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 ...