Wage Slavery
Discussion
Tom Walker:
"Is the "kindred system of wages slavery" really an analogy? After all, as the Sandwichman reported previously, Simon Kuznets warned against the dangers of analogy, citing Sidney Hook as authoritative. For his part, Hook scorned analogies as "formally worthless and never logically compelling."
Analogy? What analogy? The cotton picked by slaves in the South was not "similar" to the cotton subsequently spun and woven in Manchester with the aid of steam-powered machinery. It was the same cotton. Alf Hornborg has documented that "investments in steam technology in nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, were indissolubly connected to the Atlantic slave trade and the cotton plantations in the American South":
- "...capital, however much it tries, will never be able to ‘delink’ itself from labor and land. The rationale of machine technology is to (locally) save or liberate time and space, but (crucially) at the expense of time and space consumed elsewhere in the social system."
Chattel slavery and the wages system were thus constituent parts of a single, vertically integrated production process -- cogs in the same machine, so to speak! And speaking of machines... in a more recent book chapter, "The Fossil Interlude," Hornborg referred to the notion of "energy slaves" as "more than a metaphor."
If the category 'slavery' is defined not primarily in terms of being victims of immediate violence, but more fundamentally in terms of being coerced to perform alienating, low-status tasks for the benefit of a privileged elite, a significant part of the world’s population would qualify as slaves. Seemingly neutral concepts such as 'technology' and the 'world market' organize the transfer of their embodied labour and resources to an affluent minority. From this perspective, the operation of technology represents the deflected agency (the labour energy) of uncounted millions of labourers, harnessed for the service of a global elite.
Machinery, in Hornborg's view doesn't simply enhance the productivity of the laborer using the machine. It does so by displacing a great deal of the work time and effort to someplace else where it can be performed more cheaply and invisibly. The beneficiaries of this unequal exchange have failed to discern that what they enjoy as a gain is actually an inequitable distribution of costs and benefits. Resource exhaustion and constraints from climate change make the sustainability of this illusion doubtful.
What happens, then, when the wages system -- temporarily spared the lash of hunger through its insatiable consumption of fossil fuel and displacement of "degrading, low wage toil" to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind periphery -- runs out of cheap fuel to power the displacing machinery? " (http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2015/06/cotton-abolition-and-lash-of-hunger.html)
How do you abolish the wages system by degrees?
Tom Walker:
“Step one: Do not forget. Marx advised not to forget that in everyday struggles you are fighting with effects, not with the causes of those effects. Not forgetting requires a lot of attention to history. It also requires a keen awareness that there is a well-funded industry devoted to making us forget.
Step two: Our own accounting. Standard double-entry bookkeeping looks at profit and loss from the perspective of the business enterprise whose purpose is defined as monetary profit seeking. Making a profit is not the purpose of people or of nations.Labor is not a commodity. Labor power is a common-pool resource.
Step three: Build (or transform) organizations dedicated to not forgetting and our own accounting. The model for this is a hybrid that borrows both from traditional trade unionism and from common-pool resource management. The precedents are there. What needs to be done is to synthesize from those experiences.
Step four: Bargain collectively. Collective bargaining is not synonymous with the administrative model of bargaining established under the Wagner Act. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, called the Luddite actions "collective bargaining by riot." Theodore Ave-Lallemant wrote an obscure article nearly a hundred years ago in which he distinguished between the collective labor contract based on cooperation and the more standard form of contract bargaining which "seeks no more than to stipulate the terms of individual contracts of employment."
Step five: Work less. The wages system is effectively abolished in each hour workers collectively withdraw from the labor supply. Limitation of the hours of work is abolition of the wages system by degree. This explains why employers have fought so tenaciously for two centuries against the reduction of working time.” (http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2015/06/szalamitaktika-how-do-you-abolish-wages.html)