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{{Short description|Dependence on wages or salary}}
{{POV|date=January 2009}}
{{SYN|date=January 2009}} {{Use American English|date=February 2022}}
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'''Wage slavery''' is a controversial{{Fact|date=January 2009}} term used to refer to the similarities between ] and ] in a ] social environment with a coercive and limited set of job-related choices (e.g. working for a ] under threat of ], ] or ]).<ref></ref><ref name="schalkenbach1"></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref> These choices make a "person dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood,"<ref></ref> "esp with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from... labor".<ref></ref>


] in the ] in January 2016]]
Similarities between wage labor and slavery were articulated at least as early as ].<ref>"...vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.''" - ] </ref> These comparisons were elaborated by subsequent thinkers, particularly with the advent of the ].<ref></ref><ref></ref> Before the US Civil War, Southern defenders of Negro slavery favorably compared the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. They argued that that their slaves were better off, and workers were "free but in name – the slaves of endless toil".<ref name="urlThe Hireling and the Slave — Antislavery Literature Project">{{cite web |url=http://antislavery.eserver.org/proslavery/graysonhireling |title=The Hireling and the Slave — Antislavery Literature Project |format= |work= |accessdate=09-01-25}}</ref>


'''Wage slavery''' is a term used to criticize ] by business, by keeping wages low or stagnant in order to maximize profits. The situation of wage slavery can be loosely defined as a person's dependence on ] (or a ]) for their ], especially when wages are low, treatment and conditions are poor, and there are few chances of ].<ref name="merriam-webster.com">{{cite dictionary|title=wage slave|url=http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wage%20slave|dictionary=]|access-date=4 March 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite dictionary|title=wage slave|url=http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wage%20slave|dictionary=]|access-date=4 March 2013}}</ref>
The use of the term '''wage slave''' by labor organizations, perhaps originates from the labor protests of the ] in 1836.<ref></ref> The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century, but was gradually replaced by "the more pragmatic symbolism" of the term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century,<ref name="Hallgrimsdottir">{{cite journal|last=Hallgrimsdottir|first=Helga Kristin|date=March 2007|title=From Wage Slaves to Wage Workers: Cultural Opportunity Structures and the Evolution of the Wage Demands of Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, 1880-1900|journal=Social Forces|volume=85|issue=3|pages=1393-1411|url=http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/social_forces/v085/85.3hallgrimsdottir.html|accessdate=2009-01-04}}</ref> at about the same time as the "rise of big business"<ref>Anarchist FAQ by Ian Mckay Section C p.196</ref><ref>Livesay, Harold C. Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business</ref> which marginalized skilled workers and increased the numbers of more easily controlled unskilled ones through "scientific" management, the open-shop, welfare capitalism and mass violence, thereby detracting from labor's class consciousness and its traditional aspirations to control the workplace.<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref>http://books.google.com/books?id=uoCNcKLzM_sC Strike! By Jeremy Brecher</ref><ref>Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-driven Political Systems by Thomas Ferguson p.72</ref>
The notion of wage slavery signifies a rejection of the ] to exploit workers and an embracement of a ] from exploitation which, nevertheless, entails the realization of interdependent positive freedom as well. Thus wage slavery, in the pervasively ] and ] usage of the term, is often understood as the absence of:
# A ] or ] society, especially with ] ] of the workplace and the ] as a whole,<ref name="marx1"></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref>
# Unconditional access to non-exploitative property and a fair share of the basic necessities of life,<ref></ref><ref></ref> and
# The ability of persons to, broadly speaking, have say over economic decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by those decisions.<ref>{{citebook |last=Albert |first=Michael |authorlink=Michael Albert |title=Life After Capitalism |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=Zc4p7vUXZyEC&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=parecon+in+proportion+affected&source=web&ots=SXCno7bevU&sig=oec6UDsqQIpzEqVjKk_oMjTangU&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result Parecon: Life After Capitalism] |page=32 |publisher=] |year=2003 |isbn=184467505X}}</ref>
In terminology used by some ], ] and various ] systems, wage slavery is the condition under which a person must sell his or her ], submitting to the ] of an employer in order to prosper or merely to ].<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref>
Thus wage slavery does not refer to the unavoidable subjection of man to nature (having to work to gain one's sustenance), but to the subjection of ''man to man'' (having to work for a boss). This assumes that ''"democratic control of one's productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice."''<ref>http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19760725.htm The Relevance of Anarcho-syndicalism Noam Chomsky interviewed by Peter Jay The Jay Interview, July 25, 1976</ref>


The term is often used by critics of ] to criticize the exploitation of labor and ], with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital, particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, such as in ],<ref>{{Harvnb|Sandel|1996|p=}}.</ref> and the latter is described as a lack of ], fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.<ref name="globetrotter.berkeley.edu">{{cite web|url=http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Chomsky/chomsky-con2.html|title=Conversation with Noam Chomsky|page=2|publisher=Globetrotter.berkeley.edu|access-date=28 June 2010}}</ref><ref name="HB">{{Harvnb|Hallgrimsdottir|Benoit|2007}}.</ref><ref name="spunk.org">{{cite web|title=The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counter-revolution|url=http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html|publisher=]|access-date=4 March 2013}}</ref> The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a ] society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character"<ref>{{Harvnb|Avineri|1968|p=142}}.</ref> not only under threat of ] and ], but also of ] and ] ].<ref name="Fitzhugh 1857">{{Harvnb|Fitzhugh|1857}}.</ref><ref name="schalkenbach1">{{Harvnb|George|1981|loc=}}.</ref><ref name="globetrotter.berkeley.edu" /> Historically, many socialist organisations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or ]s as possible alternatives to wage labor.<ref name="HB" /><ref name="Geoffrey Ostergaard p. 133" />
==Comparison with chattel slavery==
{{slavery}}


Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as ] in Ancient Rome, such as in '']''.<ref name="Cicero">{{cite book|last=Cicero|first=Marcus Tullius|author-link=Cicero|translator-last=Miller|translator-first=Walter|translator-link=Walter Miller (philologist)|orig-date=First written in October–November 44&nbsp;BC|chapter=Liber I|trans-chapter=Book I|chapter-url=https://www.loebclassics.com/view/marcus_tullius_cicero-de_officiis/1913/pb_LCL030.3.xml|editor-last=Henderson|editor-first=Jeffrey|title=De Officiis|trans-title=On Duties|url=https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL030/1913/volume.xml|url-status=live|series=] |language=la, en|volume=XXI|edition=Digital|location=Cambridge, MA|publisher=]|date=1 January 1913|pages=|doi=10.4159/DLCL.marcus_tullius_cicero-de_officiis.1913|isbn=978-0-674-99033-3|oclc=902696620|ol=7693830M|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180406221818/https://www.loebclassics.com/view/marcus_tullius_cicero-de_officiis/1913/pb_LCL030.153.xml|archive-date=6 April 2018|quote=XLII. Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery. Vulgar we must consider those also who buy from wholesale merchants to retail immediately; for they would get no profits without a great deal of downright lying; and verily, there is no action that is meaner than misrepresentation. And all mechanics are engaged in vulgar trades; for no workshop can have anything liberal about it. Least respectable of all are those trades which cater for sensual pleasures}}</ref> With the advent of the ], thinkers such as ] and ] elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, and engaged in ]<ref>{{Harvnb|Proudhon|1890}}.</ref><ref name="Marx 1863 c7">{{Harvnb|Marx|1969|loc=}}.</ref> while ]s emphasized the ] brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of ] and ].<ref name="English Working Class p. 599">{{Harvnb|Thompson|1966|p=599}}.</ref><ref name="English Working Class p. 912">{{Harvnb|Thompson|1966|p=912}}.</ref><ref name="Geoffrey Ostergaard p. 133">{{Harvnb|Ostergaard|1997|p=133}}.</ref><ref name="Shop Floor p. 37">{{Harvnb|Lazonick|1990|p=37}}.</ref>
The view that wage workers are in a position similar to, or worse than, that of chattel slaves was put forward in the 19th century both by Marxist critics of capitalism and by defenders of chattel slavery, most notably in the Southern states of the US.


Before the ], Southern defenders of keeping ] in ] invoked the concept of wage slavery to favourably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North.<ref>{{Harvnb|Foner|1995|p=xix}}.</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Jensen|2002}}.</ref> The United States abolished most forms of slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian ], in the 1870s through the 1890s "eferences abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase".<ref>{{cite book|author=Lawrence B. Glickman|title=A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uaZeBhl2QLYC&pg=PA19|year=1999|publisher=Cornell U.P.|page=19|isbn=978-0-8014-8614-2}}</ref>
The first articulate description of wage slavery was made by Simon Linguet in 1763, describing how it undermined ]ness and individual ], by basing them on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty i.e. as something that is sold, rented or alienated in a ]:


== History ==
{{quote |“The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him… Men's blood had some price in the days of slavery. They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market…It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him… what effective gain the suppression of slavery brought He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune… These men, it is said, have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence. They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?”<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch07.htm |title=Chapter 7 |work=Theories of Surplus Value |author=MARX, Karl |year=1863 |publisher=Marxists.org}}</ref>}}
] denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".<ref>{{Harvnb|Goldman|2003|p=}}.</ref>]]
The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world.<ref>''The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia''. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995. {{ISBN|0-8028-3784-0}}. p. 543.</ref> In ancient Rome, ] wrote that "the very wage receive is a pledge of their slavery".<ref name="Cicero"/>
According to this view, then, the fundamental differences between a chattel slave and a wage slave are:


In 1763, the French journalist ] published an influential description of wage slavery:<ref name="Marx 1863 c7"/> {{quote|The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him&nbsp;... They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market&nbsp;... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live&nbsp;... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him&nbsp;... what effective gain the suppression of slavery brought He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune&nbsp;... These men&nbsp;... the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need.&nbsp;... They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?}}
1. The chattel slave is property (]). As such, the chattel slave's 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, since the chattel slave's owner has made a greater investment in terms of the money he paid for the slave. For this reason, in times of recession, chattel 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<ref>{{cite web |url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0145-5532(198223)6%3A4%3C516%3ATHOASN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F |title=JStor}} The Height of American Slaves: New Evidence of Slave Nutrition and Health</ref> and, as historians Fogel and Engerman's reported, slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time."<ref name = "Fogel">Fogel & Engerman, Without Consent or Contract, New York: Norton, 1989, p. 391.</ref> This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an economic system different from capitalist wage slavery:
]es picking cotton on a plantation in the South]]


The view that wage work has substantial similarities with ] was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery (most notably in the Southern states of the United States) and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of chattel slavery).<ref name="schalkenbach1"/><ref>{{Harvnb|Marx|1990|p=?}}.</ref> Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the ], argued that Northern workers were "free but in name – the slaves of endless toil" and that their slaves were better off.<ref name="urlThe Hireling and the Slave – Antislavery Literature Project">{{cite web|url=http://antislavery.eserver.org/proslavery/graysonhireling|title=The Hireling and the Slave – Antislavery Literature Project|access-date=25 January 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120619063124/http://antislavery.eserver.org/proslavery/graysonhireling|archive-date=19 June 2012}}</ref><ref name="PBS">, PBS.</ref> This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time".<ref name="Margo Steckel">{{Harvnb|Margo|Steckel|1982}}.</ref><ref name="Fogel">{{Harvnb|Fogel|1994|p=391}}.</ref> In this period, ] wrote that "t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself."<ref>{{Harvnb|Thoreau|2004|p=49}}.</ref>
{{quote |“…the preindustrial nature of these labor systems allowed slaves to establish a distinctive African American culture which eschewed the values embraced by the master class. Although intrusive and oppressive, paternalism, the way masters employed it, and the methods slaves used to manipulate it, rendered slaveholders' attempts to institute capitalistic work regimens on their plantation ineffective and so allowed slaves to carve out a degree of autonomy, manifest in their cultural assumptions and behavior, under slavery. On the one hand, planters wanted to see themselves as beneficent masters, a position which their exploitation of slave labor required them to qualify. On the other, slaves exposed the hypocrisy of the paternalist double standard and by merely obeying but not necessarily complying with their masters' orders 'acted consciously and unconsciously to transform paternalism into a doctrine of protection of their own rights,' an 'assertion of their humanity,' and, ultimately, the transformation of privileges into customary rights and the attendant affirmation of their African American identity (Genovese, 1976, p.49) The effect of this accommodation-resistance dialectic... was to render slave-holders non-capitalist masters and, more importantly for this section, made slaves pre-industrial workers whose insistence on customary rights frustrated planters who were trying to exploit slave labor. (Genovese, 1976) Slaves' partial retention of an African, essentially preindustrial work ethic which, according to Genovese, stressed hard work but within a cultural framework which eschewed freneticism, time discipline, materialism, and acquisitive individualism, was a product of slaves' labor on southern plantations which were run by essentially precapitalist masters. This experience enabled slaves to create autonomous spheres{{ndash}} personal relationships, familial bonds, a distinctive slave religion. developed a variety of subtle techniques such as feigning illness, sabotage, and deliberate go-slows in order to protect themselves and their culture… slave women, by using contraceptives, engaging in sexual abstinence, and occasionally practicing infanticide, not only limited their own exploitation but circumscribed the planters' profits (Hine, 1979)… Once this system came under increasing political attack in the 1850s by northern proponents of free wage labor, southern masters found themselves fighting for their political independence by defending a slave society and plantation system that while not economically profitable was nonetheless ideologically and socially crucial to their way of life.”<ref>{{cite web |title=Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South p. 44 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=RpJm7wW2pmIC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=preindustrial+nature+of+these+labor+systems+allowed+slaves+to+establish+a+distinctive+african+american+culture&source=web&ots=HLnqh4eD0g&sig=MGh6hCnGjMw86HQDpbJozRTqSug#PPA44,M1}}</ref>}}
] famously denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves" <ref> Emma Goldman: A documentary History of the American Years</ref>]]
Similarly, various strategies and struggles adopted by wage slaves are deemed to have created extra-capitalist structures (], ] 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 ] that often take credit for the creation of these institutions.


] criticized the analogy as spurious.<ref name="Foner 1998 p66">{{Harvnb|Foner|1998|p=66}}.</ref> They argued that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed".<ref name="Weininger 2002 p95">{{Harvnb|Weininger|2002|p=95}}.</ref> ] and the ] argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as long as laborers were likely to develop the opportunity to work for themselves, achieving ].<ref name="Sandel 181">{{Harvnb|Sandel|1996|pp=}}.</ref> The abolitionist and former slave ] initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job.<ref name="Douglass 95">{{Harvnb|Douglass|1994|p=95}}</ref> However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "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".<ref>{{Harvnb|Douglass|2000|pp=676}}</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Douglass|1886|pp=}}</ref> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: <blockquote>No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.<ref>{{Harvnb|Douglass|1886|pp=}}</ref></blockquote>] wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South]]
2. A wage slave's starkest 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 (e.g. 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 economically rational slave owners practiced positive ] to achieve best results and before losing their investment (or even friendship) by killing an expensive slave.<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref>
Self-employment became less common as the ] tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century.<ref name="HB"/> In 1869, '']'' described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South".<ref name="Sandel 181"/> ] notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right".<ref name="English Working Class p. 599"/> A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the trade unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other; labor and capital will no longer be separate but will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women".<ref name="English Working Class p. 912"/> This perspective inspired the ] (UK) of 1834 which had the "two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions – the protection of the workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of the future society" when the unions "take over the whole industry of the country".<ref name="Geoffrey Ostergaard p. 133"/> ], summarized:<blockquote>Research has shown, that the 'free-born Englishman' of the eighteenth century – even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural wage labour – tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop.<ref name="Shop Floor p. 37" /></blockquote>The use of the term "wage slave" by labor organizations may originate from the labor protests of the ] in 1836.<ref>{{Harvnb|Laurie|1997}}.</ref> The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century to object to the lack of workers' self-management. However, it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century as labor organizations shifted their focus to raising wages.<ref name="HB"/> ] described capitalist society as infringing on individual ] because it is based on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented, or ] in a ]). According to ]:<ref>{{Harvnb|Engels|1969}}.</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm|author=Engels, Friedrich|date=October–November 1847|publisher=Marxists.org|title=The Principles of Communism}}</ref> {{quote|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.}}


=== Similarities of wage work with slavery ===
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 starvation, poverty or status diminution.
{{slavery|Contemporary}}
Critics of wage work have drawn several similarities between wage work and slavery:
# Since the chattel slave is property, his value to an owner is in some ways higher than that of a worker who may quit, be fired or replaced. The chattel slave's owner has made a greater investment in terms of the money paid for the slave. For this reason, in times of recession chattel slaves could not be fired like wage laborers. A "wage slave" could also be harmed at no (or less) cost. American chattel-slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living from the 18th century<ref name="Margo Steckel"/> and – according to historians Fogel and Engerman – plantation records show that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally – their material conditions in the 19th century being "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time".<ref name="Fogel"/> This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an economic system different from capitalist wage-slavery. According to Mark Michael Smith of the Economic History Society, "although intrusive and oppressive, paternalism, the way masters employed it, and the methods slaves used to manipulate it, rendered slaveholders' attempts to institute capitalistic work regimens on their plantation ineffective and so allowed slaves to carve out a degree of autonomy".<ref>{{Harvnb|Smith|1998|p= 44}}.</ref>
# Unlike a chattel slave, a wage laborer can (barring ] or lack of job offers) choose between employers, but those employers usually constitute a minority of owners in the population for which the wage laborer must work while attempts to implement ] on employers' businesses may be considered an act of theft or insubordination and thus be met with violence, imprisonment or other legal and social measures. The wage laborer's starkest choice is to work for an employer or to face poverty or starvation or turn to crime. If a chattel slave refuses to work, a number of punishments are also available; from beatings to food deprivation – although economically rational slave-owners practiced positive ] to achieve best results and before losing their investment by killing an expensive slave.<ref>{{Cite web |url= http://niahd.wm.edu/index.php?browse=entry&id=3089 |title= The Gray Area: Dislodging Misconceptions about Slavery |access-date= 27 September 2008 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20090114032053/http://niahd.wm.edu/index.php?browse=entry&id=3089 |archive-date= 14 January 2009 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url= http://home.triad.rr.com/warfford/Roman_Empire/slavery.html |title= Roman Household Slavery |access-date= 27 September 2008 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20080928184135/http://home.triad.rr.com/warfford/Roman_Empire/slavery.html |archive-date= 28 September 2008 }}</ref>
# Historically, the range of occupations and status positions held by chattel slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free persons, indicating some similarities between chattel slavery and wage slavery as well.<ref>. ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. "The highest position slaves ever attained was that of slave minister A few slaves even rose to be monarchs, such as the slaves who became sultans and founded dynasties in Islām. At a level lower than that of slave ministers were other slaves, such as those in the ], the Central Asian ], ] China, and elsewhere, who worked in government offices and administered provinces. The stereotype that slaves were careless and could only be trusted to do the crudest forms of manual labor was disproved countless times in societies that had different expectations and proper incentives".</ref>
# Like chattel slavery, wage slavery does not stem from some immutable "human nature", but represents a "specific response to material and historical conditions" that "reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations... the ideas... the social form of daily life".<ref name="Perlman 2002 p2">{{Harvnb|Perlman|2002|p= 2}}.</ref>
# Similarities became blurred when proponents of wage labor won the ] of 1861–1865, in which they competed for legitimacy with defenders of chattel slavery. Each side presented an over-positive assessment of their own system while denigrating the opponent.<ref name="Fitzhugh 1857"/><ref name="Foner 1998 p66"/><ref name="Weininger 2002 p95"/>


According to American ] philosopher ], workers themselves noticed the similarities between chattel and wage slavery. Chomsky noted that the 19th-century Lowell mill girls, without any reported knowledge of European ] or ], 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".<ref>{{Harvnb|Chomsky|2000}}.</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Chomsky|2011}}.</ref> They expressed their concerns in a ] during their 1836 strike:<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/liberty.html|title=Liberty|work=American Studies|publisher=CSI|access-date=2007-12-01|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120626072157/http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/liberty.html|archive-date=2012-06-26}}</ref>
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)<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm |author=MARX, Karl |date=1847-11 |publisher=Marxists.org |title=The Principles of Communism }}</ref><!-- Is this Marx as stated in this article, or Engels as in the referred site? -->


{{Poem quote|Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
] of two young women in Lowell, Massachusetts]]
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I'm so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.}}


]
5. The fact that ''"hroughout history the range of occupations and status positions held by slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free persons,"'' indicates some similarities with wage slavery as well:


Defenses of both wage labor and chattel slavery in the literature have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to ] – arguing that ] and a social system's particular ] represent ] and are no more coercive than the reality of ]. According to this narrative, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the ''status quo'' is naively ]n and will result in more oppressive conditions.<ref>{{Harvnb|Carsel|1940}}; {{Harvnb|Fitzhugh|1857}}; {{Harvnb|Norberg|2003}}.</ref> Bosses in both of these long-lasting systems argued that their respective systems ]. In some sense, both did create jobs, and their investment entailed risk. For example, slave-owners risked losing money by buying chattel slaves who later became ill or died; while bosses risked losing money by hiring workers (wage slaves) to make products that did not sell well on the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses; sometimes by working hard. The "rags to riches" story occasionally comes to pass in capitalism; the "slave to master" story occurred in places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom and become business owners, self-employed, or slave-owners themselves.<ref>{{Harvnb|Metcalf|2005|p= 201}}.</ref> Thus, critics of the concept of wage slavery do not regard ], or the hard work and risk that it may entail, as a redeeming factor.<ref>McKay, Iain. B.7.2 Does social mobility make up for class inequality? An Anarchist FAQ: Volume 1</ref>
''The highest position slaves ever attained was that of slave minister... A few slaves even rose to be monarchs, such as the slaves who became sultans and founded dynasties in Islām. At a level lower than that of slave ministers were other slaves, such as those in the Roman Empire, the Central Asian Samanid domains, Ch’ing China, and elsewhere, who worked in government offices and administered provinces. On a level similar to that of slaves working in government were the so-called temple slaves usually enjoyed a much easier life than other slaves. They served in occupations ranging from priestess to janitor.Slaves fought as soldiers...usually were considered of high status...The Egyptian Mamlūks were also professional soldiers of slave origin who rose to run the entire country. The African Hausa of Zaria and most Sudanic regimes included slaves in all ranks of the soldiery and command...In many societies slaves were employed as estate managers or bailiffs. In Muscovy estate managers were a special category of slave, and they were the first whose registration with the central authorities was required. Still other high-status slaves worked as merchants. Before the invention of the corporation, using slaves was one way to expand the family firm. The practice seems to have begun in Babylonia and was perpetuated in Rome, Spain, the Islāmic world, China, and Africa. Slaves were entrusted with large sums of money and were given charge of long-distance caravans. A few slaves in Muscovy were similarly employed in the Siberian fur trade...In nearly all societies possessing slaves, some slaves were found in what might be termed urban occupations ranging from petty shopkeepers to craftsmen...In the American South, ancient Rome, Muscovy, and many other societies, slaves worked as carpenters, tailors, and masons. In Bursa, Tur., some of the finest weaving ever done was by slave craftsmen, who often contracted to fulfill a certain amount of work in exchange for emancipation. The stereotype that slaves were careless and could only be trusted to do the crudest forms of manual labour was disproved countless times in societies that had different expectations and proper incentives.''<ref></ref>


Anthropologist ] has noted that historically the first wage-labor contracts we know about – whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or ] in the Indian Ocean – were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money and the slaves another, with which to maintain their living expenses). According to Graeber, such arrangements were quite common in ] as well, whether in the United States or in Brazil. ] (1901–1989) argued that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the ] first developed on ]s.<ref>
6. Arguably, wage slavery, like chattel slavery, does not stem from some immutable "human nature," but represents a "specific response to material and historical conditions" that "reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations...the ideas... the social form of daily life." <ref></ref>
{{Harvnb|Graeber|2004|p=
}}.
</ref>
Subsequent work "traces the innovations of modern ] to the slave plantation".<ref>
{{cite book
| last1 = Beckert
| first1 = Sven
| author-link1 = Sven Beckert
| last2 = Rockman
| first2 = Seth
| chapter = Introduction: Slavery's Capitalism
| editor1-last = Beckert
| editor1-first = Sven
| editor1-link = Sven Beckert
| editor2-last = Rockman
| editor2-first = Seth
| title = Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development
| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=PBbBDAAAQBAJ
| series = Early American Studies
| location = Philadelphia
| publisher = University of Pennsylvania Press
| date = 2016
| page = 15
| isbn = 978-0-8122-9309-8
| access-date = 1 December 2018
| quote = ] traces the innovations of modern management to the slave plantation . Rosenthal is among several scholars who have urged the centrality of slavery in the histories of management and accounting.
}}
</ref>


=== Changes in the use of the term ===
The similarities between chattel and wage slavery were certainly noticed by the workers themselves; for example, the 19th century ], 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."<ref></ref>
]
In their 1836 strike, this was one of their protest songs:
At the end of the 19th century, North American labor rhetoric turned towards consumerist and economics-based politics, from its previously radical, ] vision. Whereas labor organizations once referred to powerless disenfranchisement from the rise of industrial capitalism as "wage slavery", the phrase had fallen out of favor by 1890 as those organizations adopted pragmatic politics and phrases like "wage work".{{sfn|Hallgrimsdottir|Benoit|2007|p=1393}} American producerist labor politics emphasized the control of production conditions as being the guarantor of self-reliant, personal freedom. As factories began to bring artisans in-house by 1880, wage dependence replaced wage freedom as standard for skilled, unskilled, and unionized workers alike.{{sfn|Hallgrimsdottir|Benoit|2007|pp=1401–1402}}


As Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit point out: {{quote|ncreased centralization of production&nbsp;... declining wages&nbsp;... expanding&nbsp;... labor pool&nbsp;... intensifying competition, and&nbsp;... he loss of competence and independence experienced by skilled labor" meant that "a critique that referred to all work as slavery and avoided demands for wage concessions in favor of supporting the creation of the producerist republic (by diverting strike funds towards funding&nbsp;... co-operatives, for example) was far less compelling than one that identified the specific conditions of slavery as low wages|sign=|source={{harvnb|Hallgrimsdottir|Benoit|2007|pp=1397, 1404, 1402}} }}
<poem>: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 cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
:For I'm so fond of liberty,
:That I cannot be a slave.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/liberty.html |title=Liberty |work=American Studies |publisher=CSI}}</ref></poem>


In more general English-language usage, the phrase "wage slavery" and its variants became more frequent in the 20th century.<ref>
], who believes that such sentiments are "just below the surface",<ref name = "Chomsky">{{cite web |url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20070921.htm |title=Interview |author=CHOMSKY, Noam |date=2007-09-21}}</ref> has used the militant history of labor movements, ]'s theories about an "instinct for freedom", ]'s mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and ]'s evidence supporting an innate and universal moral faculty,<ref>Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Marc Hauser</ref> to explain the incompatibility of such oppression and greed with certain aspects of human nature.<ref>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3740467851698161135 On Just War Theory at West Point Academy: Hauser's theories "could some day provide foundations for a more substantive theory of just war," expanding on some of the existing legal "codifications of these intuitive judgments" that are regularly disregarded by elite power structures. (min 26-30)</ref><ref name = "Chomsky 2004">{{cite web |url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20040714.htm |title=Interview |author=CHOMSKY, Noam |date=2004-07-14}}</ref>
</ref>


== Treatment in various economic systems ==
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 cannot 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.<ref>[http://www.jstor.org/pss/2192167 The Slaveholders' Indictment of Northern Wage Slavery by
]]]
Wilfred Carsel]</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://reactor-core.org/cannibals-all.html |title=Cannibals All |publisher=Reactor Core}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Norberg |first=Johan |title=In Defense of Global Capitalism |publisher=Cato Institute |location=Washington |year=2003 |isbn=9781930865471 }}</ref> 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 self-employed, or slave owners themselves.<ref>Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil, Alida C. Metcalf, p. 201.</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Metcalf |first=Alida |title=Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil |publisher=University of Texas Press |location=Austin |year=2005 |isbn=9780292706521 }}</ref> 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:
Some anti-capitalist thinkers claim that the ] maintain wage ] and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/144225|title=Democracy Now|website=]|date=19 October 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071113204609/http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07%2F10%2F19%2F144225|archive-date=13 November 2007}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm|title=Interview|year=1992|author=Chomsky, Noam|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060721164116/http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm|archive-date=21 July 2006}}</ref> educational institutions, unjust laws, nationalist and ], pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure, ] violence, fear of unemployment, and a historical legacy of exploitation and profit accumulation/transfer under prior systems, which shaped the development of economic theory. ] noted that employers often conspire together to keep wages low and have the upper hand in conflicts between workers and employers:{{quote|The interest of the dealers&nbsp;... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public&nbsp;... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate&nbsp;... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.}}


=== Capitalism ===
{{quote |Even if the amount of social mobility in capitalism were as great as supporters of capitalism claim, it would not matter. If it is possible for someone to move from the lowest position of an authoritarian system to the highest position, it is still unethical because it is an authoritarian system. If it were possible to go from homeless person to dictator within a fascist system, fascism would still be wrong. In many Leninist states there were individuals who went from being a worker to being part of the ruling class, in some cases even joining the Politburo, yet that does not make Marxist totalitarianism an acceptable system...The existence of social mobility does not justify a social system… , manipulating portfolios doesn’t produce anything useful; sticking money in the bank and letting it accumulate interest isn’t hard work... The workers take as much of a risk, if not more, as the capitalist. If the business fails the worker is unemployed. The worker is then usually in a worse situation then the capitalist because the capitalist is wealthy and can weather such a situation much easier than those on lower levels of the hierarchy. In addition, many jobs entail risks to workers' life or limb, whereas investment does not.<ref name = "Question">{{cite web |url=http://question-everything.mahost.org/Socio-Politics/capitalism.html |title=Capitalism |work=Question Everything}}</ref>}}
] escort strikebreakers in Buchtel, Ohio, 1884]]
]' 1928 book, '']''.]]
] troops attack ] ] "wage slavery" critics who had demanded among other things that "handicraft production be authorized provided it does not utilize wage labour".<ref>{{Harvnb|Brendel|1971}}.</ref>]]
The methods of control in wage systems, differ substantially from those in chattel systems. For example, in his book, '']'', American physicist and writer Jeff Schmidt points out that professionals are trusted to run organisations in the interests of their employers. The key word is ’trust’. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to “ensure that each and every detail of their work favours the right interests – or skewers the disfavoured ones” in the absence of overt control. Schmidt continues:
The concept of wage slavery could conceivably be traced back to pre-capitalist figures like ] from the radical Christian ] movement in England, who wrote in his 1649 pamphlet, ''The New Law of Righteousness'', that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man" and "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself".<ref name="Graham-2005">{{Harvnb|Graham|2005}}.</ref>


] stated that "the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue), nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics)",<ref>Aristotle, '']'' 1328b–1329a, H. Rackham trans.</ref> often paraphrased as "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind".<ref name="quotationspage.com">{{cite web | url=http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/1097.html | title=The Quotations Page: Quote from Aristotle}}</ref> ] wrote in 44 BC that "vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery".<ref name="Cicero"/> Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of ], like ] and ];<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html|title=Social Security History|website=www.ssa.gov}}</ref> ], who inspired the economic philosophy known as ];<ref name="schalkenbach1" /> and the ] school of thought within the ].
''"The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology."''<ref>Schmidt, '''', Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000, p. 16.</ref> Schmit goes on to show with statistical evidence that subordination to elite ideology, including aggression, is greater among those with more schooling,<ref></ref> a conclusion corroborated in other studies as well.<ref>Lies My Teacher Told Me p.297-304</ref> Nevertheless, some theorists have placed people like managers and professionals within a "managerial" or "coordinator class" somewhere in between wage slaves and capital, because they tend to "monopolize empowering labor in their jobs - while others, who we called the working class, do overwhelmingly only rote, obedient, tedious labor."<ref></ref> This perspective, however, doesn't seem to draw very sharp distinctions, because it maintains that managers tend to "...become parasitic in proportion to their proximity to the top of the pyramid...the further the distance from the production process, the higher the salary; whereas the closer the distance, the more likely that a 'manager' is a worker with a little more power than average."<ref></ref>
In ''Propaganda'' (1928), the father of ] ] argued that "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 have never heard of."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html |title=History is a weapon}}</ref>
Similarly ] 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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/mc/mc-supp-040.html |title=ZMag}}</ref>


To ] and anarchist thinkers like ] and ], wage slavery was a ] in place due to the existence of ] and the ]. This class situation rested primarily on:
Some supporters of chattel slavery claimed that those who hadn't studied in depth the economic and social aspects of slavery, could not form a reasoned opinion on the matter.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughcan/menu.html |title=Doc South |publisher=UNC}}</ref>
# The existence of property not intended for active use;
Similarly, some modern economists believe that the uneducated are not in a position to reject economic systems involving wage slavery. For example ] winning economist ] 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?"<ref>{{cite web |url=http://infoshop.org/library/Fredy_Perlman:_Intro_Commodity_Fetishism#_ref-5 |title=Introduction to Commodity Fetishism |authorlink=Fredy Perlman |author=Perlman, Fredy |publisher=Infoshop}}</ref>
# The concentration of ownership in few hands;
# The lack of direct access by workers to the ] and consumption goods; and
# The perpetuation of a ].
And secondarily on:
# The waste of workers' efforts and resources on producing useless luxuries;
# The waste of goods so that their price may remain high; and
# The waste of all those who sit between the producer and consumer, taking their own shares at each stage without actually contributing to the production of goods, i.e. the ].


=== Fascism ===
==Role in the development of the modern nation-state==
Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States.<ref>{{Harvnb|De Grand|2004|pp=48–51}}.</ref> ] was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate investment (notably from the United States) in Germany increased after the fascists took power.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v13/3/oil.html|title=A People's History of the United States|website=web.mit.edu}}</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Kolko|1962|pp=725–726}}: "General Motors' involvement in Germany's military preparations was the logical outcome of its forthright export philosophy of seeking profits wherever and however they might be made, irrespective of political circumstances. By April 1939, G.M. had applied its credo to its fullest limits, for Opel, its wholly owned subsidiary, was (along with Ford) Germany's largest tank producer. The details of additional American business involvement with German industry fill dozens of volumes of government hearings".</ref>
] in 1912.]]


Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like ], to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery: {{quote|No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the ] sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.<ref>Quote from an interview with Pierre van Paassen (24 July 1936), published in the ''Toronto Daily Star'' (5 August 1936)</ref>}}
Wage slavery played a very important role in the modern consolidation of the ] 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 powerful states, distinguish...from the multinational corporate system, the conglomerates that rely on them, that have a relation of both dependency and domination to them...heir intellectual roots...come out of the same neo-Hegelian conceptions of the rights of organic entities that led to bolshevism and fascism."''<ref></ref><ref></ref>


== Psychological effects ==
] troops attack ] ] workers who had demanded among other things that "handicraft production be authorised provided it does not utilise wage labour."]]
]]]
According to ], analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the ] era. In his 1791 book '']'', classical liberal thinker ] explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is".<ref>{{Harvnb|Chomsky|1993|p=}}.</ref> Because they explore human authority and obedience, both the ] and ] have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.<ref>{{Harvnb|Thye|Lawler|2006}}.</ref>


=== Self-identity problems and stress ===
The close link between property and the state has been noted by many outstanding thinkers. For example ], who in 1690 wrote that ''"he great and chief end...of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property"''<ref>http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtr09.htm John Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government: Chapter 9</ref> or ] 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 is great property there is 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"''.<ref></ref> This tight link between property and state was also noted by ] (who repeatedly said that "Those who own the country ought to govern it,")<ref>http://www.bartleby.com/73/764.html Frank Monaghan, John Jay, chapter 15, p. 323 (1935). According to Monaghan, this “was one of his favorite maxims.”</ref> and by US Founding Father ], who said that government ''"...ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."''<ref></ref>
According to research,<ref name="auto">{{Harvnb|Price|Friedland|Vinokur|1998}}.</ref> modern work provides people with a sense of personal and social identity that is tied to:
# The particular work role, even if unfulfilling; and
# The social role it entails e.g. family bread-winning, friendship forming and so on.
Thus job loss entails the loss of this identity.<ref name="auto"/>


] argued that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then when that person loses (or even thinks of losing) what he "owns" (e.g. the good looks or sharp mind that allow him to sell his labor for high wages) a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies because that person's sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when a person's sense of self is based on what he experiences in a "state of being" with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost, or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail. In his view, the state of being flourishes under a worker-managed workplace and economy, whereas self-ownership entails a materialistic notion of self, created to rationalize the lack of worker control that would allow for a state of being.<ref>{{Harvnb|Fromm|1995|p=?}}.<br />You can see Fromm discussing these ideas .</ref>
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.<ref>p.199 ''Bad Samaritans'', Ha-Joon Chang</ref> This organized pressure interacts with other economic factors, such as the need to stimulate demand (and thus workers' wages) and the relative power of internationally-oriented ] vs. nationally oriented ] business; with the former being more Liberal party-oriented, and the latter leaning more toward parties that oppose welfare measures and organized labor more forcefully.<ref>Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-driven Political Systems by Thomas Ferguson</ref> Individual political contributions by isolated average voters cannot efficiently compete with such influential, organized and motivated actors who invest loans, gifts or "cash paid in the form of excessive consultant, lawyer and other third party fees"; or function as lobbyists or "sources of contacts, as fundraisers (rather than mere contributors), and, especially, as sources of legitimization for candidates and positions. In particular the interaction of high business figures and the press." These actors constitute '"locs of major investors define the core of political parties and...most of the signals the party sends to the electorate, realignments...when cumulative long-run changes in industrial structures (commonly interacting with a variety of short-run factors, notably steep economic downturns) polarize the business community, thus bringing together a new and powerful bloc of investors with durable interests."<ref></ref>
This multi-party competition for control of the state can also morph, or be replaced by other elite elements; forming a one party state<ref>Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-driven Political Systems by Thomas Ferguson p.35</ref> that relies more on violence than thought control.<ref>''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky</ref>


Investigative journalist ] analyzed the work of public-health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen Hall about modern conditions of work and concludes that "to be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as mentally". Under wage labor, "a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy, and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours" while "epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work".<ref>{{Harvnb|Kuttner|1997|pp=153–54}}.</ref>
Though seemingly paradoxical, the most prominent current critic of wage slavery, the anarchist ], has defended the temporary use of state power on the grounds that it prevents even more oppressive forms of authority and wage slavery:


Wage slavery and the educational system that precedes it "implies power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption&nbsp;... in spite of&nbsp;... good intentions&nbsp;... power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his&nbsp;... order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being 'the men'&nbsp;... In a word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy". For the "leader", such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader "sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion".<ref>{{Harvnb|Ablett|1991|pp=15–17}}.</ref> Wage slavery "implies erosion of the human personality&nbsp;... some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows".<ref>quoted by Jose Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, vol. 2, p. 76</ref>
<blockquote>
"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{{ndash}} 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{{ndash}} transferring the decision making to unaccountable private interests{{ndash}} is not helpful to human beings or to democracy... so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage."<ref></ref><ref></ref>
</blockquote>


=== Psychological control ===
==Treatment in various economic systems==
{{anarchism sidebar|economics}}
] escort strikebreakers in Buchtel, Ohio, 1884. ] is a traditional way of maintaining wage slavery.]]
Wage slavery exists in various systems, including ]s, but given the prevalence of modern capitalism, it is often described as a lack of ] 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 ]. S/he faces starvation when unable or unwilling to rent him/herself to those who own the capital and means of production. ], and sometimes a state elite, own the means of life (land, industry etc) and gain profit or power simply from granting permission to use them. This they do in exchange for wages.
Though most opponents of wage slavery favor possessions for non-exploitative personal use, they oppose the "freedom" to use property for the exploitation of others (non-labor income); claiming that private ownership of the means of life is theft and that sometimes a person's freedom ends where another person's begins<ref>].</ref> (e.g. my freedom to opress, kill, steal etc violates yours). Given that workers are the majority, they believe that the elite maintain wage ] and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/144225 |title=Democracy Now |date=2007-10-19}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm |title=Interview |year=1992 |author=CHOMSKY, Noam}}</ref> educational institutions, unjust laws, nationalist and corporate ], pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://question-everything.mahost.org/Socio-Politics/thoughtcontrol.html |title=Thought Control |work=Socio-Politics |publisher=Question Everything}}</ref> ] 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:


==== Higher wages ====
{{quote |“Other workers, not capitalists, produced the means of production. The capitalist often obtains them with the money from previous profits. Those profits in turn came from previous profits and so on back to the origins of capitalism. Those original accumulations of money used to start this whole process of capitalist accumulation came from fortunes made as a result of conquest & direct expropriation (such as colonialism, the slaughter of native Americans etc) as well as fortunes achieved under pre-capitalist class societies such as feudalism or slavery. Thus from a historical perspective capitalism cannot be considered just.”<ref name = "Question" />}}
In 19th-century discussions of labor relations, it was normally assumed that the threat of starvation forced those without property to work for wages. Proponents of the view that modern forms of employment constitute wage slavery, even when workers appear to have a range of available alternatives, have attributed its perpetuation to a variety of social factors that maintain the ] of the employer class.<ref name="Perlman 2002 p2"/><ref>Gramsci, A. (1992) ''Prison Notebooks''. New York : Columbia University Press, pp. 233–38</ref>
The notion that "asic supply and demand theory would indicate that those economic theories which have utility to others would be provided by economists," entails that "n a system with inequalities of wealth, effective demand is skewed in favour of the wealthy." Therefore, wage slavery-apologetics and omissions are considered, by some radical economists and intellectuals, to be the main motor behind the "unscientific" nature and "unrealistic assumptions" of modern ], and many of the "irrelevant...mathematical models" which attempt to legitimize it, particularly by ignoring "power disparities" in the market and workplace, while ''"concentrating upon the 'subjective' evaluations of individuals... are abstracted away from real economic activity (i.e. production) so the source of profits and power... exploitation of labour...interest and rent can be ignored... exchanges in the market... abstinence or waiting by the capitalist, the productivity of capital, 'time-preference,' entrepreneurialism and so forth."'' Allegedly, ''"hese rationales have developed over time, usually in response to socialist and anarchist criticism of capitalism and its economics (starting in response to the so-called ] Socialists who predated ] and ] and who first made such an analysis commonplace)."''<ref></ref>
]]]
Preceding these thinkers, however, was ], who while offering an argument for markets based on the notion that under conditions of perfect liberty markets would lead to perfect equality, stated that the value created by workers in production must exceed the wages paid,<ref></ref> and articulated in '']'' some factors in the development of wage slavery:


In an account of the Lowell mill girls, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote that generously high wages were offered to overcome the degrading nature of the work: {{quote|At the time the Lowell cotton mills were started the caste of the factory girl was the lowest among the employments of women.&nbsp;... She was represented as subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and selfrespect. In the eyes of her overseer she was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten, pinched and pushed about. It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become millgirls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation.<ref>Robinson, Harriet H. "," in Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Fourteenth Annual Report (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1883), pp. 38082, 38788, 39192.</ref>}}
<blockquote>
"The interest of the dealers in any particular branch and trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from and even opposite to, that of the public.... have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public...We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily... he man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible to become for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life."<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref>
</blockquote>


In his book '']'', ] points out that professionals are trusted to run organizations in the interests of their employers. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to "ensure that each and every detail of their work favors the right interests–or skewers the disfavored ones" in the absence of overt control: {{quote|The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.<ref>{{Harvnb|Schmidt|2000|p=16}}.</ref>}}
===Capitalism===
Wage slavery as a concept is often a criticism of capitalism, defined as a condition in which a capitalist class (often a minority of the population) controls all of the necessary non-human components of production (], ]) that other people (workers) use to produce goods. This sort of criticism is generally associated with ] and ] criticisms of capitalism, and could conceivably be traced back to pre-capitalist figures like ] from the radical Christian ] movement in England, who wrote in his 1649 pamphlet, ''The New Law of Righteousness'', that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man," and "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself."<ref name="Graham-2005">Robert Graham, ''Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas - Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939)'', Black Rose Books, 2005</ref> Though perhaps the concept dates back to ], who in 44 BC wrote that "...vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery."<ref>] Liber I XI.II</ref>
Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of ], like ],<ref name="schalkenbach1"/> ] and ],<ref></ref> as well as the ] school of thought within the ]. Criticism of capitalism on these grounds, however, might not always be connected to the belief that one should have ] to work without a boss. ]]]


] (participatory economics) theory posits a social class "between labor and capital" of higher paid professionals such as "doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers and others" who monopolize empowering labor and constitute a class above wage laborers who do mostly "obedient, rote work".<ref>{{cite web|last=Tedrow|first=Matt<!-- Don't know where 'DC' comes from. You can look up Tedrow on Twitter. He's also currently (05/3/2013) doctoral student at Texas. -->|date=4 July 2007|title=Parecon and Anarcho-Syndicalism: An Interview with Michael Albert|url=http://www.zcommunications.org/parecon-and-anarcho-syndicalism-an-interview-with-michael-albert-by-michael-albert|publisher=]|access-date=5 March 2013}}</ref>
The extreme subordination generated by wage slavery has also been recognized by right wing bosses like US financier & railroad businessman ] (1836–1892), who famously said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."<ref>http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33148.html</ref> The concept of '''wage slavery''' suggests that even where the conditions of chattel slavery do not apply, wage earners may experience social and psychological predicaments which are similar to those stemming from ].


==== Lower wages ====
Anthropologist ] has noted that, historically, the first wage labor contracts we know about{{mdash}}whether in ancient ] or ], or in the ] or ] city states in the ]{{mdash}}were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money, and the slave, another, with which to maintain his or her living expenses.) Such arrangements were quite common in ] slavery as well, whether in the ] or ].
The terms "employee" or "worker" have often been replaced by "associate" or "partner". This plays up the allegedly voluntary nature of the interaction while playing down the subordinate status of the wage laborer as well as the worker-boss class distinction emphasized by labor movements. Billboards as well as television, Internet and newspaper advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.<ref>{{Harvnb|Ehrenreich|2009}}.</ref>
C. L. R. James made a famous argument that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the ] were first developed on slave ].<ref></ref>


Job interviews and other data on requirements for lower skilled workers in developed countries – particularly in the growing service sector – indicate that the more workers depend on low wages and the less skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for workers without better employment options and expect them to feign unremunerative motivation.<ref name="Ehrenreich 2011">{{Harvnb|Ehrenreich|2011}}.</ref> Such screening and feigning may not only contribute to the positive self-image of the employer as someone granting desirable employment, but also signal wage-dependence by indicating the employee's willingness to feign, which in turn may discourage the dissatisfaction normally associated with job-switching or union activity.<ref name="Ehrenreich 2011"/>
]]]
To ] and anarchist thinkers like ] and ] wage slavery was a ] in place due to the existence of ] and the ]. This class situation rested primarily on
#the concentration of ownership in few hands,
#the lack of direct access by workers to the ] and consumption goods
#the existence of the ].


At the same time, employers in the service industry have justified unstable, part-time employment and low wages by playing down the importance of service jobs for the lives of the wage laborers (e.g. just temporary before finding something better, student summer jobs and the like).<ref>{{Harvnb|Klein|2009|p=}}.</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last=McClelland|first=Mac|title=I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave|url=https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor|journal=]|issue=March/April 2012|access-date=4 March 2013}}</ref>
and secondarily on


In the early 20th century, "scientific methods of strikebreaking"<ref>{{Harvnb|Steuben|1950}}.</ref> were devised – employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined "harmony" and "Americanism".<ref>{{Harvnb|Chomsky|2002|p=}}.</ref><!-- "Early 20th century", but sources are early 21st century? -->
#the waste of workers' efforts and resources on producing useless luxuries;
#the waste of goods so that their price may remain high; and
#the waste of all those who sit between the producer and consumer, taking their own shares at each stage without actually contributing to the production of goods.
]]]
A disparity in bargaining power compels wage slaves to accept a predicament they wouldn't otherwise consent to. Some critics of capitalism argue that wage slavery is present in all capitalist societies, even the richest ones. This has to do with two factors:


== Workers' self-management ==
# '''Wealth disparities''': Even in a rich country like "the United States, the richest 1% of the population... owns more wealth then the bottom 95% of the population combined. It is physically impossible for that one percent to work harder than the other ninety-five percent. The average American worker works around 50 hours a week; for the capitalists to work ninety-five times more than the average worker he would have to work 4,250 hours a week. There are only 168 hours in a week; it's not possible for this wealth disparity to be the result of capitalists working harder."<ref></ref><ref></ref>
{{anarcho-communism sidebar|concepts}}
#'''Power disparities''': The higher wages received by some workers in industrialized countries do not obviate the authoritarianism critics perceive in capitalist institutions—just as the improving material conditions of chattel slaves in the American south didn't obviate chattel slavery. Labor is treated as commodity, just like food or healthcare. The lack of democratic control of industry means that workers do not have a say over decisions in proportion to how much they are affected by those decisions. This, in turn prevents workers from directing their destinies and achieving a society where ''"work is not only a means of life, but the highest want in life."''<ref></ref> Even high -paid professionals and intellectuals like lawyers and scientists may be considered wage slaves, since many of them rent and subordinate their mental powers to capitalists and other elites— getting ahead in the hierarchy by internalizing values that are serviceable to the powers that be. Even if every wage slave managed to become well fed, clothed, had healthcare etc; he'd still be in a position of subordination and deprivation of freedom.
Some social activists objecting to the ] or ] of wage working historically have considered ], ]s, ] and ] as possible alternatives to the current wage system.<ref name="globetrotter.berkeley.edu"/><ref name="HB"/><ref name="spunk.org"/><ref name="Geoffrey Ostergaard p. 133"/>


=== Labor and government ===
To this argument, Marx added:
The American philosopher ] believed that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "]", politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business".<ref>"As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance", in "The Need for a New Party" (1931), Later Works 6, p. 163</ref> ] has postulated in his ] that the undemocratic nature of economic institutions under capitalism causes elections to become occasions when blocs of investors coalesce and compete to control the state.<ref>{{Harvnb|Ferguson|1995}}.</ref>


] has argued that political theory tends to blur the 'elite' function of government:
<blockquote>
"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers...Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is...The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode of production and form of property{{ndash}} historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production{{ndash}} this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property...You are horrified at our intending to do away with private ownership of the means of production. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society."<ref></ref><ref name="marx1"/>
</blockquote>


{{quote|Modern political theory stresses Madison's belief that "in a just and a free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded." But in this case too it is useful to look at the doctrine more carefully. There are no rights of property, only rights to property that is, rights of persons with property,...
Many advocates of wage labor claim that consumer choice in capitalist societies constitutes an improvement in the standard of living and that today's wage slaves have many more consumer choices than chattel slaves. They claim that the market system reflects "what people want" and that people "vote with their dollars".<ref></ref> There is indeed evidence that many wage slaves in the 21st century have higher standards of living and more consumer choice than chattel slaves in the 18th and 19th century (although 21st century wealth inequalities are vast);<ref></ref> but some historians don't find the comparison of vastly disparate time periods to be particularly revealing. Historians Fogel and Engerman, for example, reported that slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time".<ref>Without Consent or Contract, New York: Norton, 1989, p. 391</ref> Wage slaves' standard of living has improved since the beginning of the industrial revolution and similarly, American chattel slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living from the 18th century.<ref></ref><ref></ref>
]" and ] were widely adopted after the term "]" gained negative connotations due to association with the ].<ref></ref>]]


In representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly – and critically – the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19760725.htm|title=The Relevance of Anarcho-syndicalism|last=Chomsky|first=Noam|date=July 25, 1976}}</ref>}}
Critics of capitalism claim that "voting with dollars" means that those with more dollars have more votes. They maintain that several undiscussed factors affect consumer behavior. For example, educational institutions cater to the ideological needs of the biggest employers (government, corporations); the media are profit seeking corporations selling affluent audiences to advertisers and relying primarily on business and government information; intellectuals tend to get ahead in the hierarchy and become influential by adopting and disseminating ideas that are serviceable to power; and a stated purpose of the advertising industry is to artificially "create wants" and stir away from consumer choices that may harm capitalist power (e.g. the most popular newspaper in England, the Daily Herald went out of circulation because of advertiser discrimination; news organizations stir away from programs hinting at systemic causes for societal problems even if these programs are popular.)<ref></ref> All this, they claim, distorts the framework of consumer choice and the psychological make up of consumers in a way that reflects elite interests and will, rather than that of consumers. Furthermore, in state capitalist societies, corporations in conjunction with governments have pushed for measures such as elimination of public transportation and alternate forms of energy, as well as propaganda to justify subidies to high technology industry through military expenditures. These measures, as well as the subsidies, bailouts and protectionism that allowed many countries to develop and create products at the public's expense (and without their consent), altered available choices and ideas and also allowed many industries to become competitive in subsequent "free markets"<ref></ref> whose development had therefore little to do with consumer choice.<ref></ref>
A number of psychologists and environmental experts have presented evidence showing that rampant western consumerism is harming the planet (and human beings), and becoming a substitute for activities that are emotionally more fulfilling.<ref></ref><ref> </ref>
Most importantly, critics claim that "consumer choice" is only half the story, because people are not only consumers— they are also workers, and very often, their choice in the capitalist work environment is "work for a boss or starve"; i.e. it is limited to a (sometimes possible) choice among bosses and it doesn't involve choices and decisions regarding production, distribution, working hours, regulations, hierarchy etc (i.e. the choice to have higher control over one's productive life therefore one's destiny) because the workplace and the economy (including the advertising industry and entertainment industry) are not run democratically.


In this regard, Chomsky has used Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom",<ref name="Chomsky">{{cite web|url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20070921.htm|title=A Revolution is Just Below the Surface|last=Chomsky|first=Noam|date=21 September 2007}}</ref> the militant history of labor movements, Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and ]'s theories supporting an innate and universal moral faculty,<ref>{{Harvnb|Hauser|2006}}.</ref> to explain the incompatibility of oppression with certain aspects of human nature.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3740467851698161135|title=On Just War Theory at West Point Academy: Hauser's theories "could some day provide foundations for a more substantive theory of just war," expanding on some of the existing legal "codifications of these intuitive judgments" that are regularly disregarded by elite power structures. (min 26–30)}}</ref><ref name="Chomsky 2004">{{cite web|url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20040714.htm|title=Interview|author=Chomsky, Noam|date=14 July 2004}}</ref>
Already in the 19th century, Marx had pointed out some of the ways in which technology could be used to alienate workers:


=== Influence on environmental degradation ===
<blockquote>
] philosophy professor John Clark and libertarian socialist philosopher ] have criticized the system of wage labor for encouraging environmental destruction, arguing that a self-managed industrial society would better manage the environment. Like other anarchists,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionE|title=An Anarchist FAQ Section E – What do anarchists think causes ecological problems?|access-date=2011-04-05|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110510073028/http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionE|archive-date=2011-05-10}}</ref> they attribute much of the Industrial Revolution's pollution to the "hierarchical" and "competitive" economic relations accompanying it.<ref>{{Harvnb|Bookchin|1990|p=44}}; {{Harvnb|Bookchin|2001|pp=1–20}}; {{Harvnb|Clark|1983|p=114}}; {{Harvnb|Clark|2004}}.</ref>
"Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc."<ref></ref>
</blockquote>


=== Employment contracts ===
Psychoanalyst ] believed that the lack of worker's control and unhappiness/ dissatisfaction at the workplace means that people compensate their emptiness by seeking substitutes elsewhere (religious fundamentalism, drugs, consumerism etc). Fromm thought it very likely that a democratic, not-for-profit work environment would enable more choices for workers, having a drastic effect on subsequent consumer choice and all the mechanisms currently associated with it (advertising, marketing, concentration of capital etc){{ndash}} as well as on the human psyche.<ref></ref>
Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. ] and ], arguing that the ] is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and ], which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities or the produced outputs of the employer's business".<ref>{{Harvnb|Ellerman|2005|p=16}}.</ref> Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain a ''de facto'' fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person" as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination.<ref>{{Harvnb|Ellerman|2005|p=14}}.</ref> As Pateman argues:
<!-- Image with inadequate rationale removed: ] analyzes institutional factors causing journalistic subordination in the corporate ] wage system.]] -->
{{quote|The contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can 'acquire' an external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept that the 'exchange' between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property ... The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property.<ref>{{Harvnb|Ellerman|2005|p=32}}.</ref>}}


In a modern liberal capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature and the latter being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted economist ] described this discrepancy: {{quote|Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/Inalienable-rights-and-contracts.pdf|title=Ellerman, David, ''Inalienable Rights and Contracts'', 21|access-date=2020-07-09|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081120120938/http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ%26Pol-Econ/Inalienable-rights-and-contracts.pdf|archive-date=2008-11-20}}</ref>}}
In '']'' and ''The Myth of the Liberal Media'', ] and Noam Chomsky present a substantial body of evidence showing striking qualitative and quantitative differences in the coverage of facts and events in the corporate capitalist media on the basis of their serviceability to elite groups. Their ] identifies 5 major institutional factors affecting media behavior. In order to be hired, journalists, like other intellectual wage laborers, are pressured to internalize the ideological constraints of the institutional structure-- a task that usually starts in educational institutions and works as a filtering system. Therefore, unlike journalists in totalitarian states, western journalists can serve elite interests without being subject to state coercion. As their counterparts in totalitarian states, they identify freedom with the elite that dominates their power structure:


Some advocates of ], among them philosopher ], address this inconsistency in modern societies arguing that a consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights: {{quote|The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.<ref>{{Harvnb|Ellerman|2005|p=2}}.</ref>}}
<blockquote>
"We have a free press, meaning it’s not state controlled but corporate controlled; that’s what we call freedom. What we call freedom is corporate control. We have a free press because it’s corporate monopoly, or oligopoly, and that’s called freedom. We have a free political system because there’s one party run by business; there's a business party with two factions, so that’s a free political system. The terms freedom and democracy, as used in our Orwellian political discourse, are; based on the assumption that a particular form of domination—namely, by owners, by business elements—is freedom."<ref></ref>
</blockquote>


Other economists including ] allow for the possibility of ], asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages: {{quote|f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work.<ref>{{Harvnb|Rothbard|2009|p=164 n.34}}.</ref>}}
In a thorough study of war coverage comparing Soviet and western journalism, ] concluded that


== Schools of economics ==
<blockquote>
In the philosophy of mainstream, ], ] is seen as the ], just like a carpenter would sell a chair, or a farmer would sell wheat. It is considered neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship and carries no particular moral implications.<ref>{{Harvnb|Mankiw|2012}}.</ref>
"ike the Soviet media, Western professional journalists adopt and echo government statements as their own, as self-evidently true, without subjecting them to rational analysis and challenge. As a result, they allow themselves to become the mouthpieces of state power. It is fundamentally the same role performed by the media under Soviet totalitarianism."<ref></ref>
</blockquote>


] argues that a person is not "free" unless they can sell their labor because otherwise that person has no ] and will be owned by a "third party" of individuals.<ref>{{Harvnb|Mises|1996|pp=}}.</ref>
A number of economic think tanks and analysts have favored a return to the days of Keynesian state capitalism, suggesting that the increased inequalities and slower rate of world economic growth in the neoliberal period (from the 70s till the present), as well as the "undemocratic... virtual senate of investors and lenders" created by financial liberalization, exacerbate the conditions of wage slavery.<ref></ref><ref></ref>


] perceives wage slavery as resulting from ] between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not "allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force".<ref>{{Harvnb|Bober|2007|pp=}}. See also {{Harvnb|Keen|c. 1990}}.</ref>
Other economists consider wage labor to be the central cause of the capitalist ]; i.e. the key to understanding its workings is that in addition to the disproportionalities within the market created by the lack of communication (thus information) that stems from its competitive, hierarchical environment, the workers' resistance against capitalist authority is the main force behind it:


The two main forms of ] perceive wage slavery differently:
'''Property sells products to the labourer for more than it pays him for them; therefore it is impossible.' In other words... the system is based upon wage labour and the producers are not producing for themselves.... Capitalism is production for profit and when the capitalist class does not (collectively) get a sufficient rate of profit for whatever reason then a slump is the result. If workers produced for themselves, this decisive factor would not be an issue as no capitalist class would exist. Until that happens the business cycle will continue, driven by 'subjective' and 'objective' pressures{{ndash}} pressures that are related directly to the nature of capitalist production and the wage labour on which it is based. Which pressure will predominate in any given period will be dependent on the relative power of classes. One way to look at it is that slumps can be caused when working class people are 'too strong' or 'too weak.' The former means that we are able to reduce the rate of exploitation, squeezing the profit rate by keeping an increased share of the surplus value we produce ... capitalists try to maintain them by increasing prices, i.e. by passing costs onto consumers, leading to inflation. The latter means we are too weak to stop income distribution being shifted in favour of the capitalist class, which results in over-accumulation and rendering the economy prone to a failure in aggregate demand ...products are above the purchasing power of the worker.''<ref></ref>
# ] sees it as a lack of ] in the context of substituting state and capitalist control with political and economic decentralization and ].
# ] view it as an injustice perpetrated by capitalists and solved through ] and ] of the ].
{{clear}}


== Criticism ==
In this theory, the dynamics of wage slavery closely interact with the fact that capitalists plan not with respect of demand at the present moment, but with respect to future demand. The need to maximise profits results in more and more investment in order to improve the productivity of the workforce (i.e. to increase the amount of surplus value produced). A rise in productivity, however, means that whatever profit is produced is spread over an increasing number of commodities. This profit still needs to be realised on the market but this may prove difficult as capitalists produce not for existing markets but for expected ones. As individual firms cannot predict what their competitors will do, it is rational for them to try to maximise their market share by increasing production (by increasing investment). As the market does not provide the necessary information to co-ordinate their actions, this leads to supply exceeding demand and difficulties realising sufficient profits. In other words, a period of over-production occurs due to the over-accumulation of capital.
Some ] in the United States regarded the analogy of wage workers as wage slaves to be spurious.<ref name="Foner, Eric 1998. p. 66">Foner, Eric. 1998. ''The Story of American Freedom''. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 66</ref> They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed".<ref name="McNall 95">{{cite book |last=McNall |first=Scott G. |display-authors=et al|title=Current Perspectives in Social Theory|page=95| isbn=978-0-7623-0762-3 | year=2002 | publisher=Emerald Group Publishing}}</ref> The abolitionist and former slave ] declared "Now I am my own master" when he took a paying job.<ref name="Douglass 95"/> Later in life, he concluded to the contrary "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".<ref>Douglass, Frederick. . p. 13</ref> However, ] and the ] "did not challenge the notion that those who spend their entire lives as wage laborers were comparable to slaves", though they argued that the condition was different, as long as laborers were likely to develop the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving ].<ref name="books.google.com"></ref>
Some advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, among them philosopher ], have said that inalienable rights can be waived if done so voluntarily, saying "the comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would".<ref>Ellerman, David. . p. 2</ref>


Others such as the ] economist ] go further and maintain that all rights are in fact alienable, stating ] and by extension wage slavery is legitimate.<ref>.</ref>
Due to the increased investment in the means of production, variable capital (labour) uses a larger and larger constant capital (the means of production). As labour is the source of surplus value, this means that in the short term profits may be increased by the new investment, i.e. workers must produce more, in relative terms, than before so reducing a firms production costs for the commodities or services it produces. This allows increased profits to be realised at the current market price (which reflects the old costs of production). Exploitation of labour must increase in order for the return on total (i.e. constant and variable) capital to increase or, at worse, remain constant. However, while this is rational for one company, it is not rational when all firms do it (which they must in order to remain in business). As investment increases, the surplus value workers have to produce must increase faster. As long as the rate of exploitation produced by the new investments is high enough to counteract the increase in constant capital and keep the profit rate from falling, then the boom will continue. If, however, the mass of possible profits in the economy is too small compared to the total capital invested (both in means of production, fixed, and labour, variable) then the possibility exists for a general fall in the rate of profit (the ratio of profit to investment in capital and labour). Unless exploitation increases sufficiently, already produced surplus value earmarked for the expansion of capital may not be realised on the market (i.e. goods may not be sold). If this happens, then the surplus value will remain in its money form, thus failing to act as capital. In other words, accumulation will grind to a halt and a slump will start.


== See also ==
When this happens, over-investment has occurred. No new investments are made, goods cannot be sold resulting in a general reduction of production and so increased unemployment as companies fire workers or go out of business. This removes more and more constant capital from the economy, increasing unemployment which forces those with jobs to work harder, for longer so allowing the mass of profits produced to be increased, resulting (eventually) in an increase in the rate of profit. Once profit rates are high enough, capitalists have the incentive to make new investments and slump turns to boom. If profit rates are depressed due to over-investment then even the lowest interest rates will have little effect. In other words, expectations of capitalists and investors are a key issue and these are shaped by the general state of the economy. In this framework of analysis, interest rates are considered to reflect the general aggregate demand for credit in an economy, with private banks and other credit-generating institution's largely forcing the state's hand. In other words, money is created largely in response to the needs of capitalists. Governments do not force banks to make excessive loans; and the over supply of credit, rather than the cause of the crisis, is simply a symptom. The informational isolation of competitors entails individually rational responses resulting in collectively irrational outcomes. Competitive investment drives the cycle expansion, which is allowed and encouraged by the competition among banks in supplying credit--amplifying other objective tendencies toward crisis, such as over-investment, hoarding and disproportionalities. In sum, the market's "money supply is largely endogenously determined by the market economy, rather than imposed upon it exogenously by the state." Therefore, blaming inflation on the state's intervention in the economy is considered an ideological attempt to ignore market inefficiencies and the harsh realities of ].<ref></ref><ref></ref>
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]


===Communism=== == Footnotes ==
{{reflist}}
]]]
While movements labeled as communist (or economically nationalist and socialist) have, in reaction to poverty, arisen more pervasively in the 3rd world, there is arguably as much variety (e.g. in economic policies, popular participation, atrocity levels etc) among states termed "communist" as there is among states termed "capitalist"<ref>http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm</ref><ref>http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199011--.htm</ref>-- in spite of the lack of distinctions (as well as propagandistic labeling) that has been applied due to elite ideological influence in the wage systems of the ] and the ]. These two states preserved and expanded the institutions of wage slavery by simultaneously identifying Soviet state brutality and destruction of workers' councils with ] and ] in order to either vilify them, or exploit the aura of their ideals (esp. opposition to wage slavery).<ref>http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm</ref><ref></ref> Nevertheless, even opponents of wage slavery who condemn abuses by states termed "communist," have credited certain communist parties with providing forums of public participation that helped ameliorate conditions of wage slavery, among other things.<ref></ref><ref>http://chomsky-must-read.blogspot.com/2008/03/dd-c07-s05.html The Fruits of VIctory: Latin America</ref> However, the isolation of some states termed communist has prevented them from acquiring the foreign technology required for an economic growth that can sometimes allow workers to struggle more effectively for a less oppressive form of wage slavery. North Korea is a case in point. In contrast, South Korea, applying a mixture of trade with state controls and protectionism<ref></ref> --originally through a harsh dictatorship-- developed into an industrial powerhouse with a workforce that is better equipped to combat wage slavery.<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref> At the same time, some analysts have pointed out that a less oppressive form of wage slavery would have been achieved by communist, socialist, and other radical or reformist movements in places like Vietnam and Guatemala, were not for the attacks by states termed "capitalist" like the US and France--which feared the demonstration effect of successful and independent socioeconomic development in the third world, from which they derive cheap labor and resources. This was a development that, according to Noam Chomsky, was monolithically labeled "communist" and "totalitarian" as a pretext to act against it and maintain the exploitation that is seen in "free market" zones in places like Bangladesh, Burma, Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti etc.<ref></ref> Such policies seem compatible with the observation of Korean economist ], that the developed countries want to prevent economic independence in the third world by forcing them to institute "free market" policies, which "kick away the ladder"<ref></ref> because the rich countries developed with extensive state intervention and protection of what US Founding Father ] called "infant industry".<ref>p.49-50 ''Bad Samaritans'', Ha-Joon Chang</ref>


== Bibliography ==
Alleged benefits of state economies over private ones include non-profit production, increased equity among citizens, the ability to maintain employment (thus consumption) in times of recession (which increases demand and helps the economy get out of recession); the development of "natural" monopolies such as electricity, water, gas, railways, landline telephones etc, and the improvement upon capitalist monopolies and competitive markets in pricing and production of socially optimal quantities due to the decline in the profit motive, which, in capitalist monopolies causes them to "produce only up to the quantity where profit is maximized... under normal circumstances lower than the socially optimal one" while in a competitive market it may cause ], phenomena such as the ] and other inefficiencies due to the absence of communication among competitors and lack of "freedom to set the price, as a rival can always undercut them until the point where lowering the price further will result in a loss."<ref>p.114 ''Bad Samaritans Ha-Joon Chang''</ref>
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* {{cite book|last=Norberg|first=Johan|author-link=Johan Norberg|year=2003|title=In Defense of Global Capitalism|location= Washington, D.C.|publisher=]|isbn=978-1-930865-47-1|title-link=In Defense of Global Capitalism}}
* {{cite book|last=Ostergaard|first=Geoffrey|author-link=Geoffrey Ostergaard|year=1997|title=The Tradition of Workers' Control|location=London|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-900384-91-2}}
* {{cite book|last=Perlman|first=Fredy|year=2002|title=The Reproduction of Daily Life|location= Detroit, MI|publisher=Black & Red|isbn=978-0-934868-17-4}}
* {{cite book|last1=Price|first=Richard H.|last2=Friedland|first2=Daniel S.|last3=Vinokur|first3=Anuram D.|year=1998|chapter=Job Loss: Hard Times and Eroded Identity|chapter-url=http://www.isr.umich.edu/src/seh/mprc/Job%20Loss%20Hard%20times%20and%20eroded%20identity.pdf|editor=John H. Harvey|title=Perspectives on Loss: A Sourcebook|pages=|location=Philadelphia, PA|publisher=Brunner/Mazel|isbn=978-0-87630-909-4|url=https://archive.org/details/perspectivesonlo0000unse/page/303}}
* {{cite book|last=Proudhon|first=Pierre-Joseph|author-link=Pierre-Joseph Proudhon|year=1890|orig-date=1840|title=What Is Property? or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government|location=New York, NY|publisher=Humboldt Publishing|title-link=What Is Property?}}
* {{cite book|last=Roediger|first=David|author-link=David Roediger|year=2007|orig-date=1991|title=The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class|edition=revised and expanded|location=London and New York, NY|publisher=]|isbn=978-1-84467-126-7}}
* {{cite book|last=Rothbard|first=Murray N.|author-link=Murray Rothbard|year=2009|orig-date=1962, 1970|title=Man, Economy, and State with Power and Markets|edition=2nd|url=https://mises.org/Books/mespm.PDF|location=Auburn, AL|publisher=]|isbn=978-1-933550-27-5|access-date=9 March 2013}}
* {{cite book|last=Sandel|first=Michael J.|author-link=Michael Sandel|year=1996|title=Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy|location=Cambridge, MA|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-674-19744-2|url=https://archive.org/details/democracysdiscon0000sand}}
* {{cite book|last=Schmidt|first=Jeff|author-link=Jeff Schmidt (writer)|year=2000|title=Disciplined Minds|location=Lanham, MD|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-8476-9364-1|title-link=Disciplined Minds}}
* {{cite book|last=Smith|first=Mark M.|author-link=Mark M. Smith|year=1998|title=Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South|location=Cambridge, MA|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-521-57158-6|url=https://archive.org/details/debatingslaverye00smit}}
* {{cite book|last=Steuben|first=John|year=1950|title=Strike Strategy|url=https://archive.org/details/strikestrategy00steurich|location=New York, NY|publisher=Gaer Associates|access-date=5 March 2013}}
* {{citation|editor-last=Takala|editor-first=J.|year=2005|title=Introductory Report: Decent Work – Safe Work|url=http://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/2005/105B09_281_engl.pdf|series=XVIIth World Congress on Safety and Health at Work|location=Geneva|publisher=]|isbn=978-92-2-117751-7|access-date=9 March 2013|mode=cs1}}
* {{cite book|last=Thompson|first=E. P.|author-link=E. P. Thompson|year=1966|orig-date=1963|title=The Making of the English Working Class|location=New York, NY|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-394-70322-0|title-link=The Making of the English Working Class}}
* {{cite book|last=Thoreau|first=Henry David|author-link=Henry David Thoreau|year=2004|title=Walden|edition=Fully annotated|location=New Haven, CT|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-300-10466-0|title-link=Walden}}
* {{cite book|editor1-last=Thye|editor1-first=Shane R.|editor2-last=Lawler|editor2-first=Edward J.|year=2006|title=Social Psychology of the Workplace|series=Advances in Group Processes|volume=23|location=Oxford|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-7623-1330-3}}
* {{cite book|last=Weininger|first=Elliot B.|year=2002|chapter=Class and Causation in Bourdieu|editor=Jennifer M. Lehmann|title=Bringing Capitalism Back For Critique By Social Theory|series= Current Perspectives in Social Theory|volume=21|pages=49–114|location=Bingley|publisher=]|isbn=978-0-7623-0762-3}}
{{refend}}


== External links ==
], who have also been called "]" or "]", believe that as long as any elite is in power, oppressive forms of authority such as wage slavery will continue. They describe how in all self-designated "]" states the working class follows orders and does not do away with wage labor— at the point of production workers just switch bosses (from capitalists to state ]).<ref name="chomsky1"></ref> The state bureaucracy controls the means of production — not the workers. This, they argue, is why ]'s view of socialism was that it'' "is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people,"''<ref></ref> who must trust the benevolence of their leaders. Thus they see the 20th century conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States as an inter-imperialist conflict between two rival capitalist empires.<ref>http://question-everything.mahost.org/Socio-Politics/capitalism.html Tyranny of the Invisible Hand
*{{Wikiquote-inline|wage slavery}}
A Critique of the Capitalist System</ref>


{{Poverty}}
Anarchists believe that true socialism (] of the means of production) will come only with the elimination of both capitalism and the state, via the creation of a decentralized system of free associations with consumer and ], regional federations, national ] and part-time rotative ] with no power above others i.e. with no professional politicians, as was achieved to some extent, during the ] revolution.
{{anarchism}}{{Critique of work}}{{aspects of capitalism}}
As the Infoshop FAQ points out:
{{Marxist & Communist phraseology}}
{{property navbox}}


]
<blockquote>
]
"Anarchists consider one of the defining aspects of the state is its ] nature. In other words, the delegation of power into the hands of a few. As such, it violates the core idea of socialism, namely social equality. Those who make up the governing bodies in a state have more power than those who have elected them. Hence these comments by Malatesta and Hamon: 'It could be argued with much more reason that we are the most logical and most complete socialists, since we demand for every person not just his entire measure of the wealth of society but also his portion of social power."<ref>''No Gods, No Masters'', vol. 2, p. 20</ref><ref></ref>
</blockquote>

The rejection of the state is also advocated by some libertarian Marxists, such as ], who observed talking about revolution that "this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the ]", but can only be "realized by the workers themselves being master over production."<ref name="chomsky1"/>
Libertarian socialists thus believe that rejecting such goals on the grounds that they were featured regularly in the rhetoric of leaders like Lenin and Stalin, is as illogical as rejecting freedom and peace on the grounds they were stated goals of Hitler and many other dictators. As ] says:
"''No rational person pays the slightest attention to declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, no matter who they are. And the reason is they're completely predictable, including the worst monsters, Stalin, Hitler the rest. Always full of benign intent. Yes that's their task. Therefore, since they're predictable, we disregard them, they carry no information. What we do is, look at the facts. That's true if they're Bush or Blair or Stalin or anyone else. That's the beginning of rationality.''"<ref></ref>
Just as critics of capitalism don't believe that improvements in the standard of living under capitalist wage slavery justify it, critics of state Communism don't think communist wage slavery is justified by the fact that the poorest workers in Communist Russia in the late 80s (during the 'fall of communism') were better off than the poorest workers in 1916 (right before the Bolshevik take over), or 1918 (right after).<ref name="youtube1"></ref>

Chomsky has found striking similarities in the elite managerial ideology of wage slavery in communist and capitalist states:

<blockquote>
"...] was to decree that the leadership must assume "dictatorial powers" over the workers, who must accept "unquestioning submission to a single will" and "in the interests of socialism," must "unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process." As Lenin and Trotsky proceeded with the militarization of labour, the transformation of the society into a labour army submitted to their single will, Lenin explained that subordination of the worker to "individual authority" is "the system which more than any other assures the best utilization of human resources"{{ndash}} or as ] expressed the same idea, "vital decision-making...must remain at the top...the real threat to democracy comes not from over management, but from under management"; "if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential," and management is nothing other than the rule of reason, which keeps us free."<ref>http://www.zmag.org/Chomsky/articles/86-soviet-socialism.html</ref>
</blockquote>

===Fascism===
The various authoritarian ideologies of fascism (such as ] and ]) affected social and economic relations, and were partly based on the need to divide the working class (and thus maintain wage slavery). But in terms of economic structure, fascism has traditionally consisted, like most modern first world economies, of a closely interlinked mixture of state and private control. Fascism, however, was more discriminating of trade unions than modern economies like Spain or the United States (countries which nevertheless do implement ] and laws to limit union influence).<ref></ref>

Workers did not control the workplace democratically. They worked for wages provided by their superiors in hierarchical institutions like corporations and the state — therefore, wage slavery continued. Fascist economic policies were widely accepted (and praised) in the 1920s and 30s and foreign (especially US) corporate investment in Italy and Germany shot up after the fascist take over.<ref></ref><ref></ref> In Germany, this foreign investment, in conjunction with Hitler's economic policies, led to economic growth and an increase in the standard of living of some Germans,<ref></ref> though critics do not believe that such improvements justify fascism nor wage slavery.<ref name="youtube1"/>
Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American "National Security States," Noam Chomsky and ] argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist (or "sub" and "neo"-fascist) terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights:

<blockquote>
"The proof of the pudding is that U.S. bankers and industrialists have consistently welcomed the "stability" of the new client fascist order, whose governments, while savage in their treatment of dissidents, priests, labor leaders, peasant organizers or others who threaten "order," and at best indifferent to the mass of the population, have been accommodating to large external interests. In an important sense, therefore, the torturers in the client state are functionaries of IBM, Citibank, Allis Chalmers and the U.S. government, playing their assigned roles in a system that has worked according to choice and plan."<ref>p. X preface ''The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism''</ref>
</blockquote>

Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like ], to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:

<blockquote>
"No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the ] sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges."<ref>http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/buenaventu325901.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Psychological effects==

]]]
Analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the ] era. In his 1791 book On the Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker ] exlained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness"— and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is."<ref></ref>

More recently, investigative journalist ] in ''Everything for Sale'', analyzes the work of public-Health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen Hall and concludes that "''to be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as mentally.''" Under wage slavery, "''a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualisation, autonomy, and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours''" while "''epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work.''"<ref>Kuttner, ''Op. Cit.'', p. 153 and p. 154</ref>
Stress and other emotional problems, might be closely related to suicide and diseases such as obesity and nicotine addiction.

Wage slavery, and the educational system that precedes it "''implies power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption… in spite of… good intentions … power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his … order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being 'the men' … In a word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy.''" For the "leader", such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader "''sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion.''"<ref>''The Miners' Next Step'', pp. 16-17 and p. 15</ref> Wage slavery "''implies erosion of the human personality… some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows.''"<ref>quoted by Jose Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'', vol. 2, p. 76</ref>

]

According to ] ], "''a hierarchical mentality''," stemming from mechanisms such as wage slavery "''fosters the renunciation of the pleasures of life. It justifies toil, guilt, and sacrifice by the 'inferiors,' and pleasure and the indulgent gratification of virtually every caprice by their 'superiors.' The objective history of the social structure becomes internalised as a subjective history of the psychic structure… Hierarchy, class, and ultimately the State, penetrate the very integument of the human psyche and establish within it unreflective internal powers of coercion and constraint… By using guilt and self-blame, the inner State can control behaviour long before fear of the coercive powers of the State have to be invoked.''"<ref>''The Ecology of Freedom'', p. 72 and p. 189</ref> Similarly, the anarchist ] pointed out that "power and authority corrupt those who exercise them as much as those who are compelled to submit to them."<ref>''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin'', p. 249</ref> ''"Power operates destructively, even on those who have it, reducing their individuality as it 'renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.'''"<ref>Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', pp. 17-8</ref><ref name="infoshop1"></ref>
<!-- Image with inadequate rationale removed: ]'' analyzes the magnification of negative psychological tendencies in wage labor-based corporate systems]] -->
As the ] FAQ points out "''] said, 'We hate those whom we injure.' Those who oppress others always find reasons to regard their victims as 'inferior' and hence deserving of their fate. Elites need some way to justify their superior social and economic positions. Since the social system is obviously unfair and elitist, attention must be distracted to other, less inconvenient, 'facts,' such as alleged superiority based on biology or 'nature.'''"<ref name="infoshop1"/>— "facts" that may be internalized by the victims themselves.

], the ] who conducted the famous ], said:

<blockquote>
"Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying get with the program, be a team player…When a person feels, I am not personally responsible, I am not accountable, it's the role I'm playing or these are the orders I've gotten, then you allow yourself to do things you would never do under ordinary circumstances. The Lucifer Effect is really a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to be kind, or cruel, caring or selfish, creative or destructive. To make some of us be villains and some of us heroes. And it all depends on the situation. When we have total freedom, we choose situations that we know we can control. But when we're in situations where other people are in charge, in the military, in prisons, in some schools, in some families, we are – we can be transformed."<ref></ref>
</blockquote>

Similarly, the ] proved the capacity of ordinary humans to repress their "strongest moral imperatives against hurting others," in authoritarian environments.<ref>Milgram, Stanley. (1974), ''Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View''. Harpercollins (ISBN 0-06-131983-X).</ref><ref>Milgram, Stanley. (1974), ''Harper's Magazine.'' Abridged and adapted from ''Obedience to Authority''.</ref>
Both, the Stanford and Milgram experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of authoritarian workplace relations.<ref></ref>
The magnification of negative human tendencies in wage labor-based state and corporate systems has prompted some experts to regard them as psychopathic. For example, using diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV; ], a ] Psychology Professor and FBI consultant, provides a detailed analysis comparing the legal person embodied in the modern, profit-driven corporation to that of a clinically diagnosed psychopath. His findings corroborate typical psychopathic behavior such as superficiality, callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, diffusion of responsibility, emphasis on short-term goals, predatory egotism, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness: repeated lying to and deceiving of others for profit, incapacity to experience guilt, failure to conform to the social norms with respect to lawful behaviors etc.<ref>''</ref>

In Marx's opinion,
<blockquote>
"he following elements are contained in wage labor: (1) the chance relationship and alienation of labor from the laboring subject; (2) the chance relationship and alienation of labor from its object; (3) the determination of the laborer through social needs which are an alien compulsion to him, a compulsion to which he submits out of egoistic need and distress...(4) the maintenance of his individual existence appears to the worker as the goal of his activity and his real action is only a means; he lives to acquire the means of living…" And so "the more the worker expends himself in his work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, and the poorer he himself becomes in his inner life, the less he belongs to himself. It is just the same as in religion. The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself. The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to him but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the less he possesses … the alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, takes on its own existence, but that it exists outside him, independently and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. '''The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force'''… the alienated character of work for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person."<ref></ref>
</blockquote>

German-Jewish psychoanalyst ] argued that wage slavery fosters alienation and is "''connected with the marginalisation and disempowerment of those without authority''" because "''hose who have these symbols of authority and those who benefit from them must dull their subject people's realistic, i.e. critical, thinking and make them believe the fiction , … the mind is lulled into submission by clichés … people are made dumb because they become dependent and lose their capacity to trust their eyes and judgement.''"<ref>Erich Fromm, ''To Have or To Be?'', p. 47</ref> As regards the concept of self-ownership in the context of wage labor, Fromm noted that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then when that person loses (or thinks of losing) what he "owns" (e.g. the good looks or sharp mind that allows him to sell his labor for high wages), a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies because that person's sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when one's sense of self is based on what one experiences in a state of ''being'' (feelings, love, sadness, taste, sight etc) without regard for what one once had and lost, or may lose, less authoritarian tendencies prevail.<ref></ref> Psychologists themselves are subject to these pressures and often work on behalf of elites—helping individuals adjust to the status quo, pathologizing rebellion against authority<ref></ref> and sometimes participating in advertising, propaganda, unnecessary profit-driven drug prescriptions, war and torture.<ref></ref>

It is important to note that wage slaves, just like chattel slaves, remain so even if they identify with their oppressors or think of themselves as free due to propaganda, self-deception, or ]. Critics of capitalism point at the fact that chattel slavery was once also perceived as legitimate because of the ideological influences of its power structure, and that, in fact, moral arguments were offered in its favor.<ref></ref><ref></ref> ] claims that there is no reason to believe that one day humans won't look back at the days of wage slavery with the same moral outrage with which they react to chattel slavery. People, in his view, have to learn that they are not free, and engage in the kind of "consciousness raising" activities that enabled women in the ], to perceive that they were oppressed.<ref>''Language and Politics'' p. 468-469</ref>

==Social effects==
] production.]]

Systems based on wage slavery have been blamed for creating a cruel society that represses our moral instincts and pits people against each other for the benefit of elites. Such systems have also been blamed for the deaths of tens of millions of human beings. For example, Nobel Prize winning economist ] did a study of democratic post-colonial India from 1949-1979, which had an economic system based--as much as western democracies-- on private ownership of the means of production<ref></ref> and concluded that "every eight years or so more people in addition die in India{{ndash}} in comparison with Chinese mortality rates{{ndash}} than the total number that died in the gigantic Chinese famine" of the late '50s<ref></ref>— i.e. over 100 million in those 30 years alone.

In many instances — such as Stalin's Gulags, the Holocaust and various wars — wage slavery was only one of several interlinked contributing factors (others being racism, nationalism, social Darwinism etc). Some experts deem that tens of millions of human beings die every year due to the direct and indirect consequences of systems based on wage slavery (e.g. wars, work-related injury/illness, deaths associated with rampant consumerism, environmental destruction, suicide, people dying of hunger and disease because they don't have access to the means of life and it's not profitable to help them, etc).<ref></ref>
], like news media, entertainment and consumerism, can serve to veil wage slavery]]

Environmental degradation and the handling of nuclear weapons by people following orders for wages hint at the mass suicidal tendencies of hierarchical systems such as wage slavery. This may be due to an incompatibility with the moral and survival instincts that developed in the more decentralized pre-civilization power structures that possibly encompassed most of hominidae evolution—though too little is known about ] to know for certain. Anecdotal evidence suggests that humans retain strong altruistic and anti-hierarchical tendencies.<ref></ref><ref></ref> Also, the anecdotal evidence in Lawrence Keeley's book ''The Myth of the Noble Savage''<ref>{{cite book |last=Ellingson |first=Terry |title=''The Myth of the Noble Savage'' |publisher=University of California Press |location=Berkeley |year=2001 |isbn=9780520226104 }}</ref> was counterbalanced by William Eckhardt's statistical and mathematical evidence, which together produced the possible conclusion that primitive warfare among the more violent tribes was constant but of a very low intensity, and mainly psychological. According to Eckhardt, wars of civilizations produce far more destruction than all of the primitive wars, both absolutely and proportionally.<ref></ref> Agriculture meant that humans shifted from taking what nature offered to a mode of control of nature. This shift to control ultimately led to the creation of our current forms of civilized hierarchy--probably based on the creation or magnification of abstract notions of land ownership.<ref></ref> The perceived psychological roots and ramifications of facts such as that "he human status as top mammal depends without question on food production" and that the "unter gatherer... lifestyle, in terms of long-term stability and reliability, has been the most successful in human history"<ref>''First Farmers'' by Peter Bellwood p. 1-2</ref> has prompted ] author ] to consider wage slavery as simply part of a continuum of "hierarchy... domestication...onformity, repetition, and regularity were the keys to civilisation upon its triumph, replacing the spontaneity, enchantment, discovery of the pre-agricultural human state that survived so very long".<ref></ref>

] are an example of a leisurely, very non-hierarchical ] society with a ]]]

However, according to anthropologist ], the picture is in some respects more mixed: "There were hunter-gatherer societies with nobles and slaves, there are agrarian societies that are fiercely egalitarian. Even in . . . Amazonia, one finds some groups who can justly be described as anarchists, like the ], living alongside others; say, the warlike Sherentre, who are clearly anything but."<ref>''Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology'', pp. 53-4</ref>
While most anarchists believe that people should be able to seek non-technological ways of living, they think it possible to achieve an anti-authoritarian society devoid of wage slavery and artificial alienation without resorting to such drastic measures as dismantling modern civilization, which would entail such seemingly unrealistic actions as renouncing all technology and massively reducing the earth's population. Even if desirable, a voluntary reduction in birth rates and safe decommissioning of industry would require a long transitional period (probably centuries) that could only consist of something like a traditional anarchism.<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref>
According to the Anarchist FAQ, however, "few anarchists are convinced by an ideology which, as Brian Morris notes, dismisses the 'last eight thousand years or so of human history' as little more than a source 'of tyranny, hierarchical control, mechanised routine devoid of any spontaneity. All those products of the human creative imagination{{ndash}} farming, art, philosophy, technology, science, urban living, symbolic culture{{ndash}} are viewed negatively by Zerzan{{ndash}} in a monolithic sense.'"<ref></ref>

===Human nature, law, and war===
]
] or Justitia is a personification of the moral force that supposedly underlies the legal system. Her blindfold symbolizes ] through impartiality towards its subjects, the weighing scales represent the ] of people's interests under the law, and her sword denotes the law's force of ] and the power of the sovereign to enforce the law.]] ]
The general environment of obedience and subordination created by those who are forced to rent themselves in order to survive and/or prosper—from police and lawyers, to the general population— entails that wage slavery is a primary element of law formation and enforcement, though in many parts of the world, to varying degrees, grassroots struggles have also been able to exert a positive counteracting influence. The subordination to the needs, interests and perceptions of elite groups in society has an inordinate influence on most aspects of the law—distorting the framework used to apply our intrinsic moral and intellectual faculties. This also means that the law doesn't exist in a vacuum. Apart from the direct influence of powerful groups, it is also shaped by other factors. For example, educational institutions catering to the ideological needs of the biggest employers (government, corporations); natural mechanisms that induce intellectuals to get ahead in the hierarchy, make money and become influential by adopting and disseminating ideas that are serviceable to power; the mainstream media—which are profit seeking corporations selling affluent audiences to advertisers and relying primarily on business and government information; economic phenomena like capital flight, nationalistic and commercial values and propaganda spread by a huge advertising industry and powerful government apparatus, the threat of unemployment or even the passivity and ideology spread by spectator sports and entertainment industry.<ref></ref><ref></ref> The influence of elite groups on the law and conception of "democracy" is seen in even the most advanced government systems prior to the era of ]. For example, in the first part of his magisterial two volume work ''The Transformation of American Law'', Morton J. Horwitz writes:

<blockquote>
"During the eighty years after the American Revolution, a major transformation of the legal system took place... enabled emergent entrepreneurial and commercial groups to win a disproportionate share of wealth and power in American society. The transformed character of legal regulation thus became a major instrument in the hands of these newly powerful groups."<ref>''Transformation of American Law'' 1780-1860 p. xvi Morton J. Horwitz</ref>
</blockquote>

And even before this transformation, US Founding Father ] had already stated at the ] that:

{{quote |“In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”<ref>{{cite web |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=BjkOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA450&lpg=PA450&dq=landholders+ought+to+have+a+share+in+the+government+to+support+these+invaluable+interests+and+to+balance+and+check+the+other&source=web&ots=cnTSolkpJJ&sig=fuggu7aSK5rBblWw90eOYRmFbf0#PPA450,M1 |title=Books |publisher=Google}}</ref>}}

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."<ref></ref> Accordingly, police function developed in the context of maintaining a layered societal structure and protecting property.<ref>{{cite book |last=Siegel |first=Larry J. |title=Criminology |pages=515–516 |publisher=Thomson Wadsworth |year=2005}} </ref>

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 means majority rule, rather than people "having a say over decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by them"<ref>http://books.google.com/books?id=Zc4p7vUXZyEC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=people+having+a+say+over+decisions+in+proportion+to+the+degree+they+are+affected+by+them&source=web&ots=SXEgj28noO&sig=jRasOhTBDXvmMJ0zKCL35A18HG8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result Parecon By Michael Albert</ref>{{ndash}} which entails respect for the legitimate rights of minorities.
]

Noam Chomsky believes that the rationalizations for this elite government function have been fallacious:

{{quote |“Modern political theory stresses Madison's belief that "in a just and a free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded." But in this case too it is useful to look at the doctrine more carefully. There are no rights of property, only rights to property that is, rights of persons with property. Perhaps I have a right to my car, but my car has no rights. The right to property also differs from others in that one person's possession of property deprives another of that right if I own my car, you do not; but in a just and free society, my freedom of speech would not limit yours. The Madisonian principle, then, is that government must guard the rights of persons generally, but must provide special and additional guarantees for the rights of one class of persons, property owners".<ref></ref> "" epresentative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain… there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly{{ndash}} and critically{{ndash}} the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held that democratic control of one's productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful…”<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19760725.htm |title=Interview |publisher=Chomsky}}</ref>}}

Marx's indictment of elite systems of justice contains similar observations:

<blockquote>
"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 are 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."<ref></ref> our very ideas 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."<ref></ref></blockquote>

A large percentage of lawyers do work to defend the interests of corporate and state elites— though the potential for change becomes apparent when despite pressures, incentives and other elite-driven selection processes, some determined lawyers don't. The law has also been shaped by their struggles, as well as those of other constituencies e.g. labor movements, women's and civil rights movements or even the liberal values of economically conservative elites who don't want state oppression to affect them personally, or are in favor of oppression only to maintain their privileges (thus opposing laws against gays, ethnic groups, abortion etc). Nevertheless, if it's true, as Frederik Douglass said, that "power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will"<ref></ref> wage slavery, so long as it exists, will remain a strong factor ensuring the resiliency of a system of law that overcriminalizes the powerless and decriminalizes the powerful. The law can ensure that moral principles are applied, but will tend to do so only when it does not fundamentally alter the hierarchical status quo that is 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 (e.g. 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 ], etc). Wage slavery also contributes to making powerful groups unaccountable to the law (e.g. US violations of international law,<ref></ref> police brutality<ref>http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/reports98/police/uspo14.htm Human Rights Watch - Shielded from Justice:
Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States</ref> 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, (e.g. 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.
{{Anarchism sidebar}}
Such legal notions are based on the belief 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. From this perspective, the root causes of war and environmental destruction lie in hierarchical mechanisms like wage slavery. In other words, if the state was eliminated and people directly controlled the economy democratically, they would 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.

Several assumptions underlie this rationale:

1 - In hierarchies there's an incentive to not be completely honest with one's superior and to tell him/her what s/he wants to hear. This lack of honest communication builds up the higher it goes up the hierarchy and is reflected once again onto the society by those powerful enough to exert influence{{ndash}} primarily the elite who, having a lot to lose, have strong incentives to subordinate and atomize the general population by spreading untruths.

2 - It becomes easier to abuse people when one has power over them.

3 - 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 are doing" etc).

4 - 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:

{{quote|Most people don't go around punching and killing people, and the average person wouldn't steal food from a child just because there are no police around and he happened to be hungry. If he did we'd find such behavior pathological, not normal (as you'd expect if we were really so greedy).Yet states have killed millions through war, and corporations will literally take away water from children for profit (e.g. Bechtel in Cochabamba, Bolivia) and kill millions of workers through horrible working conditions and negligence. They act as magnified projections of our worst tendencies, and negate the fact that cooperation is more important for survival than competition, (as Russian scientist Kropotkin demonstrated in his book Mutual Aid). If you count the number of people killed (and the amount of money stolen) by capitalist and state institutions and compare it to the smaller criminals (bank robbers, serial killers, gangs, Islamic terrorists etc), it is not even close. Furthermore, evidence shows that, contrary to popular belief, institutions of power do not restrain criminal behavior, but actually promote the alienation, violence and socio-economic disparity that creates most of these smaller criminals… Even a saint who gains state power will become an important cog in a repressive power structure, just like CEOs and slave owners could be very nice people, yet in their institutional role they are oppressive. "Good" men in power are responsible for much more death and suffering than "evil" men without power, that's why unlike capitalists and Marxists, anarchists have never imposed dictatorship and mass murder on anyone.<ref name="infoshop2"></ref>}}
<!-- Image with inadequate rationale removed: ] -->
According to some thinkers, however, there's something called the "bad apple theory" that argues states are natural structures. Anthropologist ] explains it:

{{quote|All you need is one group in a fairly large region that decides to be predatory raiders and beat up on their neighbors and everyone has to either militarize their own society, or endure being periodically victimized. But consider this: if we have a biological inclination to be warlike and aggressive, then why is it so few take the former option? Studies show that most tribes don't immediately imitate the aggressive group and start organizing for war in self-defense, but endure the raids (which happen on average every five or ten years) just so they don't have to. If we have a natural tendency, it's not to organize ourselves for war, because even people with a very concrete material interest in doing so often don't do it.<ref name="infoshop2"/>}}
]
Some historians , like ] argue that most soldiers do not go to war out of an intrinsic desire to kill. They have to be trained, deceived and desensitized:

{{quote |“Wars don't take place out of the rush of a population demanding war: it's the leaders who demand war and who prepare the population for war. You didn't have the American public clamoring to go to WW1… people did not want to go to war…. That's why Wilson said "no we are not going to war". Then he is elected, and almost immediately calls upon the nation to go to war a massive propaganda campaign was mounted. On the one hand you had the propaganda, and on the other you had the coercion, the draft and the punishment… in other words, it takes powerful inducements and threats to mobilize the young population of a nation for war and if you had a spontaneous urge for war you wouldn't have to do that. The consequence of believing that war happens as a result of human nature is to place the blame on the citizenry, and to take it away from the leaders of the nation who are driving the country to war… it's like telling the poor that your poor because of your own faults,…”<ref></ref>}}

Similarly, Noam Chomsky explained how

{{quote |“...you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So, slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous, but the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you could imagine – benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything. In their institutional role they are monsters because the institution is monstrous.”<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.thecorporation.com/media/Transcript_finalpt1%20copy.pdf|format=PDF|title=''The Corporation'' transcript |date=2006-11-13}}</ref>}}

The struggle against wage slavery has often been linked to other anti-hierarchical struggles. For example, ] (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 the 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 active 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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://struggle.ws/ws98/ws54_mujeres_libres.html |title=Mujeres Libres |publisher=Struggle}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.geocities.com/Paris/2159/womspain.html |title=Women in Spain}}</ref><ref></ref>

===Environmental destruction===
]
According to ] (and his philosophy of ]), "it is not until we eliminate domination in all its forms … that we will really create a rational, ecological society."<ref>Murray Bookchin, ''Remaking Society'', p. 44</ref> 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."<ref>Bookchin, ''The Future of the Ecology Movement'', pp. 1–20.</ref><ref>Bookchin, ''Which Way for the Ecology Movement?'', p. 17.</ref> "ature, as every materialist knows, is not something merely external to humanity. We are a part of nature. Consequently, in dominating nature we not only dominate an 'external world'{{ndash}} we also dominate ourselves."<ref>John Clark, ''The Anarchist Moment'', p. 114.</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://infoshop.org/faq/secE1.html |title=FAQ |publisher=Infoshop}}</ref>

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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secEcon.html |title=Economy |work=FAQ |publisher=Infoshop}}</ref>

==Alienated employment contract==
Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. ] and ], arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination, which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities or the produced outputs of the employer’s business."<ref></ref> Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain a de facto fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person . . ." as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination.<ref>http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/translatio-v-concessio-P-and-S-final.pdf Ellerman, David, ''Translatio versus Concessio'', 14</ref> As Pateman argues:<blockquote>
"The contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can ‘acquire’ an external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept that the ‘exchange’ between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property . . . The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property."<ref>http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/translatio-v-concessio-P-and-S-final.pdf Ellerman, David, ''Translatio versus Concessio'', 32</ref></blockquote>

This becomes clear when an employee commits a crime and suddenly loses the status of input or non-person and is treated as a consenting adult who bears responsibility for their actions, even if they were merely fulfilling their contractual obligation by voluntarily consenting to obedience. Such is not the case with other inputs, e.g., were an employer to use an input (say, a gun) to kill someone, the input itself would not be held legally responsible, but the person operating it. If the employer were instead to hire someone else to use the input to kill someone, legally both the employer and the employee would be held responsible for their joint venture, even if the employee is contractually a mere input (a non-person or tool) providing labor power. One of the original theorists behind the marginal productivity theory, Austrian economist ], made a similar argument when he pointed out that de facto responsibility can never fall on "dead tools," such as land or capital, since only the laborer can be held responsible for what use the tools are put to, thus conceding the essential argument behind radical slogans such as "Only labor is creative" or "Only labor is productive."<ref>Ellerman, David, ''Property and Contracts in Economics'', 135</ref>
<blockquote>
The judge,..., who, in his narrowly-defined task, is only concerned with the legal imputation, confines himself to the discovery of the legally responsible factor,-that person, in fact, who is threatened with legal punishment. On him will rightly be laid the whole burden of the consequences, although he could never by himself alone-without instruments and all the other conditions-have committed the crime. The imputation takes for granted physical causality. ... If it is the moral imputation that is in question, then certainly no one but the labourer could be named. Land and capital have no merit that they bring forth fruit; they are dead tools in the hand of man; and the man is reponsible for the use he makes of them.<ref>Wieser, ''Natural Value'', 76-79</ref>
</blockquote>
Where a tool is alienable (or transferable), a person is not, since self-determination is "an inextricable aspect of the activity of being human," not something that can be "acquired and surrendered."<ref></ref> As Ellerman explains,
<blockquote>
"The point is not that a person should not or ought not do it; the point is that a person cannot in fact make such a voluntary transfer . At most, person A can agree to cooperate with B by doing what B says—even if B’s instructions are quite complete. But that is not alienation or transference of decision making or responsibility. Person A is still inexorably involved in ratifying B’s decisions and person A inextricably shares the de facto responsibility for the results of A’s and B’s joint activity—as everyone recognizes in the case of a hired criminal regardless of the completeness of the instructions."<ref>http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/translatio-v-concessio-P-and-S-final.pdf Ellerman, David, ''Translatio versus Concessio'', 14</ref>
</blockquote>
However, when the hired employee contributes to producing valuable commodities instead of committing criminal acts, "he joint venture or partnership is transformed into the employer's sole venture," entitling the employer to legal claim over all positive outputs, even though all working members of the firm were de facto responsible for the output's production. Critics of the employment contract argue that "the facts about human responsibility" within the employment firm "do not change" regardless of what is consented to in a contractual agreement.<ref></ref> Therefore, all working members of a firm have joint claims to the outputs of a firm, not just the employer, regardless of whether the outputs are criminal or non-criminal.

Critics of the employment contract advocate consistently applying "the principle behind every trial," i.e., "legal responsibility should be imputed in accordance with de facto responsibility," implying a workplace run jointly by the people who actually work in the firm.<ref></ref> The people who actually work in a firm are de facto responsible for the actions of said firm and thus have a legal claim to its outputs, as the contractarian critics argue. "Responsible human action, net value-adding or net value-subtracting, is not de facto transferable."<ref>http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/translatio-v-concessio-P-and-S-final.pdf Ellerman, David, ''Translatio versus Concessio'', 26</ref> Suppliers (including shareholders), on the other hand, having no de facto responsibility, have no legal claim to the outputs.

While a person may still voluntarily decide to contractually rent themselves, just as today they may voluntarily decide to contractually sell themselves, in a society where "the principle behind every trial" is consistently applied, neither contract would be legally enforceable, and the rented/sold individual would maintain at all times de jure responsibility for her/his actions, including legal claim to the fruits of their labor. In a modern liberal-capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature, and the later being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted economist ] described this discrepancy.
<blockquote>"Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be
capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage."<ref>http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/Inalienable-rights-and-contracts.pdf Ellerman, David, ''Inalienable Rights and Contracts'', 21</ref></blockquote>

Some advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, among them ], address this inconsistency in modern societies, arguing that a consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights.
<blockquote>"The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would."<ref>http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/translatio-v-concessio-P-and-S-final.pdf Ellerman, David, ''Translatio versus Concessio'', 2</ref></blockquote>

Others like ] allow for the possibility of ], asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:
<blockquote>"f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work."<ref>''Man, Economy, and State'', vol. I , p. 441</ref></blockquote>

==Criticism==
Philosopher Gary Young has argued 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 is forced to hire a worker to survive otherwise his capital will be exhausted through consumption leaving him nothing to purchase the necessities of life.<ref>Young, Gary. 1978. ''Justice and Capitalist Production. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8'', no. 3, p. 448</ref> 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 another employer, i.e. accept the condition he would impose on others.<ref>Nino, Carlos Santiago. 1992. ''Rights''. NYU Press. p.343</ref>

According to ],<ref name="humanaction"> on The Ludwig von Mises Institute accessed at ] ]</ref> what is exchanged between individuals is irrelevant for the result. In the context of Austrian economics, the concept of compensation would extend to cover everything received by workers from employers for their labor. For consistency then compensation in forms other than wages should also be condemned by those who consider capitalist production wage slavery. That is to say, anything other than a revolutionary restructuring of the labor-employer relation leaves the original condition, the one advocated by the school in question, largely untouched.

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 ] notion of ].{{Fact|date=August 2008}} Under this view, a man is not free unless he can sell himself, because if a man does not 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 is not legitimate, there is no right for anyone then to claim enslavement to wages in the first place.<ref name="humanaction" />

According to Eric Foner, black ]s in the U.S. regarded the analogy of wage earners to slaves, symbolized by the term "wage slavery," as spurious. When ] escaped slavery and took a paying job, he declared "Now I am my own master." According to Douglas, wage labor did not represent oppression but fair exchange and former slaves for the first time receiving the fruits of their labor. According to abolitionist ], "wage slavery" (in a time when chattel slavery was still common) was an "abuse of language."<ref>Foner, Eric. 1998. ''The Story of American Freedom''. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 66</ref>

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Latest revision as of 13:57, 2 January 2025

Dependence on wages or salary

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Salary protest by the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers' Union in the United Kingdom in January 2016

Wage slavery is a term used to criticize exploitation of labour by business, by keeping wages low or stagnant in order to maximize profits. The situation of wage slavery can be loosely defined as a person's dependence on wages (or a salary) for their livelihood, especially when wages are low, treatment and conditions are poor, and there are few chances of upward mobility.

The term is often used by critics of wage-based employment to criticize the exploitation of labor and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital, particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, such as in sweatshops, and the latter is described as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character" not only under threat of extreme poverty and starvation, but also of social stigma and status diminution. Historically, many socialist organisations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.

Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, and engaged in critique of work while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism.

Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of keeping African Americans in slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favourably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished most forms of slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian Lawrence Glickman, in the 1870s through the 1890s "eferences abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase".

History

Emma Goldman denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".

The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world. In ancient Rome, Cicero wrote that "the very wage receive is a pledge of their slavery".

In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery:

The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him ... They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market ... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live ... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... what effective gain the suppression of slavery brought He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune ... These men ... the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. ... They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?

The view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery (most notably in the Southern states of the United States) and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of chattel slavery). Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states, argued that Northern workers were "free but in name – the slaves of endless toil" and that their slaves were better off. This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time". In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that "t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself."

Abolitionists in the United States criticized the analogy as spurious. They argued that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as long as laborers were likely to develop the opportunity to work for themselves, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "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". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market:

No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.

African American wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South

Self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century. In 1869, The New York Times described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South". E. P. Thompson notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right". A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the trade unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other; labor and capital will no longer be separate but will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women". This perspective inspired the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (UK) of 1834 which had the "two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions – the protection of the workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of the future society" when the unions "take over the whole industry of the country". William Lazonick, summarized:

Research has shown, that the 'free-born Englishman' of the eighteenth century – even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural wage labour – tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop.

The use of the term "wage slave" by labor organizations may originate from the labor protests of the Lowell mill girls in 1836. The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century to object to the lack of workers' self-management. However, it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century as labor organizations shifted their focus to raising wages. Karl Marx described capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy because it is based on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented, or alienated in a class society). According to Friedrich Engels:

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.

Similarities of wage work with slavery

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Critics of wage work have drawn several similarities between wage work and slavery:

  1. Since the chattel slave is property, his value to an owner is in some ways higher than that of a worker who may quit, be fired or replaced. The chattel slave's owner has made a greater investment in terms of the money paid for the slave. For this reason, in times of recession chattel slaves could not be fired like wage laborers. A "wage slave" could also be harmed at no (or less) cost. American chattel-slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living from the 18th century and – according to historians Fogel and Engerman – plantation records show that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally – their material conditions in the 19th century being "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time". This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an economic system different from capitalist wage-slavery. According to Mark Michael Smith of the Economic History Society, "although intrusive and oppressive, paternalism, the way masters employed it, and the methods slaves used to manipulate it, rendered slaveholders' attempts to institute capitalistic work regimens on their plantation ineffective and so allowed slaves to carve out a degree of autonomy".
  2. Unlike a chattel slave, a wage laborer can (barring unemployment or lack of job offers) choose between employers, but those employers usually constitute a minority of owners in the population for which the wage laborer must work while attempts to implement workers' control on employers' businesses may be considered an act of theft or insubordination and thus be met with violence, imprisonment or other legal and social measures. The wage laborer's starkest choice is to work for an employer or to face poverty or starvation or turn to crime. If a chattel slave refuses to work, a number of punishments are also available; from beatings to food deprivation – although economically rational slave-owners practiced positive reinforcement to achieve best results and before losing their investment by killing an expensive slave.
  3. Historically, the range of occupations and status positions held by chattel slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free persons, indicating some similarities between chattel slavery and wage slavery as well.
  4. Like chattel slavery, wage slavery does not stem from some immutable "human nature", but represents a "specific response to material and historical conditions" that "reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations... the ideas... the social form of daily life".
  5. Similarities became blurred when proponents of wage labor won the American Civil War of 1861–1865, in which they competed for legitimacy with defenders of chattel slavery. Each side presented an over-positive assessment of their own system while denigrating the opponent.

According to American anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Noam Chomsky, workers themselves noticed the similarities between chattel and wage slavery. Chomsky noted that the 19th-century Lowell mill girls, without any reported knowledge of European Marxism or anarchism, 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". They expressed their concerns in a protest song during their 1836 strike:

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 cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I'm so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.

Defenses of both wage labor and chattel slavery in the literature have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to nature – arguing that hierarchy and a social system's particular relations of production represent human nature and are no more coercive than the reality of life itself. According to this narrative, 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 respective systems created a lot of wealth and prosperity. In some sense, both did create jobs, and their investment entailed risk. For example, slave-owners risked losing money by buying chattel slaves who later became ill or died; while bosses risked losing money by hiring workers (wage slaves) to make products that did not sell well on the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses; sometimes by working hard. The "rags to riches" story occasionally comes to pass in capitalism; the "slave to master" story occurred in places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom and become business owners, self-employed, or slave-owners themselves. Thus, critics of the concept of wage slavery do not regard social mobility, or the hard work and risk that it may entail, as a redeeming factor.

Anthropologist David Graeber has noted that historically the first wage-labor contracts we know about – whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or Swahili city-states in the Indian Ocean – were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money and the slaves another, with which to maintain their living expenses). According to Graeber, such arrangements were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or in Brazil. C. L. R. James (1901–1989) argued that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the Industrial Revolution first developed on slave plantations. Subsequent work "traces the innovations of modern management to the slave plantation".

Changes in the use of the term

By the end of the 19th century, both the use of the term "wage slavery" and its meaning declined.

At the end of the 19th century, North American labor rhetoric turned towards consumerist and economics-based politics, from its previously radical, producerist vision. Whereas labor organizations once referred to powerless disenfranchisement from the rise of industrial capitalism as "wage slavery", the phrase had fallen out of favor by 1890 as those organizations adopted pragmatic politics and phrases like "wage work". American producerist labor politics emphasized the control of production conditions as being the guarantor of self-reliant, personal freedom. As factories began to bring artisans in-house by 1880, wage dependence replaced wage freedom as standard for skilled, unskilled, and unionized workers alike.

As Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit point out:

ncreased centralization of production ... declining wages ... expanding ... labor pool ... intensifying competition, and ... he loss of competence and independence experienced by skilled labor" meant that "a critique that referred to all work as slavery and avoided demands for wage concessions in favor of supporting the creation of the producerist republic (by diverting strike funds towards funding ... co-operatives, for example) was far less compelling than one that identified the specific conditions of slavery as low wages

— Hallgrimsdottir & Benoit 2007, pp. 1397, 1404, 1402

In more general English-language usage, the phrase "wage slavery" and its variants became more frequent in the 20th century.

Treatment in various economic systems

Adam Smith

Some anti-capitalist thinkers claim that the elite maintain wage slavery and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry, educational institutions, unjust laws, nationalist and corporate propaganda, pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure, state violence, fear of unemployment, and a historical legacy of exploitation and profit accumulation/transfer under prior systems, which shaped the development of economic theory. Adam Smith noted that employers often conspire together to keep wages low and have the upper hand in conflicts between workers and employers:

The interest of the dealers ... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public ... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate ... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.

Capitalism

Pinkerton guards escort strikebreakers in Buchtel, Ohio, 1884
Red Army troops attack Kronstadt libertarian socialist "wage slavery" critics who had demanded among other things that "handicraft production be authorized provided it does not utilize wage labour".

The concept of wage slavery could conceivably be traced back to pre-capitalist figures like Gerrard Winstanley from the radical Christian Diggers movement in England, who wrote in his 1649 pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness, that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man" and "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself".

Aristotle stated that "the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue), nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics)", often paraphrased as "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind". Cicero wrote in 44 BC that "vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery". Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine; Henry George, who inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism; and the Distributist school of thought within the Catholic Church.

To Karl Marx and anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, wage slavery was a class condition in place due to the existence of private property and the state. This class situation rested primarily on:

  1. The existence of property not intended for active use;
  2. The concentration of ownership in few hands;
  3. The lack of direct access by workers to the means of production and consumption goods; and
  4. The perpetuation of a reserve army of unemployed workers.

And secondarily on:

  1. The waste of workers' efforts and resources on producing useless luxuries;
  2. The waste of goods so that their price may remain high; and
  3. The waste of all those who sit between the producer and consumer, taking their own shares at each stage without actually contributing to the production of goods, i.e. the middle man.

Fascism

Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States. Fascism was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate investment (notably from the United States) in Germany increased after the fascists took power.

Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like Buenaventura Durruti, to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.

Psychological effects

Wilhelm von Humboldt

According to Noam Chomsky, analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book The Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is". Because they explore human authority and obedience, both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.

Self-identity problems and stress

According to research, modern work provides people with a sense of personal and social identity that is tied to:

  1. The particular work role, even if unfulfilling; and
  2. The social role it entails e.g. family bread-winning, friendship forming and so on.

Thus job loss entails the loss of this identity.

Erich Fromm argued that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then when that person loses (or even thinks of losing) what he "owns" (e.g. the good looks or sharp mind that allow him to sell his labor for high wages) a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies because that person's sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when a person's sense of self is based on what he experiences in a "state of being" with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost, or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail. In his view, the state of being flourishes under a worker-managed workplace and economy, whereas self-ownership entails a materialistic notion of self, created to rationalize the lack of worker control that would allow for a state of being.

Investigative journalist Robert Kuttner analyzed the work of public-health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen Hall about modern conditions of work and concludes that "to be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as mentally". Under wage labor, "a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy, and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours" while "epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work".

Wage slavery and the educational system that precedes it "implies power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption ... in spite of ... good intentions ... power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his ... order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being 'the men' ... In a word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy". For the "leader", such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader "sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion". Wage slavery "implies erosion of the human personality ... some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows".

Psychological control

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    Higher wages

    In 19th-century discussions of labor relations, it was normally assumed that the threat of starvation forced those without property to work for wages. Proponents of the view that modern forms of employment constitute wage slavery, even when workers appear to have a range of available alternatives, have attributed its perpetuation to a variety of social factors that maintain the hegemony of the employer class.

    In an account of the Lowell mill girls, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote that generously high wages were offered to overcome the degrading nature of the work:

    At the time the Lowell cotton mills were started the caste of the factory girl was the lowest among the employments of women. ... She was represented as subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and selfrespect. In the eyes of her overseer she was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten, pinched and pushed about. It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become millgirls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation.

    In his book Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt points out that professionals are trusted to run organizations in the interests of their employers. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to "ensure that each and every detail of their work favors the right interests–or skewers the disfavored ones" in the absence of overt control:

    The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.

    Parecon (participatory economics) theory posits a social class "between labor and capital" of higher paid professionals such as "doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers and others" who monopolize empowering labor and constitute a class above wage laborers who do mostly "obedient, rote work".

    Lower wages

    The terms "employee" or "worker" have often been replaced by "associate" or "partner". This plays up the allegedly voluntary nature of the interaction while playing down the subordinate status of the wage laborer as well as the worker-boss class distinction emphasized by labor movements. Billboards as well as television, Internet and newspaper advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.

    Job interviews and other data on requirements for lower skilled workers in developed countries – particularly in the growing service sector – indicate that the more workers depend on low wages and the less skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for workers without better employment options and expect them to feign unremunerative motivation. Such screening and feigning may not only contribute to the positive self-image of the employer as someone granting desirable employment, but also signal wage-dependence by indicating the employee's willingness to feign, which in turn may discourage the dissatisfaction normally associated with job-switching or union activity.

    At the same time, employers in the service industry have justified unstable, part-time employment and low wages by playing down the importance of service jobs for the lives of the wage laborers (e.g. just temporary before finding something better, student summer jobs and the like).

    In the early 20th century, "scientific methods of strikebreaking" were devised – employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined "harmony" and "Americanism".

    Workers' self-management

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    Some social activists objecting to the market system or price system of wage working historically have considered syndicalism, worker cooperatives, workers' self-management and workers' control as possible alternatives to the current wage system.

    Labor and government

    The American philosopher John Dewey believed that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy", politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business". Thomas Ferguson has postulated in his investment theory of party competition that the undemocratic nature of economic institutions under capitalism causes elections to become occasions when blocs of investors coalesce and compete to control the state.

    Noam Chomsky has argued that political theory tends to blur the 'elite' function of government:

    Modern political theory stresses Madison's belief that "in a just and a free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded." But in this case too it is useful to look at the doctrine more carefully. There are no rights of property, only rights to property that is, rights of persons with property,... In representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly – and critically – the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

    In this regard, Chomsky has used Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom", the militant history of labor movements, Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and Marc Hauser's theories supporting an innate and universal moral faculty, to explain the incompatibility of oppression with certain aspects of human nature.

    Influence on environmental degradation

    Loyola University philosophy professor John Clark and libertarian socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin have criticized the system of wage labor for encouraging environmental destruction, arguing that a self-managed industrial society would better manage the environment. Like other anarchists, they attribute much of the Industrial Revolution's pollution to the "hierarchical" and "competitive" economic relations accompanying it.

    Employment contracts

    Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. David Ellerman and Carole Pateman, arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination, which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities or the produced outputs of the employer's business". Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain a de facto fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person" as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination. As Pateman argues:

    The contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can 'acquire' an external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept that the 'exchange' between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property ... The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property.

    In a modern liberal capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature and the latter being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted economist Paul Samuelson described this discrepancy:

    Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage.

    Some advocates of right-libertarianism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, address this inconsistency in modern societies arguing that a consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights:

    The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.

    Other economists including Murray Rothbard allow for the possibility of debt slavery, asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:

    f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work.

    Schools of economics

    In the philosophy of mainstream, neoclassical economics, wage labor is seen as the voluntary sale of one's own time and efforts, just like a carpenter would sell a chair, or a farmer would sell wheat. It is considered neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship and carries no particular moral implications.

    Austrian economics argues that a person is not "free" unless they can sell their labor because otherwise that person has no self-ownership and will be owned by a "third party" of individuals.

    Post-Keynesian economics perceives wage slavery as resulting from inequality of bargaining power between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not "allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force".

    The two main forms of socialist economics perceive wage slavery differently:

    1. Libertarian socialism sees it as a lack of workers' self-management in the context of substituting state and capitalist control with political and economic decentralization and confederation.
    2. State socialists view it as an injustice perpetrated by capitalists and solved through nationalization and social ownership of the means of production.

    Criticism

    Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy of wage workers as wage slaves to be spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass declared "Now I am my own master" when he took a paying job. Later in life, he concluded to the contrary "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". However, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans "did not challenge the notion that those who spend their entire lives as wage laborers were comparable to slaves", though they argued that the condition was different, as long as laborers were likely to develop the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment.

    Some advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, have said that inalienable rights can be waived if done so voluntarily, saying "the comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would".

    Others such as the anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block go further and maintain that all rights are in fact alienable, stating voluntary slavery and by extension wage slavery is legitimate.

    See also

    Footnotes

    1. "wage slave". merriam-webster.com. Retrieved March 4, 2013.
    2. "wage slave". dictionary.com. Retrieved March 4, 2013.
    3. Sandel 1996, p. 184.
    4. ^ "Conversation with Noam Chomsky". Globetrotter.berkeley.edu. p. 2. Retrieved June 28, 2010.
    5. ^ Hallgrimsdottir & Benoit 2007.
    6. ^ "The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counter-revolution". Spunk Library. Retrieved March 4, 2013.
    7. Avineri 1968, p. 142.
    8. ^ Fitzhugh 1857.
    9. ^ George 1981, "Chapter 15".
    10. ^ Ostergaard 1997, p. 133.
    11. ^ Cicero, Marcus Tullius (January 1, 1913) . "Liber I" [Book I]. In Henderson, Jeffrey (ed.). De Officiis [On Duties]. Loeb Classical Library (in Latin and English). Vol. XXI. Translated by Miller, Walter (Digital ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 152–153 (XLII). doi:10.4159/DLCL.marcus_tullius_cicero-de_officiis.1913. ISBN 978-0-674-99033-3. OCLC 902696620. OL 7693830M. Archived from the original on April 6, 2018. XLII. Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery. Vulgar we must consider those also who buy from wholesale merchants to retail immediately; for they would get no profits without a great deal of downright lying; and verily, there is no action that is meaner than misrepresentation. And all mechanics are engaged in vulgar trades; for no workshop can have anything liberal about it. Least respectable of all are those trades which cater for sensual pleasures
    12. Proudhon 1890.
    13. ^ Marx 1969, Chapter VII.
    14. ^ Thompson 1966, p. 599.
    15. ^ Thompson 1966, p. 912.
    16. ^ Lazonick 1990, p. 37.
    17. Foner 1995, p. xix.
    18. Jensen 2002.
    19. Lawrence B. Glickman (1999). A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Cornell U.P. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-8014-8614-2.
    20. Goldman 2003, p. 283.
    21. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995. ISBN 0-8028-3784-0. p. 543.
    22. Marx 1990, p. ?.
    23. "The Hireling and the Slave – Antislavery Literature Project". Archived from the original on June 19, 2012. Retrieved January 25, 2009.
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    64. Quote from an interview with Pierre van Paassen (24 July 1936), published in the Toronto Daily Star (5 August 1936)
    65. Chomsky 1993, p. 19.
    66. Thye & Lawler 2006.
    67. ^ Price, Friedland & Vinokur 1998.
    68. Fromm 1995, p. ?.
      You can see Fromm discussing these ideas here.
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    71. quoted by Jose Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, vol. 2, p. 76
    72. Gramsci, A. (1992) Prison Notebooks. New York : Columbia University Press, pp. 233–38
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    85. Chomsky, Noam (September 21, 2007). "A Revolution is Just Below the Surface".
    86. Hauser 2006.
    87. "On Just War Theory at West Point Academy: Hauser's theories "could some day provide foundations for a more substantive theory of just war," expanding on some of the existing legal "codifications of these intuitive judgments" that are regularly disregarded by elite power structures. (min 26–30)".
    88. Chomsky, Noam (July 14, 2004). "Interview".
    89. "An Anarchist FAQ Section E – What do anarchists think causes ecological problems?". Archived from the original on May 10, 2011. Retrieved April 5, 2011.
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    91. Ellerman 2005, p. 16.
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    93. Ellerman 2005, p. 32.
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    95. Ellerman 2005, p. 2.
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    97. Mankiw 2012.
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    99. Bober 2007, pp. 41–42. See also Keen c. 1990.
    100. Foner, Eric. 1998. The Story of American Freedom. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 66
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    103. p.181-184 Democracy's Discontent By Michael J. Sandel
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    105. "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability: A Critique of Rothbard, Barnett, Smith, Kinsella, Gordon, and Epstein".

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