A Slave's-eye View of Wage Slavery

Fredrick Douglass was a slave.  An escaped slave.  He was a man who knew a thing or two about slavery.

In the early days of his freedom, on taking a paying job, he said, "Now I am my own master."  But after the war, when he saw the condition of former slaves change very little, and often not for the better, he said,

"Experience 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."

It is easy to dismiss the idea of wage work as a form of slavery when you hear it from a bunch of middle-class white intellectuals; but from Douglass, the idea carries some weight.

The argument for the abolition of chattel slavery is not about conditions.  While it is true that many slaves were treated horribly, treatment was not the issue.  Paid workers were often treated horribly also, as shown in the Triangle factory fire incident.  In general, slaves in the American south had better conditions than workers in the north.  People often treat property they own better than that which they rent.  In fact, one of the major pro-slavery arguments in the days before the Civil War was that slavery wasn't any worse a life than wage labor.  

There was never a war fought over the right of people to treat poorer people like livestock.  It was not long after the Civil War, that it became evident that the philosophical win of abolition did not score any points in the realm of real human suffering.  When Martin Luther King Jr. went through the south in the 1960s, visiting sharecroppers, he found people living in conditions that did not appreciably differ from slavery.  They were free on paper, but many had never seen an American dollar bill, as they were paid in company store credit.  For generations.  One hundred years after the war.

If you are reading this, you probably work in much better conditions, and make much better wages than those sharecroppers.  Of course that's not so of the people who assembled whatever computer or tablet or phone you are reading this on, who would have more kinship to the 146 people who died in the Triangle factory fire than to a modern American worker.  You are probably not doing so bad.  But it is only a matter of degree.

Our ancestors, from three million years ago, up to the last few hundred years, if they were free, had a choice.  If they didn't want to work for someone else, they could run off and find some land and farm, or hunt, or fish.  It's the choice that makes freedom.  I don't mean the choice between competing for several jobs with hundreds of other people - or sleeping in a doorway and eating garbage.  If your life depends on trading labor for survival, you are a slave. 

If you have a master, you are a slave regardless of whether he owns you or just rents you.