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The comparison between slaves of old and the wage slaves of today is a good one. Regardless of the shiny veneer of amenity-laden offices and endless vacation ti

The comparison between slaves of old and the wage slaves of today is a good one. Regardless of the shiny veneer of amenity-laden offices and endless vacation time, the fact remains that most people do a job so that they don't starve to death. That is not free work, that is wage slavery.

Jimmy 12y ago
Your thesis seems to be "If (if you don't do X, then you starve to death), then X is slavery", but I don't think that's true. Think of small hunter-gatherer groups that lived before the advent of agriculture. If they didn't go out and find food, they would die. But it doesn't seem right to say they were slaves.
- littletimmy 12y ago
  Good point. But in the case of the hunter-gatherers a person is not working for someone else who will then provide him sustenance. That is not the case with an office worker. I agree with you in that the topic is more complex than I initially made it seem. In the case of the office worker, hopefully the worker produces something of which then the capital owner takes some and leaves the rest to the office worker. That seems better than slavery, but only marginally. It actually sounds more like indetured sevitude in a feudal system (i.e. plant my land, we split the crop). We could debate whether that's slavery or not.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    You still have the option of working for yourself to provide your own sustenance. It's called farming. Maybe our ancestors were foolish to give it up- maybe it's the idyllic lifestyle- but the fact is people voluntarily left it behind. What are you really advocating? Post-scarcity?
    - littletimmy 12y ago
      Ah, that's a good argument. It used to be that you had the option of farming. Back in the old days where all land was not somebody's, you could go into the wilderness and stake out a piece of land to live off like a homestead. This is no longer an option. Where are such pieces of land that I can go and cultivate? I'm an advocate of basic income. Or negative income tax if you want to call it that.
      - sliverstorm 12y ago
        It's been a long, long time since there was an abundance of completely free arable land that no-one had laid claim to. You aren't talking about "the old days", you're talking about the prehistoric days when there were few humans. Saying "farming isn't an option because you can't get land for free" is, IMO, a bit of silly argument. Arable land is (just like everything else) a scarce resource in a heavily populated world; it's not by someone's evil machinations that you can't freely have as much of it as you please. That's not slavery, that's competition for scarce resources. If you did want to farm, it's (very roughly) $1k/acre in many places, and you only need a couple acres to feed yourself.
        ninguem2 12y ago
        You could still do it in the 19th century you didn't have a problem with killing the natives.
        sliverstorm 12y ago
        If killing people to take their land is valid, then by golly you can still do it in the 21st century.
        echaozh 12y ago
        If someone really wants to try, he can always loan money and buy land/start a company. This is hacker news after all. Feeling being slaved can be a very good motivation for entrepreneurship. Moaning about it is lame, in this circle at least. Social safety net is not for the brave of hearts.
      - 12y ago
tbrownaw 12y ago
people do a job so that they don't starve to death So that's why the long-term unemployment rate never rises above zero. Thanks, I'd been wondering why all those predictions of recessions causing high unemployment never panned out. . Also, there's also the fact that the power imbalance between employer and employee these days is a bit less than the imbalance between slave and owner was. Besides the existence of non-starving unemployed people, I would like to note the lack of children working 18-hour days.
- phaemon 12y ago
  > I would like to note the lack of children working 18-hour days. I would like to note it too, but unfortunately it still exists. Google for it.
stretchwithme 12y ago
Every organism has to do things or starve to death. Welcome to the nature of reality.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  yeah that's true but not very insightful
  - stretchwithme 12y ago
    Its not meant to be. Its pointing out the obvious that many people like to pretend is somebody's fault.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nickbauman 12y ago
Wage slavery is a huge cost efficiency over customary slavery. With wage slavery you're not responsible for someone's shelter, feeding and care when they're sick. In the civil war, the south in preparing for war with the north couldn't compete with a slave economy man-for-man because of this. Canal diggers in the north were paid very little, often in rum, and died from disease so quickly and were replaced by a constant churn of immigrants. Doing that kind of work with slaves would be much more costly.
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  ??? Slavery was extremely economical. That was the entire point. Slaves dug numerous canals in the south. The reasons the south's infrastructure could not compete with the north's were two-fold. Geography and, in a word, "technology". The canal era in the US was really initiated with the completion of the Erie in NY. All of a sudden, Georgians watched NYC become America's premier port city because of the Erie canal, and concluded that Georgia must build canals if it was to compete. The geography in the South, however, was all wrong. (At least, by the standards of 19th century engineering. And even by today's standards really.) The S-O-A Canal is a very good example. It was started... and less than a year later, southern engineers had to concede that every route from the Piedmont to the Tennessee border was impractical for canal construction. Even in the face of geographic realities like this, slaves were still able to carve out numerous canals in the south. Canals that would have been highly unlikely to have been carved out by any rational means. In the north they would have done the survey, determined the geographic problems and moved on to another project. Slaves proved resourceful and determined problem solvers on many of the canal projects. (The slaves promptly began using many of these canals as escape routes North as soon as they were completed... but that's another story.) The other reason canals were bad business in the South AND the North was technological. The reality is... railroads simply had a manifest superiority to canals as infrastructure assets. Between 1825 which is, I believe, when the Erie was completed to about the 1850's, which is when everyone seemingly conceded the superiority of the railroad - the South wasted a lot of time on canal construction. In fact, it could be argued that what held the South back was its insistence on building canals after witnessing the success the North was having with them. It took them a lot of time before the South fully considered the gift of geography the North had been given in their analyses. (The upper midwest sits on something like 20% of the GLOBAL freshwater supply. And that's just for starters. Look at a topographical map of NY State and trace out the Erie Canal on it and you'll see what I mean.) The correct strategic response to Northern canals would have been to invest heavily in railroads. But because the South had so much slave labor at their disposal, they tried to build canals to match the North, as that was more economical. They took quite a bit of time to realize that canals were a stop gap technology. Railroads should have been the real goal from the outset. By the time they realized that... it was too late. So the reason canals were more successful in the North was not because the South had slavery. In fact, for what we now realize were reasons of their own, slaves would prove to be some of the best canal diggers the world had ever seen. Putting canals in places that were seemingly intractable. And they died FAR less than natives or immigrants to boot. No... the reason canals were less practical in the south was down to geography. The reason the South believed they could conquer that geography was slavery. And the slaves were, for a variety of reasons, ALMOST able to pull it off... but in the end... physics is still physics. And many southern canal projects didn't work out as well as their backers hoped. (They didn't work out as well as the slaves had hoped either. But the slaves made judicious use of those that did.) I always thought that if the South had invested heavily in railroads as soon as they identified the threat that the Erie Canal presented in the 1820's... they would have done far better in the Civil War. They probably still would not have won. They would, at least, have beaten the North's Eastern Armies, which looked pretty and marched well... but were fairly inept. The South and the North EAST would, in the presence of more southern railroads, have been evenly matched. The problem was... the North's Western Armies were hyper-competent. Far more capable than either the Eastern or the Southern Armies. Grant's guys were, well informed, (Pinkerton made sure of that), and REALLY meticulous about infrastructure. So I doubt railroads would have made a difference once the Western Armies were let off their leashes. But the South could definitely have performed better in the War. They may have held out a bit longer at a minimum.

Jimmy 12y ago

Your thesis seems to be "If (if you don't do X, then you starve to death), then X is slavery", but I don't think that's true. Think of small hunter-gatherer groups that lived before the advent of agriculture. If they didn't go out and find food, they would die. But it doesn't seem right to say they were slaves.

littletimmy 12y ago
Good point. But in the case of the hunter-gatherers a person is not working for someone else who will then provide him sustenance. That is not the case with an office worker. I agree with you in that the topic is more complex than I initially made it seem. In the case of the office worker, hopefully the worker produces something of which then the capital owner takes some and leaves the rest to the office worker. That seems better than slavery, but only marginally. It actually sounds more like indetured sevitude in a feudal system (i.e. plant my land, we split the crop). We could debate whether that's slavery or not.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  You still have the option of working for yourself to provide your own sustenance. It's called farming. Maybe our ancestors were foolish to give it up- maybe it's the idyllic lifestyle- but the fact is people voluntarily left it behind. What are you really advocating? Post-scarcity?
  - littletimmy 12y ago
    Ah, that's a good argument. It used to be that you had the option of farming. Back in the old days where all land was not somebody's, you could go into the wilderness and stake out a piece of land to live off like a homestead. This is no longer an option. Where are such pieces of land that I can go and cultivate? I'm an advocate of basic income. Or negative income tax if you want to call it that.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      It's been a long, long time since there was an abundance of completely free arable land that no-one had laid claim to. You aren't talking about "the old days", you're talking about the prehistoric days when there were few humans. Saying "farming isn't an option because you can't get land for free" is, IMO, a bit of silly argument. Arable land is (just like everything else) a scarce resource in a heavily populated world; it's not by someone's evil machinations that you can't freely have as much of it as you please. That's not slavery, that's competition for scarce resources. If you did want to farm, it's (very roughly) $1k/acre in many places, and you only need a couple acres to feed yourself.
      - ninguem2 12y ago
        You could still do it in the 19th century you didn't have a problem with killing the natives.
        sliverstorm 12y ago
        If killing people to take their land is valid, then by golly you can still do it in the 21st century.
      - echaozh 12y ago
        If someone really wants to try, he can always loan money and buy land/start a company. This is hacker news after all. Feeling being slaved can be a very good motivation for entrepreneurship. Moaning about it is lame, in this circle at least. Social safety net is not for the brave of hearts.
    - 12y ago

tbrownaw 12y ago

people do a job so that they don't starve to death So that's why the long-term unemployment rate never rises above zero. Thanks, I'd been wondering why all those predictions of recessions causing high unemployment never panned out. . Also, there's also the fact that the power imbalance between employer and employee these days is a bit less than the imbalance between slave and owner was. Besides the existence of non-starving unemployed people, I would like to note the lack of children working 18-hour days.

phaemon 12y ago
> I would like to note the lack of children working 18-hour days. I would like to note it too, but unfortunately it still exists. Google for it.

stretchwithme 12y ago

Every organism has to do things or starve to death. Welcome to the nature of reality.

wavefunction 12y ago
yeah that's true but not very insightful
- stretchwithme 12y ago
  Its not meant to be. Its pointing out the obvious that many people like to pretend is somebody's fault.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nickbauman 12y ago

Wage slavery is a huge cost efficiency over customary slavery. With wage slavery you're not responsible for someone's shelter, feeding and care when they're sick. In the civil war, the south in preparing for war with the north couldn't compete with a slave economy man-for-man because of this. Canal diggers in the north were paid very little, often in rum, and died from disease so quickly and were replaced by a constant churn of immigrants. Doing that kind of work with slaves would be much more costly.

bilbo0s 12y ago
??? Slavery was extremely economical. That was the entire point. Slaves dug numerous canals in the south. The reasons the south's infrastructure could not compete with the north's were two-fold. Geography and, in a word, "technology". The canal era in the US was really initiated with the completion of the Erie in NY. All of a sudden, Georgians watched NYC become America's premier port city because of the Erie canal, and concluded that Georgia must build canals if it was to compete. The geography in the South, however, was all wrong. (At least, by the standards of 19th century engineering. And even by today's standards really.) The S-O-A Canal is a very good example. It was started... and less than a year later, southern engineers had to concede that every route from the Piedmont to the Tennessee border was impractical for canal construction. Even in the face of geographic realities like this, slaves were still able to carve out numerous canals in the south. Canals that would have been highly unlikely to have been carved out by any rational means. In the north they would have done the survey, determined the geographic problems and moved on to another project. Slaves proved resourceful and determined problem solvers on many of the canal projects. (The slaves promptly began using many of these canals as escape routes North as soon as they were completed... but that's another story.) The other reason canals were bad business in the South AND the North was technological. The reality is... railroads simply had a manifest superiority to canals as infrastructure assets. Between 1825 which is, I believe, when the Erie was completed to about the 1850's, which is when everyone seemingly conceded the superiority of the railroad - the South wasted a lot of time on canal construction. In fact, it could be argued that what held the South back was its insistence on building canals after witnessing the success the North was having with them. It took them a lot of time before the South fully considered the gift of geography the North had been given in their analyses. (The upper midwest sits on something like 20% of the GLOBAL freshwater supply. And that's just for starters. Look at a topographical map of NY State and trace out the Erie Canal on it and you'll see what I mean.) The correct strategic response to Northern canals would have been to invest heavily in railroads. But because the South had so much slave labor at their disposal, they tried to build canals to match the North, as that was more economical. They took quite a bit of time to realize that canals were a stop gap technology. Railroads should have been the real goal from the outset. By the time they realized that... it was too late. So the reason canals were more successful in the North was not because the South had slavery. In fact, for what we now realize were reasons of their own, slaves would prove to be some of the best canal diggers the world had ever seen. Putting canals in places that were seemingly intractable. And they died FAR less than natives or immigrants to boot. No... the reason canals were less practical in the south was down to geography. The reason the South believed they could conquer that geography was slavery. And the slaves were, for a variety of reasons, ALMOST able to pull it off... but in the end... physics is still physics. And many southern canal projects didn't work out as well as their backers hoped. (They didn't work out as well as the slaves had hoped either. But the slaves made judicious use of those that did.) I always thought that if the South had invested heavily in railroads as soon as they identified the threat that the Erie Canal presented in the 1820's... they would have done far better in the Civil War. They probably still would not have won. They would, at least, have beaten the North's Eastern Armies, which looked pretty and marched well... but were fairly inept. The South and the North EAST would, in the presence of more southern railroads, have been evenly matched. The problem was... the North's Western Armies were hyper-competent. Far more capable than either the Eastern or the Southern Armies. Grant's guys were, well informed, (Pinkerton made sure of that), and REALLY meticulous about infrastructure. So I doubt railroads would have made a difference once the Western Armies were let off their leashes. But the South could definitely have performed better in the War. They may have held out a bit longer at a minimum.