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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 c

• kazinator 4y ago
  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.
  • heavyset_go 4y ago
    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.
    • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Wage labor was a deal that many, many people freely accepted, because on net it was better than subsistence farming. Serious question: If you aren't doing wage labor, how are you going to live? Subsistence farming? Welfare? How?
      • heavyset_go 4y ago
        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.
        • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
          I gather that you're not in the US, then. 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.
      • ok_dad 4y ago
        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.
        • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
          > ... due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup. This sounds like you're saying: It's all the fault of them. Not our own choices, not even structural forces pushing us this direction. It's them. That is, without further credible details, this sounds like paranoid conspiracy-theory stuff.
        • BitwiseFool 4y ago
          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'?
          • FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
            They're called "investors", and they choose what kind of pursuits receive monetary compensation.
            • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
              Nope. Customers choose what kinds of pursuits receive monetary compensation. You have something you want to do (and get paid for) that investors won't pay you to do? Can you get customers to pay for it? Then just go do it. Nobody's stopping you.
          • funnymony 4y ago
            Counterpoint: Youtube influencers, standup comics, foo critics. (No investor chose to pay them)
      • TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        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.
        • heavyset_go 4y ago
          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.
    • kazinator 4y ago
      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.
      • heavyset_go 4y ago
        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.
        • kazinator 4y ago
          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.
          • mgrthrow 4y ago
            I'd encourage you to read The Conquest of Bread for some high level thoughts on other ways we could arrange things that a) aren't primitive and b) aren't capitalism.
            • kazinator 4y ago
              Unless demonstrated otherwise, this sort of "could" is indistinguishable from "couldn't".
• luckylion 4y ago
  > 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?
  • eyelidlessness 4y ago
    > Slavery usually includes ownership and force. 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.
• least 4y ago
  > 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."
  • heavyset_go 4y ago
    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.
    • antisthenes 4y ago
      > 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.
    • least 4y ago
      > 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.