Wage slavery

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Wage slavery is a term used by anti-capitalists (including socialists, anarchists, and communists) to refer to a condition in which a person is legally (de jure) voluntarily employed but practically (de facto) a slave. It is used to express disapproval of a condition where a person feels compelled to work in return for payment of a wage. In colloquial terms, this may refer to people that make a cult of work (the extreme case is dying of karoshi), or those who require one to work in order to be socially acceptable. In terms used by critics of capitalism, wage slavery is the condition where a person must sell his or her labor-power, submitting to the authority of an employer, in order merely to subsist. Different sources seem to have different ideas about what practical conditions would qualify a worker as a wage slave.

For example: wage slave can denote a worker who has no choice in who they work for, or in the type of job they can get; either due to economic and geographic circumstances, or due to personal lack of competence or education.

1 Wage slavery in capitalist society
2 Wage slavery in communist states
3 See also
4 External links

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Wage slavery in capitalist society

Wage slavery as a concept is a criticism of capitalism, defined as a condition when a capitalist minority of the population controls all of the necessary non-human components of production (capital and land) that other people (workers) use to produce goods. This sort of criticism is generally associated with socialist criticisms of capitalism, but is also expressed by the branch of liberalism represented by Thomas Jefferson ([1]), Henry George ([2]), Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine ([3]), as well as the Distributist school of thought within the Roman Catholic Church. Criticism of capitalism on these grounds is connected to the belief that one should have freedom to work without a boss or obligation.

The use of the term "wage slavery" is also a rhetorical device to draw parallels between modern work and the historical institution of slavery, specifically to chattel slavery wherein one person owns another person as property. The concept of wage slavery suggests that even where the conditions of chattel slavery do not apply, wage earners may live in conditions which are practically identical with the conditions of those under chattel slavery.

A key difference between wage slavery and chattel slavery recognized by Karl Marx was that the individual laborers can in some cases refuse to work for a specific employer and cannot (legally) be subjected to corporal punishment by that employer. To Marx, wage slavery was a class condition, not an individual situation. This class situation rested on

the concentration of ownership in few hands;
the lack of direct access by workers to the means of production and consumption goods; and
the existence of the reserve army of unemployed workers.

Furthermore, in Marx's view, this situation was ultimately due to the existence of private property and the state.

Marx recognized that some working people could escape wage slavery and become capitalists, if only in small numbers. But to him, the profits received by the capitalists were dependent on the work done by the working class, so that too much upward mobility would lead to the downfall of capitalism, unless it was balanced by downward mobility out of the capitalist class. This suggests that even if the faces of the "wage slaves" change, the category remains. A common analogy is that even if some slaves can win their freedom (as it was sometimes possible in ancient societies like Rome, for example), that doesn't justify slavery.

Critics of capitalism may view the working class to be slaves if employers have unrestricted power to fire individual workers; this is especially true if they can blacklist them from other employment (such blacklisting of suspected communists was instituted by employers during the McCarthy Era in the United States in Hollywood and other sectors). The "at will" employment arrangement means that a worker may be fired (or quit) for any reason. If a worker fears losing his job more than the employer fears losing a particular worker, then the employer can govern the personal life of the worker. For example, a worker may be fired based on his sexual orientation, unless protected by an enforceable anti-discrimination law. In an unrestrained form, this power even extends to basic civil liberties, such as the right to worship freely or to express political opinions. (In the United States, employees have no legal right to express political opinions while on the job.) This power could also undermine the right to vote; fear of this factor was a significant motivator for instituting the secret ballot.

Instances of wage slavery that show the most similarity to chattel slavery occur in societies where educational opportunities are limited, unionization is violently suppressed, and property may be arbitrarily confiscated. By connection of global trade networks, these harsh instances of wage slavery are connected to and affect societies with stronger traditions of freedom and few noticeable effects of supposed wage slavery. Extreme critics of capitalism argue that the same basic relationships are present in all capitalist societies, even if their impact is lessened by various traditions such as state accountability to the people and the establishment of a mixed economy. A mixed economy can permit some private control based upon ownership, but also supposedly exerts social control of capital through state ownership of certain industries or regulation of private economic relationships. Some proponents of neoliberalism advocate that the state only own those industries that are truly public goods while at the same allowing the rest of the economy to remain capitalist. Extreme proponents of capitalism advocate that everything, even industries that are essential to life, should be private property, bought and sold on the free market.

Critics of capitalism also assert that capitalist economic systems have a tendency to commodify the very things that should be most freely available in society—especially one that is technologically advanced. A pronounced lack of leisure time is commonly the focal point of such an argument.

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Wage slavery in communist states

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In theory, under Marxist communism labor is supposed to be voluntary: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.". However, some authoritarian communist states, such as the USSR, employed a wide range of involuntary labor, from slave labor of Gulag camps to obligatory labor of the former Soviet Union, where failure to have a job was a criminal offence, known as "parasitism" (тунеядство, tuneyadstvo).

Bearing in mind that most workers' and especially peasants' wages were on the subsistence level, the laborers' condition would fit most definitions of "wage slavery". However, the application of the term "wage slavery" to the economy of Communist states has been hardly used in this way.

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