Slave Labour and Wage Labour—How Much of a Difference is There?
I will start by taking about the civil war. In the south, the primary mode of labour was known as slavery. In this mode you are the property of a slaveholder. You are provided with just enough to not die in exchange that you work on and to the extent you are told, at the threat of physical violence in the case of disobedience.
In the north, where slavery was less common, but still very present, the primary method was that of wage labour. This is the primary mode of work located in the US today. You work on typically a factory of some kind in exchange for a pittance. Nowadays, this is at least guaranteed to be a real currency. If you were disobedient, you would be fired. If you were not able to secure another employer as they are known, you would be unable to continue living.
Let us now compare these two modes:
- Your labour is not yours; you do not reap what you so
- Malcompliance will result in physical suffering following an action taken by the one who owns your work.
- In exchange for your work, you are given just enough to live.
- You are a resource to be extracted.
So what are the differences?
- An employed person can take their labour anywhere (this is often not an option for other reasons)
- An employed person costs nothing to replace. (The slaver has the bare minimum incentive to keep their human property alive.)
- Employable people are made to fight eachother for work.
When the slaves were freed by the end of the civil war, their material standing did not fundamentally change. What changed, at least at this point, was still nominal. However, with these freed people now in the same labour pool as the rest, charletons could now claim there was a plot to take white jobs, and thus divide the working class.
In addition to the fact that this societal arrangement of work is not unsimilar to that of slave labour if not in legal semantics, is that the old approach to slavery is still ongoing. A close examination reveals that the law still allows enslavement for those deemed criminals. Not suppose the legal system were used against a particular race, one historically enslaved, and now you are getting the picture.
Additionally, we should not ignore all the slaves and pittance labour that goes on in countries that export to the US. Where do you suppose your clothes come from?
What is ultimately pointed out here is that
Slavery never went away, it simply changed form.
