Against All Slavery

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on the 15th of January 1929 and the third Monday of January is an American public holiday to commemorate him.

The abolitionist’s great struggle was to show that people were not property.

A recent article in the Guardian explains that the origin of all the words for "work" in European languages suggests work as coercion, and certainly not for the prosperity of the worker. Work was compulsion and punishment, an affliction which promised neither wellbeing nor even an assured sustenance. Words indicating labour in most European languages originate in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution. The French word travail and Spanish trabajo, like its English equivalent, are derived from the Latin trepaliare – to torture, to inflict suffering or agony. The word peine, meaning penalty or punishment, also is used to signify arduous labour, something accomplished with great effort. The German Arbeit suggests effort, hardship and suffering; it is cognate with the Slavonic rabota (from which English derives "robot"), a word meaning corvee, forced or serf labour. In the word "work", violence is latent, and it appears in the form wreak, when we speak of wreaking havoc or vengeance. "Toil" derives from Old French, meaning argument or dispute, fight and struggle.

 Work is the destiny of those who have no wealth. 0.000016% of the world’s population holds 16% of its economic output. If you thought that everybody should own exactly the same amount, that 0.000016% of the world’s population owns a million times more than they ought to. Before the crash, a world total of 1,125 dollar billionaires owned $4.4 trillion worth of everything. In 2011, 1,210 individuals owned $4.5 trillion. Yet 2.6 billion people exist on just $2 a day or less.

“One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?’ These are questions that must be asked.” -   Martin Luther King, Jr. SCLC Convention of Aug. 1967

We all end up owned by the capitalist class and we all pick the cotton they choose to plant and we all end up working for the company store. Make no mistake, the wages system is a form  slavery.  “We have nothing to lose but our chains” takes on a whole new meaning.

 And as MLK says "If we do not unite as brothers, we are destined to perish as fools"