Wage slavery is a term used to draw an analogy
between slavery and wage labor by focusing
on similarities between owning and renting
a person. It is usually used to refer to a
situation where a person's livelihood depends
on wages or a salary, especially when the
dependence is total and immediate.The term
"wage slavery" has been used to criticize
exploitation of labour and social stratification,
with the former seen primarily as unequal
bargaining power between labor and capital
(particularly when workers are paid comparatively
low wages, e.g. in sweatshops) and the latter
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 starvation or poverty,
but also of social stigma and status diminution.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, while Luddites
emphasized the dehumanization brought about
by machines. Before the American Civil War,
Southern defenders of African American slavery
invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably
compare the condition of their slaves to workers
in the North. The United States abolished
slavery after the Civil War, but labor union
activists found the metaphor useful and appropriate.
According to Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded
Age "[r]eferences abounded in the labor press,
and it is hard to find a speech by a labor
leader without the phrase".The introduction
of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was
met with resistance, giving rise to the principles
of syndicalism. Historically, some labor organizations
and individual social activists have espoused
workers' self-management or worker cooperatives
as possible alternatives to wage labor.
== History ==
The view that working for wages is akin to
slavery dates back to the ancient world. In
ancient Rome, Cicero wrote that "whoever gives
his labor for money sells himself and puts
himself in the rank of slaves".
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 [has] the suppression of slavery
brought [him ?] He is free, you say. Ah! That
is his misfortune ... These men ... [have]
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 "[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".Some abolitionists in the United
States regarded the analogy as spurious. They
believed 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 laborers were
likely to have the opportunity to work for
themselves in the future, 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".
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 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". "Research has shown",
summarises William Lazonick, "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
===
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 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 – 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".
Unlike a chattel slave, a wage laborer can
(barring unemployment or lack of job offers)
choose between employers, but they 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 face
poverty or starvation. 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.
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.
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".
Similarities were blurred by the fact that
proponents of wage labor won the American
Civil War, in which they competed for legitimacy
with defenders of chattel slavery. Both presented
an over-positive assessment of their system
while denigrating the opponent.
According to American anarcho-syndicalist
philosopher Noam Chomsky, the similarities
between chattel and wage slavery were noticed
by the workers themselves. He noted that the
19th-century Lowell Mill Girls, who 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:
Defenses of 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 system 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. 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 business
owners, 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 the
concept of wage slavery.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 slave
another, with which to maintain his or her
living expenses). According to Graeber, such
arrangements were quite common in New World
slavery as well, whether in the United States
or Brazil. C. L. R. James argued that most
of the techniques of human organization employed
on factory workers during the Industrial Revolution
were first developed on slave plantations.
=== Decline in use of term ===
The usage of the term "wage slavery" shifted
to "wage work" at the end of the 19th century
as groups like the Knights of Labor and American
Federation of Labor shifted to a more reformist,
trade union ideology instead of worker's self-management.
Much of the decline was caused by the rapid
increase in manufacturing after the Industrial
Revolution and the subsequent dominance of
wage labor as a result. Another factor was
immigration and demographic changes that led
to ethnic tension between the workers.
As Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit point out: [I]ncreased
centralization of production ... declining
wages ... [an] expanding ... labor pool ... intensifying
competition, and ... [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 ... co-operatives,
for example) was far less compelling than
one that identified the specific conditions
of slavery as low wages.
== Treatment in various economic systems ==
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... [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.
=== Capitalism ===
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:
The existence of property not intended for
active use;
The concentration of ownership in few hands;
The lack of direct access by workers to the
means of production and consumption goods;
and
The perpetuation of a 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, 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 Italy and 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 ==
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:
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.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 (creativity,
love, sadness, taste, sight and the like)
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 ... [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".
=== Psychological control ===
==== 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". 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 ==
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, "[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.
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.
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.
== 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:
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.
State socialists view it as an injustice perpetrated
by capitalists and solved through nationalization
and social ownership of the means of production.
== See also ==
== Footnotes ==
== Bibliography ==
== 
External links ==
How The Miners Were Robbed (1907 anti-capitalist
pamphlet by John Wheatley)
Quote by Buckminster Fuller
Three Addresses on the Relations Subsisting
Between the White and Colored People of The
United States
Wage Labour and Capital
