Barnfish wrote:
John_UK22 wrote:
.....
Thanks for posting this andyh. The irony of brainwashed slaves arguing passionately for the very system that is abusing and enslaving them would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
Many avoided this so called slavery by not sticking their snouts in the cheap loans trough and maintaining financial independence by using the remaining regulated financial system.
To call what has happened slavery is an insult to those truly enslaved.
Whether or not it's worse or not than previous forms of slavery isn't relevant to whether it's still slavery or not.
“The transition from chattel to wage slavery was effected in the British Caribbean by restructuring colonial labour laws.(1)
The process began in 1823;
under pressure from abolitionists inside and outside parliament and with support from the West India lobby, the imperial government made an unprecedented attempt to alter existing owner and slave laws and prepare the slaves for freedom.
It marked the seriousness of its intention by promising slave owners £20 million compensation for their property losses when abolition finally took place. Dismantling the slave laws, in the event, took fifteen years:
between 1823 and 1833 laws were framed to prepare the slaves for the "civil rights and privileges" of other classes of His Majesty's subjects (2) and from 1833 to 1838 when the slave status was abolished and a master/apprentice system was substituted as a preliminary to wage work.”
1. An early version of this paper was presented at the "Master and Servant in History" Conference at York
University, Toronto in 1996.
2. Public Record Office (PRO), London, Colonial Office (CO) 854/1, Circular Despatch, Bathurst to
the Governor of Jamaica, May 28, 1823.
Mary
Turner, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London
Modernizing Slavery: Investigating the Legal Dimension
Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. e.g.
working for a wage not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma or status diminution.
Wikipedia
Karl Marx described Capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy, by basing it on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented or alienated in a class society).
“The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest.
The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labour only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.”
“Wage slavery is the same as chattel slavery. There is no difference between selling yourself and renting yourself ...”
Noam
Chomsky
The connection between chattel slavery and wage slavery as alternative modes of exploitation is visible in the debates within the British and American ruling class that led up to the abolition of chattel slavery.
While religious abolitionists condemned slave holding as a moral sin, the clinching argument against chattel slavery was that it was no longer the most effective way of exploiting the labouring population. It was abandoned because it was impeding economic and especially industrial development – that is, the accumulation of capital.
SPGB
Many of his friends who then heard him would remember that, during the various discussions upon the abolition of the Slavetrade, it was constantly urged, both in that House and out of it, that no substantial benefit could be obtained, unless measures were devised to introduce
those moral regulations with respect to the treatment of the slaves, which might secure a supply of slaves without looking to the slavemarket for that supply.
Mr Wilberforce,
House of Commons
13 June 1815 Hansard Vol 31
