Wage or wage slavery is a capitalist situation in which the worker theoretically (de jure) works of his own free will, but in practice (de facto) is forced to trade his own labor force, often submitting to the conditions of the employer in order to survive.
At the same time, a parallel is drawn between ancient slavery and the position of the worker (employee) under capitalism: it is argued that in fact the latter has no other choice but to work for a salary. The choice that the capitalist system provides to man is illusory. Noam Chomsky argues that in modern democratic societies, the democratic element extends at best only to the political system. The economic system, in his opinion, is still based on the dictates of those in power, in which most individuals are assigned the role of secondary means of production. From the point of view of critics of the capitalist system, wage slavery turns a person into a specific form of product (in the labor market), deprives him of the free time necessary for full intellectual developmenthas a detrimental effect on health (cf. karosi).
Karoshi (過 労 死) is a Japanese term meaning death by overwork. Japan is one of the few countries that collects special statistics on karoshi. The main medical causes of karoshi are stroke or heart attack due to stress.
The practice of “voluntary slavery” (enslavement servitude), widespread in medieval Russia, speaks of the long historical coexistence of slavery and free choice. Before the war between the North and South in the United States, slavery advocates from the southern states compared the living conditions of their slaves to the conditions in which civilians in the northern states had to live and work. With the industrial revolution, Marx, Proudhon, and other thinkers also compared wage labor and slavery, criticizing private ownership of the means of production.
A clear definition of wage slavery was given by Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet in 1763. Karl Marx devoted an entire chapter to Lenge's Theory of Surplus Value, in which he quotes S. Lenge:
Only the impossibility of living differently makes our day laborers plow the land, the fruits of which they will not have to use, and our bricklayers - to erect houses in which they will not have to live. Poverty drives them to the market, where they await masters who would deign to buy them. Poverty forces them on their knees to beg the rich man to allow them to enrich him.
The idea that there are significant similarities between wage work and slavery was often expressed in the late 18th and 19th centuries by both supporters of slavery (especially in the southern states of the United States) and opponents of capitalism (who criticized the slave labor system as well). Some defenders of slavery in the South argued that workers in the North were "free in name only, but [in fact] slaves to endless toil," and that their slaves were in a better position. This claim was partially supported by modern research, which found that the material conditions of life and work of slaves were "better than what was usually available to personally free urban workers in those days." At that time, Henry Thoreau wrote that “it is hard when there is an overseer over you from the South, even worse if from the North; but the worst is when you are your own supervisor."
Black wage laborers pick cotton on plantations in the South. However, self-employment became increasingly rare when, in the second half of the 19th century. the craft began to be supplanted by industrial production.
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E. P. Thompson noted that for British workers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, "the gap in status between the" servant "- a hired employee who obeys the master's orders and discipline - and the [free] artisan who could" come and go " it was so great when he wished that people would rather agree to shed blood than let themselves be carried from one end to another. And, in the system of values of society, the one who resisted the downgrading was right.
"Research has shown," summed up William Lazonick, "that the eighteenth-century 'born free Englishmen' - even those forced to engage in agricultural wage labor (laborer) - stubbornly resisted the transition to the capitalist workshop."
The use of the term "wage slavery" by workers' organizations seems to date back to the protests of female workers from the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836. Later this term was used by many organizations of workers of the mid-19th century, in order to indicate the lack of workers' self-government. However, by the end of the 19th century. it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term "wage work" as workers' organizations began to focus more on wage growth than on the dependence of employees.
Karl Marx described capitalist society as encroaching on individual autonomy. At the same time, he was based on the materialistic and consumer concept of the body and its freedom (that is, what 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. Each individual slave is the property of a certain master, and, already due to the interest of the latter, the existence of the slave is guaranteed, no matter how pitiful it may be. The individual proletarian is, so to speak, the property of the entire bourgeois class. His labor is bought only when someone needs it, and therefore his existence is not guaranteed. This existence is guaranteed only for the proletarian class as a whole.
Some anti-capitalist thinkers have argued that the elite support wage slavery and the disunity of the working class through their influence over the media and entertainment, educational institutions, as well as through unfair laws, nationalist and corporate propaganda, every incentive to adopt values that please the ruling elite. direct state violence, fear of unemployment, and finally, the "historical legacy" in the form of exploitation and accumulation / redistribution of profits under the previous economic systems. A certain economic theory has been summed up under this.
For example, Adam Smith noted that employers often collude with each other to keep wages low:
The interests of traders … in any given branch of trade or production are always in some respects different from the public interest, and even contradict them. These people are usually interested in deceiving and even oppressing the public. As has been said, we seldom hear about employers 'unions, although often about workers' unions. But if someone imagines in this regard that the owners rarely unite, it means that he simply does not understand this topic. Employers are always and everywhere in a kind of tacit alliance with each other, in agreement not to raise wages above the current level … It is easy, however, to foresee which of the two parties will (under all normal circumstances) gain an advantage in the dispute and force the other side to agree with the proposed conditions …
Prominent critics of fascism, such as Buenaventura Durruti, believed that fascism was a weapon and refuge for privileged people who wanted to continue to maintain wage slavery:
No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping out of their hands, they cultivate fascism in order to preserve their privileges.
Principles of modern slavery
- Economic compulsion of slaves to permanent work. The modern slave is forced to work non-stop until death, because the money earned by a slave in 1 month is enough to pay for housing for 1 month, food for 1 month and travel for 1 month. Since a modern slave always has enough money for only 1 month, a modern slave is forced to work all his life until death. The pension is also a big fiction, because A retired slave pays his entire pension for housing and food, and a retired slave has no spare money.
- The second mechanism of covert coercion of slaves to work is the creation of an artificial demand for pseudo-necessary goods, which are imposed on the slave with the help of TV advertisements, PR, and the location of goods in certain places of the store. The modern slave is involved in an endless race for "novelties", and for this he has to constantly work.
- The third hidden mechanism of economic coercion of modern slaves is the credit system, with the "help" of which modern slaves are more and more drawn into credit bondage, through the mechanism of "loan interest". Every day the modern slave needs more and more, because a modern slave, in order to pay off an interest-bearing loan, takes a new loan without giving up the old one, creating a pyramid of debts. Debt, constantly hanging over the modern slave, is a good incentive for the modern slave to work, even for meager wages.
- The fourth mechanism of hidden coercion of slaves is the mechanism of inflation or periodically artificially arranged defaults, which do not allow citizens to develop economically, having gone bankrupt from scratch … The rise in prices in the absence of an increase in the slave's wages provides a hidden imperceptible robbery of slaves. Thus, the modern slave becomes more and more impoverished.
- In order for modern slaves not to demand their share of the profit, they did not demand to give back what they earned by their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers, etc. the facts of plundering into the pockets of slave owners of resources that were created by numerous generations of slaves over a thousand-year history are hushed up.
And the most important sign of a slave is not the ability to self-organize, solidarity, support each other, the ability to live in union with each other.