Not really, it's a very old observation. For example, Cicero observed that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves"
And there are many types of slavery that are not chattel slavery.
> And there are many types of slavery that are not chattel slavery.
Exactly! The sort of slavery being referenced here is "wage slavery," and it derives straight from Cicero's line of thinking. The idea here is that the vast majority of humans in a developed economy need to work. In particular, people without the resources to start a business themselves have to work for someone else. Although there is theoretically a choice of employers (there may not in fact be due to locality of the labor market), one nonetheless has to work for someone else, selling their time. If one wants to survive, one is not free to leave one's job.
This lack of freedom is the essential notion of wage slavery. That some wage slaves are better off than others is irrelevant: house slaves in the American South were often treated better and had better working conditions than field hands, but they were still slaves.
So, people who both owned slaves and employed laborers, and were in a position to see the equivalence, but lacked the identity-group reasons either slaves or laborers would have to see an illusionary difference?
pmiller2|6 years ago
Exactly! The sort of slavery being referenced here is "wage slavery," and it derives straight from Cicero's line of thinking. The idea here is that the vast majority of humans in a developed economy need to work. In particular, people without the resources to start a business themselves have to work for someone else. Although there is theoretically a choice of employers (there may not in fact be due to locality of the labor market), one nonetheless has to work for someone else, selling their time. If one wants to survive, one is not free to leave one's job.
This lack of freedom is the essential notion of wage slavery. That some wage slaves are better off than others is irrelevant: house slaves in the American South were often treated better and had better working conditions than field hands, but they were still slaves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaveryhttps://en.wikiped...
veggieburglar|6 years ago
dragonwriter|6 years ago
kentrado|6 years ago