external world' — we also dominate ourselves."
From this point of view, the materialistic and competitive "grow or die" maxim of capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. A centralized state structure, though partially restraining of destructive market forces, cedes great power to a few individuals, which has the consequence of standardising and disempowering the majority while imbuing it with an inability to handle the complexities and diversity of life and its ecological systems.

Criticism

Gary Young argues that the same basic reasoning that considers the individual to be forced to sell his labor to a capitalist in order to survive, also applies to the capitalist in that he's forced to hire a worker to survive otherwise his capital will be exhausted through consumption leaving him nothing to purchase the necessities of life. In this sense, the capitalists are as "enslaved" by the workers as the workers are by the capitalists. Some point out that the owner of capital does have a third alternative, which is to sell his labor power to an employer.
   According to the viewpoint of Austrian economical theory, what is exchanged between individuals is irrelevant for the result. For a consistentcy with austrian economics, the concept of wage slavery would extend to cover all actions taken by individuals in their relations with other parties. Hence compensation in forms other than wages should also be condemned by advocates of wage slavery.
   Further, utilizing the Misesian analytics of individual action, human beings must always engage in production in order to consume and survive. Thus, man would be enslaved to nature itself. If man is always enslaved in some form or another, according to this view, the concept of slavery is of little use in order to draw distinctions between what is a coercive interpersonal relationship and what is not, thereby defeating the analytical purpose of wage slavery theory.
   Wage slavery is also in contradiction to the Rothbardian notion of self-ownership. Under this view, if a man doesn't own himself, he must be owned by either another individual or a group of individuals. The ability for anyone to consent to an activity or action would then be placed in the hands of a third party. Further, the third-party's ownership would also be in the hands of yet another individual or group. This regression of ownership would transfer ad infinitum and leave no one with the ability to coordinate their own actions or those of anyone else. The conclusion is therefore that if under wage slavery, self-ownership isn't legitimate, there's no right for anyone then to claim enslavement to wages in the first place.

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