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Wage slavery
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Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person is dependent for a livelihood on the wages earned, especially if the dependency is total and immediate. The term is used to draw an analogy between slavery and some or all forms of wage labor. Some uses of the term refer to various forms of unfree labour, such as peonage. More controversially, others point to the similarities between owning and employing a person, and extend the term to cover a wide range of employment relationships in a hierarchical social environment with limited aspects of wage job-related choices (e.g.
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Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person is dependent for a livelihood on the wages earned, especially if the dependency is total and immediate. The term is used to draw an analogy between slavery and some or all forms of wage labor. Some uses of the term refer to various forms of unfree labour, such as peonage. More controversially, others point to the similarities between owning and employing a person, and extend the term to cover a wide range of employment relationships in a hierarchical social environment with limited aspects of wage job-related choices (e.g. working for a boss under threat of starvation, poverty or social stigma). The term is often used by anti-capitalists (socialists, anarchists, and other groups), to express disapproval of a condition where a person feels compelled to work for a wage.
Similarities between wage labor and slavery were articulated at least as early as Cicero. These comparisons were elaborated by subsequent thinkers, such as Proudhon and Marx, particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution. Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of Negro slavery also invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North.
The use of the term wage slave by labor organizations, perhaps originates 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, but was gradually replaced by the more pragmatic term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century.
Historic aspects
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 US), and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of chattel slavery).
Defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states often argued that 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."
The first articulate description of wage slavery was perhaps made by Simon Linguet in 1763:?
This viewpoint was later elaborated on by Karl Marx, who describe it as undermining beingness and individual autonomy, 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 class society). According to Marx:
The description of wage workers as wage slaves was not without controversy. Many abolitionists in the U.S. including northern capitalists, regarded the analogy 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.
Proponents of the viewpoint that the condition of wage workers has substantial similarities (as well as some advantages and disadvantages) vis a vis chattel slavery, argued that:
1. Since the chattel slave is property, the chattel slave's 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 he 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, 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." 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:
Similarly, various strategies and struggles adopted by wage slaves created what may be called extra-capitalist structures (unions, welfare institutions etc) that can constrain the inherent inequity of wage slavery.
2. Unlike a chattel slave, a wage slave can sometimes choose his boss, but he cannot choose to have no boss. A wage slave's starkest choice is to work for a boss or face poverty or starvation. Indirectly, prison, beatings, insults and other punishments, including death, lay in store for those who try to survive without working for 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 reinforcement to achieve best results and before losing their investment (or even friendship) 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. 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[s] the inhabitants, the social relations...the ideas...[and] the social form of daily life."
The similarities between chattel and wage slavery were noticed by the workers themselves. For example, the 19th century Lowell Mill Girls, 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."
They expressed as such in one of their protest songs in 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.
Philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky believes that such sentiments are "just below the surface". He has used the militant history of labor movements, Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom", Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and Marc Hauser's evidence supporting an innate and universal moral faculty, to explain the incompatibility of such oppressive conditions with certain aspects of human nature.
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. 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. 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.
Methods of control in wage systems
In 19th century discussions of labour 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.
Treatment in various economic systems
The term 'wage slavery' or 'wage slave' has been used to describe the condition of workers in various economic systems, including communist states, but given the prevalence of modern capitalism, it is sometimes described as a lack of rights in the market system; especially in the absence of non-market structures stemming from some degree of democratic input (welfare system, retirement income, health insurance, etc.). The concept seeks to point out how the only rights a worker has are the rights he or she gains on the labor market. S/he faces starvation when unable or unwilling to rent him/herself to those who own the capital and means of production. Capitalists, landowners, or sometimes a state elite, own the means of production (land, industry etc) and gain profit or power simply from granting permission to use them. This they do in exchange for wages. The 19th century economist Henry George argued that the market economy could be reformed by making land common property. In his view, people should own the productive results of their efforts, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, should belong equally to everyone in society.
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 (e.g. my freedom to opress, kill, steal etc violates yours). Given that workers are the majority, they believe 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 (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:
The notion that "[b]asic supply and demand theory would indicate that those economic theories which have utility to others would be provided by economists," entails that "[i]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 economic theory, 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...[who] are abstracted away from real economic activity (i.e. production) so the source of profits and power... [namely] exploitation of labour...interest and rent can be ignored...[in favor of] exchanges in the market...[and concepts such as] abstinence or waiting by the capitalist, the productivity of capital, 'time-preference,' entrepreneurialism and so forth." Allegedly, "[t]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 Ricardian Socialists who predated Proudhon and Marx and who first made such an analysis commonplace)."
Preceding these thinkers, however, was Adam Smith, 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, and articulated in The Wealth of Nations some factors in the development of wage slavery:
"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.... [They] 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... [while] [t]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."
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 (capital, land, industry etc) that other people (workers) use to produce goods. This sort of criticism is generally associated with socialist and anarchist criticisms of capitalism, and 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." Though perhaps the concept dates back to Cicero, 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."
Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Henry George, Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine, as well as the Distributist school of thought within the Roman Catholic Church. Criticism of capitalism on these grounds, however, might not always be connected to the belief that one should have freedom to work without a boss. Defenders of slavery such as Thomas Carlyle, argued that black workers were better off as slaves than they would be as wage employees. Carlyle's famous description of economics as the dismal science was coined in the course of polemical debates with anti-slavery economists such as John Stuart Mill.
The extreme subordination generated by wage slavery has also been recognized by right wing bosses like US financier & railroad businessman Jay Gould (1836–1892), who famously said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." 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 chattel slavery.
Anthropologist David Graeber has noted that, historically, the first wage labor contracts we know aboutwhether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or Swahili city states in the Indian oceanwere 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 New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or Brazil.
C. L. R. James made a famous argument that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the industrial revolution were first developed on slave plantations.
To Marx and anarchist thinkers like Bakunin and 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
- the concentration of ownership in few hands,
- the lack of direct access by workers to the means of production and consumption goods
- the existence of the reserve army of unemployed workers.
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.
- 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."
- 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." 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.
Communism
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"-- 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 US and the USSR. These two states preserved and expanded the institutions of wage slavery by simultaneously identifying Soviet state brutality and destruction of workers' councils with socialism and communism in order to either vilify them, or exploit the aura of their ideals (esp. opposition to wage slavery). 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. 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 --originally through a harsh dictatorship-- developed into an industrial powerhouse with a workforce that is better equipped to combat wage slavery. 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. Such policies seem compatible with the observation of Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, 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" because the rich countries developed with extensive state intervention and protection of what US Founding Father Alexander Hamilton called "infant industry".
Fascism
The various authoritarian ideologies of fascism (such as race-based theories of superiority and Social Darwinism) 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, with "person[s] dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood." Fascism, however, was more discriminating of trade unions than modern economies like Spain or the United States (countries which nevertheless do implement union busting and laws to limit union influence).
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. 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, though critics do not believe that such improvements justify fascism nor wage slavery.
Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American "National Security States," Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman 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:
"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."
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
Analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book On 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."
More recently, investigative journalist Robert Kuttner 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."
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 … [Leadership means] 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 … [and the] 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… [because] 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."
Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that wage slavery fosters alienation and is "connected with the marginalisation and disempowerment of those without authority" because "[t]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 [that irrational authority is rational and necessary], … [so] the mind is lulled into submission by clichés … [and] people are made dumb because they become dependent and lose their capacity to trust their eyes and judgement." 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.
Labor and government
Noam Chomsky writes that rationalizations for what he describes as an 'elite' government function have been fallacious:
Mujeres Libres (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.
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, "[t]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 [costs] or the produced outputs [revenue, profits] of the employer’s business." Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain[s] 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."
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. 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." 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 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 laissez-faire capitalism, among them 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."
Others like 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:
"[I]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."
Criticism
According to Eric Foner, abolitionists in the U.S. regarded the analogy of wage earners to slaves, symbolized by the term "wage slavery," as spurious. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison stated that the use of the term "wage slavery" (in a time when chattel slavery was still common) was an "abuse of language." The abolitionist believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass described his elation when he took a paying job, declaring that "Now I am my own master." According to Douglass, wage labor did not represent oppression but fair exchange and former slaves for the first time receiving the fruits of their labor.
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. 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.
In mainstream economic theory, 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 neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship, and carries no particular moral implications. The problem of poverty comes from an unequal distribution of income and can be addressed by government programs like social security and progressive taxation, and does not reflect a fundamental flaw in the capitalist system.
According to Austrian school of economics, 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 classical liberal and libertarian notion of self-ownership. 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.
See also
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