@watcher314159

1 week ago

The wage relation is literally and not at all hyperbolically slavery. When you're on the clock, your employer owns you and can demand whatever they want, up to the limits of the slave, sorry, employment contract, and what the law permits (because even in the Bible there are legal limits on the right to destroy one's property if that property is people).

Like, if we go way back to the Ancient Greeks, the wage relation has its origin in subcontracting slaves. Owners renting their slaves' labour to other owners, and even slaves renting out other slaves.

Come forward to the Colonial period and you see wages and taxation used in concert to enslave populations. Namely imposing taxes to coerce people into selling themselves, in whole or in part. These taxes were called "moralizing taxes", on the logic that they were teaching the "savages" the value of hard work; this is actually where the concept of laziness comes from.

And this strategy of imposing taxes and other expenses to coerce people into selling themselves has remained largely unchanged for centuries, right until the modern day. Sure, there have been other forms of slavery that grant slaves even fewer rights mixed in that have come in and out of fashion, like the prison-industrial complex and chattel slavery and indentured servitude, but it's all a difference of degree, not of kind.

Like, in the corporate world we've also got serfdom, a form of slavery where the slaves are tied to the land, and transferring ownership of the land includes ownership of the serfs. This is how corporate mergers and split-ups work; ownership of the title to a business doesn't just come with title to its land, but to its employment/slave contracts as well. This, alongside things like management hierarchies and privatized security, is why we speak of corporate or managerial feudalism.

Long story short, if you asked Aristotle to look at the modern wage relation he would see no meaningful difference to the slave wage system of his own society.

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