Wage slavery

[11] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, and engaged in critique of work[12][13] while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines.

In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery:[13] The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him ...

[23][24] 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".

[29] Abraham Lincoln and the 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.

[30] 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.

[10] William Lazonick, summarized: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.

[47] 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.

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 plantations.

[50] At the end of the 19th century, North American labor rhetoric turned towards consumerist and economics-based politics, from its previously radical, producerist vision.

[51] American producerist labor politics emphasized the control of production conditions as being the guarantor of self-reliant, personal freedom.

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,[54][55] 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.

[59] 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".

[11] Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine;[60] Henry George, who inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism;[9] 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: And secondarily on: Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States.

[61] Fascism was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate investment (notably from the United States) in Germany increased after the fascists took power.

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".

[65] 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.

In contrast, when a person's sense of self is based on what he experiences in a "state of being" with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost, or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail.

[70] 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".

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.

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.

Billboards as well as television, Internet and newspaper advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.

[78][79] In the early 20th century, "scientific methods of strikebreaking"[80] were devised – employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined "harmony" and "Americanism".

[82] 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.

[87][88] 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.

[92] 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.

The noted economist Paul Samuelson described this discrepancy: Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized.

[103] Some advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, have said that inalienable rights can be waived if done so voluntarily, saying "the comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery.