Own the future or be owned

Americans are routinely taught that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. But few children learn that Eugene Victor Debs devoted his life to freeing workers from wage slavery. Debs, who devoted his life to the emancipation of working men and women had come to believe that devotion to the oppressed must be shown by resistance to the oppressors. This contention that modern society holds two social classes, two conflicting interests, lay at the root of his entire program. Class struggle was high, but class-consciousness was low. Struggles were largely sectional with little solidarity. This was the environment that shaped Debs’ thinking. A lesson Debs learned was that the two main political parties worked against labor and for the employers. Prior to this struggle, Debs had not only been a supporter of the Democratic Party, but had also run (and won) a post as a state representative in Indiana but now  told workers “ I favor wiping out both old parties so they will never come into power again. I have been a Democrat all my life and I am ashamed to admit it.” He later in life again indicted the two-party system: “To turn your back on the corrupt Republican Party and the corrupt Democratic Party—the gold-dust lackeys of the ruling class—counts for something. It counts still more...to join a minority party that has an ideal, that stands for a principle, and fights for a cause.” Debs was introduced to Marx and other socialist writers and found explanations that corroborated his experiences. “The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity,” he wrote.

The fake panacea of reformism was something Debs understood: “Every hint at public ownership is now called Socialism, without reference to the fact that there can be no Socialism, and that public ownership means practically nothing, so long as the capitalist class is in control of the national government. Government ownership of public utilities means nothing for labor under capitalist ownership of government.” Debs’ vision was a society organized for workers: “The end of class struggle and class rule, of master and slave, of ignorance and vice, of poverty and shame, of cruelty and crime—the birth of freedom, the dawn of brotherhood, the beginning of MAN” In the class war he was clear about which side to be on: Debs was clear about which war he was prepared to fight: “I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist…. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and this the world-wide war of the social revolution.”

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In 1912 Debs running for the fourth time for president, called for the abolition of capitalism rather than for its reform, receiving 900,000 votes. In his nomination speech Debs declared “Economic slavery is the world’s greatest curse today. Poverty and misery, prostitution, insanity, and crime are its inevitable results. The Socialist party is the one party which stands squarely and uncompromisingly for the abolition of industrial slavery…”

Socialism is about ending wages slavery. Wage slavery is a disguised form of slavery. Wage-slaves do not wear chains and manacles and they do not usually toil under the lash of the whip. They are wage slaves because they own only their labor-power and must sell it to the class which owns the means of production, who make more from using the labor-power than buying it costs them. From that excess come profits, interest, and all the other forms of income of the capitalist class.  The price of labor-power rises and falls. Sometimes there is a boom and the workers, the sellers of labor-power, have increased bargaining-strength in the market; sometimes there is mass unemployment, and the buyers of labor-power can dictate their terms Always the owners of the means of production squeeze a surplus out of the workers. Always they grab the riches of society, leaving the workers scraping to get by. Always they have the power over production, and the workers have none. In good times and in bad for the sellers of labor-power, the system is one of wage-slavery. Socialism is the abolition of wage-slavery and its replacement by  co-operative labor, with the producers collectively owning and controlling the means of production.

Slavery existed long before capitalism. Slavery is treating a person as property, as a thing without responsibility for its actions. Although the slave acts and produces, his actions and products are the property of his master because the slave himself is property. Wage labor differs from slavery as rental differs from ownership. The employer does not own the employee, he rents her, and she rents herself out. Under the employment contract her labor and its products are appropriated by the owner. The critique of wage labor as “wage slavery” is as old as capitalism itself, and the analogies with slavery should be central to any thoroughgoing critique of capitalism (or state-capitalism). The core problem in both slavery and wage labor is the unequal power the employer has over the worker, and the exploitation the employer is able to achieve in virtue of that power. In an economy of worker cooperatives, where it is still possible to own capital wealth and where inequalities of ownership could be substantial lenders of capital (money, plant, materials) can still control nominally self-managing workers as a condition of access to capital. In the extreme case, a lender could stipulate as a condition of the loan that “self-managing” workers impose upon themselves policies supporting the interests of the lender and not of the workers. That cooperatives have many efficiency advantages over capitalist (or state) managed firms is not irrelevant to the case for cooperatives. That case has to assess whether the whole complex of political, economic, and social institutions is just.

Wage slavery is a condition in which a person is legally de jure (based on law) voluntarily employed but de facto (in fact) a slave. It describes a condition where a person is compelled to work in return for payment of a wage in order to subsist. Wage slavery is the condition where a person must sell his or her labor-power, submitting to the authority of an employer, in order to merely survive.

Wage slavery is more of an after effect of artificial scarcity of employers created by the state. In the market, labourers exchange their labor for money and other goods. If there are less employers than laborers, the wages of the labourers would be very low. If one is really concerned about falling wages, one must be concerned about the falling number of employers – corporatism. More the job opportunities, more the wage and better the working conditions.

When slavery was being abolished in USA, instead of granting the slave laborers their property rights and rights to fruits of their labor, they were instead given wages. State, while “freeing” the slaves, kept on defending the property titles granted to their masters. “Wage slavery” was immediately criticized by the defenders of Chattel slavery (who were like the vulgar libertarians of their time) – who claimed that giving wages to laborers freed the masters from taking care of their slaves. They argued that when slaves are property of their masters, they are treated better:

“For some Southerners, the situation of Northern workers looked a lot worse than slavery. In fact, they argued, unlike the “wage slavery” of the North, the slavery system in the South provided food, clothing, medical care, and leisure to slaves, caring for them throughout their lives.” – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/lincolns-wage/

It is indeed true that Chattel slavery was replaced with wage slavery, where the masters no longer controlled their slaves directly but still got to make profit by employing wage slaves to work on government protected “private property”. Slavery in America was abolished not on humanitarian grounds, but because abolition was an effective weapon in the fight to save the Union. The right thing was done, but for the wrong reason. Political pragmatism had won out over moral indignation.

“In regard to labor two systems obtain; one that of slave labor, the other that of free labor. Of the two, the first is, in our judgment, except so far as the feelings are concerned, decidedly the least oppressive. If the slave has never been a free man, we think, as a general rule, his sufferings are less than those of the free laborer at wages. As to actual freedom one has just about as much as the other. The laborer at wages has all the disadvantages of freedom and none of its blessings, while the slave, if denied the blessings, is freed from the disadvantages. We are no advocates of slavery, we are as heartily opposed to it as any modern abolitionist can be; but we say frankly that, if there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.” (Orestes Brownson, “The Laboring Classes,” The Boston Quarterly Review, July 1840.)

Even before Marxist ideas arrived an understanding of wage slavery was taking root in America. Some argued that the wealthy “keep us in a state of humble dependence” through their monopoly control of the means of production. As Thomas Skidmore (1790 - 1832), founder of the Workingmen’s Party of New York, put it: “Thousands of our people of the present day in deep distress and poverty, dependent for their daily subsistence upon a few among us whom the unnatural operation of our own free and republican institutions, as we are pleased to call them, has thus arbitrarily and barbarously made enormously rich.”

Their “humble dependence” meant that they had no choice but to sell their labor to some employer or another. Their only chance of leading a decent life was if some employer would give them a job. Though formally free, these workers were nonetheless economically dependent and thus unfree. That is why wage-labor merited the name slavery. Skidmore made the comparison with classical slavery the most explicit:

“For he, in all countries is a slave, who must work more for another than that other must work for him. It does not matter how this state of things is brought about; whether the sword of victory hew down the liberty of the captive, and thus compel him to labor for his conqueror, or whether the sword of want extort our consent, as it were, to a voluntary slavery, through a denial to us of the materials of nature…”

The critique of wage-slavery could hardly be clearer. Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government has a passage that goes:

“Slavery.—The weight of chains, number of stripes, hardness of labor, and other effects of a master’s cruelty, may make one servitude more miserable than another; but he is a slave who serves the gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will.”

When a man (or woman) is placed in a position where he is compelled to give the benefit of his labor to another, he is in a condition of slavery, whether the slave is held in chattel bondage or in wages bondage, he is equally a slave. The worker’s dependence is not a feature so much of being the legal property of another as it was being forced, by economic need, to sell his or her labor. As one anonymous author put it “Is there a workshop where obedience is not demanded – not to the difficulties or qualities of the labor to be performed – but to the caprice of he who pays the wages of his servants?” It was for this reason that the Knights of Labor sought “to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefore.” The point about a cooperative system was that property was collectively owned and work cooperatively managed. Only when the class differences between owners and workers were removed could liberty be truly universalized. As William H. Silvis, one of the earliest of these figures, argued, cooperation “renders the workman independent of necessities which often compel him to submit to hectoring, domineering, and insults of every kind.” The co-operative commonwealth is nothing more than the culmination and completion of the American Revolution’s aspirations.