

Wage slave? Or slave to the wage? - _delirium
http://ctrlaltdelmylife.weebly.com/2/post/2012/02/wage-slave-or-slave-to-the-wage.html

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mseebach
The term "wage slave" annoys me greatly. You're a "slave" to whatever
arrangements you can make to exchange your work for food and shelter. If
you're a freelancer, you're a "slave" to finding clients and chasing payments,
if you're a start-up founder, you're a "slave" to building and selling a
product, if you're a subsistence farmer, you're a "slave" to cultivating the
ground. The usage of the word "slave" masks the fact that "wage slaves" enjoy
unprecedented freedom in choosing their "master".

Yes, there are unhelpful patterns in consumerism in which people more or less
consciously reduce the options available to them, but I don't think talking
about wage slavery is very meaningful in that situation, either: If you have
trouble moderating your personal consumption, the uncertainty of self-
employment is most certainly not for you.

~~~
davidhollander
"Wage slave" is an anti-concept used by individuals to rationalize their
belief that coercive slavery can be morally legitimate. In order to do so,
they must conflate voluntary impositions on freedom (doing what your boss says
to obtain their property) with coercive impositions on freedom (doing what
your owner says to avoid violence). At the start of the industrial revolution,
the term was used by plantation owners in the South to attack factory owners
in the North.

~~~
_delirium
Do you have evidence for that origin? As far as I'm able to find, the term
originated among socialists in either the UK or the Northeastern United
States, who were against both wage-slavery and the regular kind of slavery. I
can't find any evidence that it was coined in the Southern U.S. by supporters
of slavery, but sources admittedly seem a bit spotty (and I can believe that
they would've used it for their ends if convenient).

~~~
davidhollander
The argument was invoked by John C Calhoun, Thomas Roderick Dew, and George
Fitzugh in the beginning of the 19th century in their defenses of slavery.

Additionally, any form of socialism advocating for the abolishment of
capitalism through political organization rather than voluntary abandonment
also presupposes that one can legitimately claim ownership over the output and
life of another through use of force.

------
einhverfr
One of the most interesting books I read was "The Servile State" by Hilaire
Belloc. Belloc suggests that in fact most people when desperate will gladly
trade freedom for subsistence. He suggests the natural evolution of class
warfare is from unrestrained capitalism to a welfare state, to one which
legally compels workers to labor for the benefit of someone else. And indeed
that's the system we have in the US, if you listen to folks like Cornell West
and look into the prison industrial complex.

The way out, as both Belloc and his contemporary Chesterton (Note: I am NOT a
Catholic. I am NOT even a Christian. I am not endorsing Chesterton's religious
writings) thought was to try to push for an economy of the self-employed. This
idea may seem less welcome on a VC site.... But the basic idea is that if
labor and capital fight, both get to declare victory, but really Capital wins.
The way to win if you are on the labor side is no to play the game, and go
into business for yourself as an independent agent, freed from worker
protections but also in a relative position of power and freedom compared to
where you would be as an employee.

Time was when almost everyone was self-employed. The only reason it isn't for
everyone is we make it so darn hard in the US. I say that as one who has been
in Indonesia and Malaysia for the past six months and I can say that no third
world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US. Indeed
no developed nation does either.....

~~~
scarmig
Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration, and never in human
history has the majority of workers been employed that way. Even now, as (a
small minority of) people in the Global South are moving to that kind of
labor, we see that very same system breaking down in the West. People usually
work piecemeal and irregular hours, in exchange for locally-valid credit.

It's a pipe dream to believe that the height of human happiness and social
justice is everyone sitting down at a 9-5 job five days a week so you can pay
down the mortgage on housing you overpaid for because everyone else also
bought into the same myth. Which is what mainstream political parties in all
countries that I know of seem to buy into, just with variations on the theme.

I like Chesterton's vision and see it as more emancipatory than the
industrial-corporate socialism/capitalism that we have, despite me being a
left wing crazy.

Will have to check out Belloc.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration_

Very much so. It used to be from dawn until dusk.

When hours were first instituted, it was always compared to farm work, since
that was understood to be the hardest work possible.

EDIT: I see there's a lot of academicians with opinions. Anyone here grow up
on a farm? Would you like to tell us about how easy the work is?

~~~
_delirium
There's considerable variation in estimates, but most historians don't
consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours, apart from
peak weeks at planting and harvest. Data is really spotty, though, and before
formalized hourly employment, it's not even really clear that people
distinguished systematically between "working hours" and "leisure hours", so
reconstructing it is difficult. To take one minor example, is "knitting by the
fire while chatting with a neighbor" 100% work, 50% work, or something else?
Perhaps it depends on whether it was a relaxed, half-working, half-chatting
sort of knitting, or more industrious, but can we plausibly estimate how much
of each was done in the 19th century? Even the distribution of how much of
their day people typically took off for meals isn't well established (though
it probably also varied by season).

~~~
jpdoctor
> _but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical
> agrarian working hours_

Probably because they've never worked on a farm.

~~~
_delirium
Ah, I didn't realize we were having an intellectual discussion at that level
here. Your counter-argument to historical research is essentially, "fuck them
ivory tower mothafuckas, I've got _anecdotes_ "?

------
hexis
You could also start a business and not hire employees. It's not right for
every business idea, but if you can manage it, it's pretty amazing.

~~~
siavosh
My concern with this has always been that you can never really have any time
off if you're supporting a product, i.e. always having to check your email
making sure customer questions are being answered and your servers aren't on
fire.

~~~
patio11
First, what Amy says.

Second, [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-
busin...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-business-
on-5-hours-a-week/)

I run two software businesses. One of them is fairly critical. I'm taking off
~2.5 months this year for my wedding. (I.e. I anticipate less than 10 minutes
a day of work during that... assuming I can't hire anyone to do it for me.)

I've previously sustained that level of work for weeks or months. It really is
doable.

------
ilaksh
Good point. A responsible and moral person will feel an obligation to his
employees to maintain the business.

Of course many business owners are disconnected enough that they don't rely on
the income of a particular business and don't have qualms with cutting staff.

However, I think its important to understand the historical context of the
term "wage slave".

Go back to serfdom. The lord owns the land, and in order to live there, a serf
must provide service in the form of agricultural production or whatever else
the lord wants him to do. Supposedly the lord or his king would provide
"protection" by hiring knights and such. If the serf refuses to serve or pay
up (by donating his harvest etc.) then he is removed from the land or killed.

This is similar to the way that a Mafia operates.

Fast forward to the "American System of Enter-prise".

Prise: "something taken by force," late 14c., from O.Fr. prise "a taking,
seizing, holding," prop. fem. pp. of prendre "to take, seize," from L.
prendere, contraction of prehendere (see prehensile). Especially of ships
captured at sea (1510s).

pry (2) "raise by force," 1823 (originally also a noun, "an instrument for
prying, a crowbar"), alteration of prize (as though it were a plural) in
obsolete sense of "lever" (c.1300), from O.Fr. prise "a taking hold, grasp"
(see prize (n.2)).

What might one use a pry bar for? Manacles.

In the American System of Enter-prise, capital (money) translates into land
and business ownership and power. Rather than having land directly granted to
the lords by the King, banks provide loans to those who can demonstrate a
history of ownership (a parallel to the authentication of nobility). Rather
than working the land directly for subsistence, workers are required to
exchange wages for money to pay for food and the right to stay in their homes.

A worker who does not please his boss or the ownership will be fired and no
longer receive wages. Because of urbanization, few people have the land,
skills or other requirements for producing their own food, and must purchase
food with money earned through wages. Without wages, the worker cannot pay his
rent/mortgage. Therefore, a man who has been fired by his boss will starve and
lose his home if he cannot quickly find another boss (owner).

Despite the introduction of money and new terminology, class structures and
circumstances similar to those in feudal society occur in the contemporary
system.

------
davidw
Sounds like the "E-Myth revisited" situation where the business was something
that was not separate from her.

A "real business" is one that does _not_ make you a slave to it: it's
something that you own, rather than something you must be intimately involved
in for it to continue functioning. You make money when you are sleeping.

Not sure where the downvotes are from on this, it's not exactly some horrible
thing to say about someone: many businesses "are" their owners. But unless you
recognize that, you'll never fix it.

------
maeon3
Using the phrase "wage slave" to refer to a business owner who must make
payroll even when profits are down is a bit of a stretch. A slave can't choose
to stop working, but a business owner can cut payroll to zero by liquidating
everyone and everything and taking a year long vacation.

~~~
ars
A year long vacation? With what money?

And by that logic a wage slave can stop by quitting his job and taking a year
long vacation.

Do you suffer from the belief that if you own a business you must be rich?

~~~
maeon3
If you own a business and have a big payroll to make say more than 5 people at
some salary between min wage and 100k/year then I would think they have far
more freedom to extract themselves from the rat race than someone living hand
to mouth working minimum wage. You are right, a business owner could be a
slave to others if they are not profitable and he has debts to other entities.

Still, I reserve "slave" for those people lower on the food chain.

