Is Wage Labor Slavery?

 

SOMETHING I’ve seen socialists groan and complain about repeatedly, one of many things they find an issue with, is wage labor. They consider it coercion, theft, or slavery for someone to render their manpower to another in exchange for money. In the most recent iteration of this complaint that I have laid eyes on it went something like this: “Having to work for hours every week to barely make ends meet is slavery!”

Now, there is a lot that could be said. First, we could attack the umbrella that these types of complaints fall under. That umbrella is a general abhorrence of having to work for one’s living. They are desperate for Marx’s post-scarcity society wherein we see “[t]he free development of individualities…which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them[,]” or, i.e., a bunch of free time for people to sit around and fart around. The psychological drawbacks of excess leisure aside, what this comes down to is that socialists are just lazy, in other words, and feel entitled to not having to get their soft palms calloused. Second, we could note that working hours per worker have fallen by half in most capitalist countries, and thus the socialist’s dream should have been realized already (by capitalism) and, again, they’re just lazy bastards.

However, by noting that working hours have fallen so much, indicating a rise in productivity, but yet two-thirds of people identify as living paycheck-to-paycheck, we see that the socialist might be right. Our economic condition is terrible, and yet we live in a “capitalist economy.” Is the socialist right, then, to bemoan having to get up early in the morning and living as a wagie? Are we in the death throes of late-stage capitalism?

No, no we are not. As many people know, whether they have old relatives or some other awareness of Ye Olden Days, things used to be dirt cheap. Ford cars in 1920 were worth $325, jeans in 1962 were worth $5, in 1917 homes were worth $5,000, among many other products and goods. Since these days things have only gotten worse, with houses, for example, being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and almost always requiring mortgage loans (back in 1920 only 37% of homeowners had a mortgage). Now, again, socialists are apt to blame all this on capitalism, which they consider greedy and therefore wanton to continuously increase prices until the proletariat has enough, gains class consciousness, and revolts. However, they’d be wrong.

What happened between the cheap and lovely 1900s and the brutally expensives 2000s? I won’t keep you much longer and I’ll tell you directly: inflation happened. Inflation, which means an increase in the money supply, has gripped the economy of almost every nation - some worse than others (looking at you Venezuela/Zimbabwe) - for decades. In America, inflation, since 1913, the US dollar has lost 99% of its value, 1913 being the year that the Federal Reserve was established and government control of the money supply came into its own. Since 1971, when Nixon put the final nail in America’s gold standard, 94% of the dollar’s value has been lost. Why is gold so important? Well, as a variety of sources will tell you (see here, here, and here for articles; here, here, and here for books) commodity money - such as gold - cannot be printed, and on a free market it cannot be debased. What this means is that inflation would be non-existent on a free market, that the currency and prices would be stable, and had we kept it the intense devaluation of the dollar over the last century would not have been seen, meaning we could still enjoy the rather affordable lives of our grand and great-grandparents.

Inflation devalues currency, it cripples the purchasing power of each individual dollar, meaning that one dollar is capable of affording less. One year, five dollars can buy five dollars of goods, but another year prices have doubled meaning you can only afford half as much. This is why the socialist, everyone in fact, is living paycheck-to-paycheck, because the 2022 paycheck is worth 99% less than the 1922 paycheck, and things are bound to get worse the longer we have a central bank, a paper fiat currency, and are off the gold standard. The socioeconomic instability perpetuated by inflation also leads to cultural decay, which is a whole other category of problems to consider.

In short, then, the “wagie,” the slavery of the wage laborer, only exists because increases in productivity and concomitant falls in working hours have been eliminated thanks to non-capitalist policies, namely the government’s nationalization of the money supply and the resulting inflation from the politicking that money is now subject to. The solution, then, to improving all of our lots in life is not embracing socialism, but by embracing capitalism and a free market of money and its gold standard. It might be years before we get to such a point, and years before the economic wounds are healed, but for all of our sakes it must be fought for. I, for one, would like a $5,000 home.