Rape, consent, and wage slavery

[cyu]

Really good article at http://onestrawshort.blogspot.com/2009/02/capitalism-consent-and-wage-slavery.html

...well worth reading the whole thing, but I'll just quote the first part because it is a brilliant analogy for how capitalism works.

The rapist physically forces the victim to have sex with him. This is the typically-conceived vision of rape. However, it is not the only one.

Suppose the rapist holds a gun to the victim's head and tells her he will kill her unless she has sex with him. He is giving her a choice; she does not actually have to have sex with him. She could choose to die instead. However, this is not a reasonable alternative. There is no consent because any decision she makes is made under duress; thus, this is still rape.

Next, suppose the rapist kidnaps another person and tells the victim that she has a choice. Either she can murder the other victim, or she can have sex with the rapist. Again, the choice is not a reasonable choice; it is one in which the only alternative to being a victim is to victimize another. Thus, there is no consent; this is still rape.

Now suppose the rapist locks her in a room and tells her she can either have sex with him or starve to death. The alternative is not a reasonable one; there is no consent; this is still rape.

Finally, suppose the victim has multiple kidnappers. They give her a choice; either she can have sex with one of them (she chooses which one) or she can starve to death. The fact that she is allowed to choose her rapist clearly does not amount to consent; it is merely a choice between a number of situations that are all still fundamentally involuntary. Since there is no consent, this is still rape.

[NOT_a_Capitalist]

Good post. Unfortunately, someone has to be enslaved to pay off the banks' ever- compounding interest plus principal.

All real value sucked out of the world by the parasitical capitalist bankers who create money out of nothing and back it through government tyranny.

[ZeroNowhere]

That kind of analogy is actually quite common, though generally it's compared to highway robbery (your money or your life) and such, though with the same effect. On the other hand, I don't like the ending much, seeing as it puts stress upon ownership of land as the basis of capitalism rather than ownership of the means of production, which sounds way too much like Georgeism for me to be comfortable. Also, the whole 'then he can make his own chairs, blah' stuff sounds more like a utopian feudalism than socialism, with all of the stress upon individual production.


All real value sucked out of the world by the parasitical capitalist bankers who create money out of nothing and back it through government tyranny.
You've been watching Zeitgeist (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jan09/page12.html) recently, it seems? Though really, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.

[Yazman]

You've been watching Zeitgeist recently, it seems? Though really, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.

lol? You're serious when you say this? Seems pretty straightforward to me - capitalist parasites enslaving the masses in order to generate surplus value. Even Marx talked about this, so I don't know why you seem to think its new.

[ZeroNowhere]

lol? You're serious when you say this? Seems pretty straightforward to me - capitalist parasites enslaving the masses in order to generate surplus value. Even Marx talked about this, so I don't know why you seem to think its new.
No, the whole 'all real value sucked out of the world by parasitic capitalist bankers who create money out of nothing' bit.

[TC]

I think its useful to analytically deconstruct the concept of 'consent' in employment contracts in that they are entered into in a context of coercion and thus cannot be taken to be freely chosen, except in a forced choice.

However, one has to be careful not to abstract to the point that real differences are glossed over. Slavery in the historic sense is meaningfully distinct from 'wage slavery' in that slaves were bound to a particular "employer" through direct physical coercion whereas proletariat are bound to the employer class through indirect coercion. With regards to slaves the violence was direct bodily harm, with proletariat the violence is use of police force to violently exclude them from resources required for their survival if they don't comply with the wishes at least one employer. This is not a meaningless distinction, the distinction is not between coercion and freedom but between a more physically humiliating, alienating form of coercion and a less humiliating and alienating form of coercion.

The same, incidentally, applies to rape and forced-choice sex. In post-agricultural pre-industrial societies women essentially found themselves in the last scenario: if they didn't marry someone or prostitute themselves they'd starve since they were legally excluded from employment opportunities available to men. This was clearly a context of coercion, of 'forced choice' among a number of options. However it was also clearly not equal to actually being forcibly raped on any sort of experiential level.

So we need to be careful to recognize the coercion inherent in capitalism but not to deny meaningful distinctions between different forms of coercion and the resulting experiences.

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

I have to work, but I can assure you I have never been raped.

[NOT_a_Capitalist]

No, the whole 'all real value sucked out of the world by parasitic capitalist bankers who create money out of nothing' bit.

All money is created by banks through loans, these loans aren't based on anything of existing value.

Central Banks create M1 money, which is loaned out to governments who tax the people to pay off the interest on the loan. M2 money is created when that loan money goes into other banks which is then loaned out again based on fractional reserve banking. And so on and so forth.

That's called the money multiplier.

So every dollar is based off debt and the lower and middle classes pay it off. The bankers create nothing but collect interest off debt, and when people default on their debt the bankers take whatever asset the loan was for.

Perfect scam - it's what capitalism is based on.

I would suggest further reading but I can't post any links (type in 'Money as debt' on youtube).

[Yazman]

No, the whole 'all real value sucked out of the world by parasitic capitalist bankers who create money out of nothing' bit.

Yeah, thats exactly what I was referring to in my post. Thats what capitalists do - "value" is arbitrary. Nothing has any inherent monetary value or indeed any sort of inherent value at all. This is what Lenin was referring to when he talked about toilet bowls being gold plated in a communist society.

The logic or reasoning you use to come to this conclusion can be quite varied, but at the end of the day I'm not really concerned with it. The most important thing to me is that people see the monetary system for what it is - a fucking sham imposed on us by capitalists that needs to be completely abolished. Value (and money) is inherently arbitrary and as workers we generate surplus value which is claimed by capitalist parasites.

[NOT_a_Capitalist]

Production is the only thing that creates value. Gold is useful in production of electronics and other things. The people who create nothing tend to horde all the wealth - governments, corporations and private bankers who can generate arbitrary value and pass it off in the form of taxes, loans, interest payments, debt instruments, etc on REAL production while they sit in their ivory towers with their mountains of stolen wealth.