Wage slavery ≠ Chattle slavery

[Prinskaj]

I have come across the argument, that wage slavery isn't comparable to chattle slavery, because chatte slavery requires an action i.e. the use of force. While wage slavery doesn't, even though it has the same result.
How can i best counter this concept?

[Os Cangaceiros]

It's pretty much true, actually. Those economic orders aren't equivalent, they're different things.

[Belleraphone]

Pretty much what ES said. It's true, Chattle slavery is much worse than wage slavery. Wage slavery says work or starve. Chattle slavery says work for me with no benefits and starve.

[Prinskaj]

It's pretty much true, actually. Those economic orders aren't equivalent, they're different things.

I did not say that wage-slavery is just as horrific as chattle slavery, what i am saying is, that the two can be compared.
Let's take an example: Starvation or even death is the primary motivation behind both. Wether the death occurs from being denied food from an "owner" or being fired and not being able to purchase said food. Wage slavery is clearly preferable as you can pick a "master", but the two can still be compered.

[Charlie Watt]

Pretty much what ES said. It's true, Chattle slavery is much worse than wage slavery. Wage slavery says work or starve. Chattle slavery says work for me with no benefits and starve.

Depends where you work. In the west, it's clearly not even similar. Subsistence level wage slavery in an Indonesian sweat-shop working 12 hours a day, every day seems roughly equatable with chattle slavery to me, though.

[brigadista]

when you add into the mix debt slavery then maybe both are comparable because wage slavery + debt slavery = no financial benefit so you could be working for nothing..especialy if you have no rights or conditions at work

[Jimmie Higgins]

I have come across the argument, that wage slavery isn't comparable to chattle slavery, because chatte slavery requires an action i.e. the use of force. While wage slavery doesn't, even though it has the same result.
How can i best counter this concept?

In terms of the production process, the difference is that, as with serfs, the exploitation of slaves is direct: the owner merely pays for the upkeep of the laborer and takes the total results of the labor. Wage-slavery, on the other hand, is indirect exploitation because the laborer is paid the market value of his labor but works more than what he is paid for and the boss takes the surplus as profit.

Both forms of exploitation require force of some degree from social pressure up to armed men to catch runaways or shoot strikers.

[ZeroNowhere]

They're probably coming at you from the perspective of the non-aggression principle, and apparently of the opinion that the North going to war with the South was in no way forceful. In any case, though, their distinction is pretty much baseless. The slaveowner had control of their slave's labour-power, and hence the slave had to work for them. The 'force' involved here is that of the law, according to which the slave's position as slave meant that they had certain necessary obligations; otherwise, they could simply be bought and sold, which presumably does not involve 'force'. One could say that slavery was originally built on force, but the same is true of wage-labour through primitive accumulation.

Ultimately, the realm of direct 'force' ends in both cases once the system of slavery or wage-labour becomes an established legal institution, and hence the 'force' becomes omnipresent. Of course from that view things won't appear 'forceful'. However, both were born in force, and in force must be ended. Nonetheless, once slavery became established as an institution, the saleability of the slave was also institutionalized, and direct force was not necessary per se, except in the form of management and so on, which are hardly absent from wage-labour. In neither case is 'an action' necessary, because the state, hence 'force', have come into harmony with the underlying mode of production (at least temporarily.)

What they're probably referring to, in a fairly strange way, is the fact that wage-labour is based upon the freedom of the labourer to sign a contract, which is not the case with the slave. It's not clear that this has much to do with the non-aggression principle, or with 'an action', however. It's also besides the point, insofar as it focuses simply upon the situation of a single labourer abstracted from the rest of society, and asserts that they could, for example, start a business, ignoring the fact that from a social point of view capital is reliant upon wage-labour, and hence that the existence of the working class on one side and capital on the other is a wider sociological phenomenon which must be preserved regardless of 'social mobility'. Slavery describes the wider relations of production, in which the working class as a class subject to capitalism do exist, as a necessary whole, and likewise wage-slavery exists as a property of this whole. The point is the slavery of the working class to capital as a whole, which becomes a necessity with the modern level of integration of social production.


Pretty much what ES said. It's true, Chattle slavery is much worse than wage slavery. Wage slavery says work or starve. Chattle slavery says work for me with no benefits and starve.
Technically speaking, if a chattel slave were to starve to death, they would become a somewhat less effective chattel slave.

[Jimmie Higgins]

On a side note, the slave-owning ruling class in the South argued that slavery was more humane than industrial labor in the north. It was part of their ideological paternalism and a totally bullshit apology for slavery, but it points out some of the hypocrisy of capitalist "free labor" when industry at that time (and still today in many places) worked children to death and beat their workers etc. The difference from the laborers perspective would be that it's easier to fight for your interests collectively as a wage-worker than as a slave and so the reason more workers aren't beat and worked to death in western capitalism is that workers organized and fought for more humane conditions.

[Jose Gracchus]

Southern slavery apologists frequently claimed they were more humane and invested their slaves with better treatment. After all, they did own them, and would you light your car or chair on fire? Slave lords claimed they were like stewards to the slave's wards. The apologists stated that on the other hand, capitalists merely rented people and threw them away when they needed another.

Incidentally, while it certainly has peculiar or archaic qualities, I do not think the antebellum South slave-planter social formation was distinct from the capitalist mode of production. Antebellum slaveowners were an unusual type of capitalist, who exploited chattel slave labor to realize production for profit of a cash crop (cotton) specifically for world markets and, in fact, the cutting-edge of capitalist industrial production for the time: textiles.

[Jose Gracchus]

Loren Goldner, a left-com (!) in Race Traitor, Parts I (http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/raceI.html) and II (http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/raceII.html). Food for thought.