Editing Wage slavery (section)

== History ==
[[File:Portrait Emma Goldman.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Emma Goldman]] denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".<ref>{{Harvnb|Goldman|2003|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=0IF7CusxuMcC&pg=PA283 283]}}.</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, [[Cicero]] wrote that "the very wage [wage labourers] receive is a pledge of their slavery".<ref name="Cicero"/>

In 1763, the French journalist [[Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet|Simon Linguet]] 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 [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him ?] He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune&nbsp;... These men&nbsp;... [have] 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?}}

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).<ref name="schalkenbach1"/><ref>{{Harvnb|Marx|1990|p=?}}.</ref> Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the [[Confederate States of America|Southern slave states]], 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">[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/lincolns-wage/ Wage Slavery], 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, [[Henry David Thoreau]] wrote that "[i]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>

[[Abolitionism in the United States|Abolitionists in the United States]] 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> [[Abraham Lincoln]] and the [[History of the United States Republican Party|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]].<ref name="Sandel 181">{{Harvnb|Sandel|1996|pp=[https://books.google.com/books?id=_KdrTfTxqvgC&pg=PA181 181–84]}}.</ref> The abolitionist and former slave [[Frederick Douglass]] 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=[https://archive.org/stream/threeaddresseson00dougrich/threeaddresseson00dougrich_djvu.txt 12–13]}}</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=[https://archive.org/stream/threeaddresseson00dougrich/threeaddresseson00dougrich_djvu.txt 16]}}</ref></blockquote>[[File:CottonNegrosSouth.jpg|thumb|upright|[[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.<ref name="HB"/> 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".<ref name="Sandel 181"/> [[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".<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 [[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".<ref name="Geoffrey Ostergaard p. 133"/> [[William Lazonick]], 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 [[Lowell mill girls]] 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"/> [[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 [[Social alienation|alienated]] in a [[class society]]). According to [[Friedrich Engels]]:<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 ===
{{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 [[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.<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>[http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/548305/slavery/24172/Slave-occupations "The sociology of slavery: Slave occupations"]. ''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 [[Roman Empire]], the Central Asian [[Samanid Empire|Samanid domains]], [[Ch'ing]] 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[s] the inhabitants, the social relations... the ideas... [and] 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 [[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.<ref name="Fitzhugh 1857"/><ref name="Foner 1998 p66"/><ref name="Weininger 2002 p95"/>

According to American [[Anarcho-syndicalism|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".<ref>{{Harvnb|Chomsky|2000}}.</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Chomsky|2011}}.</ref> They expressed their concerns in a [[Protest songs in the United States|protest song]] 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>

{{Poem quote|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.}}

[[File:Wage slavery.jpg|thumb|right]]

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 [[human condition|life itself]]. According to this narrative, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the ''status quo'' is naively [[utopia]]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 [[wealth creation|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.<ref>{{Harvnb|Metcalf|2005|p= 201}}.</ref> 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.<ref>McKay, Iain. B.7.2 Does social mobility make up for class inequality? An Anarchist FAQ: Volume 1</ref>

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 [[:Category:Swahili city-states|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 plantation]]s.<ref>
{{Harvnb|Graeber|2004|p= [http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragments_%20Anarchist_Anthropology.pdf 37]
}}.
</ref>
Subsequent work "traces the innovations of modern [[management]] 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 = [[Caitlin Rosenthal]] 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 ===
[[File:Wage Slavery Use Study.svg|thumb|upright=1.5|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".{{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|[I]ncreased centralization of production&nbsp;... declining wages&nbsp;... [an] expanding&nbsp;... labor pool&nbsp;... intensifying competition, and&nbsp;... [t]he loss of competence and independence experienced by skilled labor" meant that "a critique that referred to all [wage] 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}} }}

In more general English-language usage, the phrase "wage slavery" and its variants became more frequent in the 20th century.<ref>
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=wage+slavery%2Cwage-slavery%2Cwage+slave%2Cwage-slave&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cwage%20slavery%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwage%20-%20slavery%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwage%20slave%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwage%20-%20slave%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cwage%20slavery%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwage%20-%20slavery%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwage%20slave%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwage%20-%20slave%3B%2Cc0 Statistical table of frequency of use]
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