> I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.
The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other"
But it's a real stretch of the imagination to say the current United States (especially post income tax and Social Security entitlements) is anywhere even close to post Civil War circumstances.
> Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person.
There is a difference between "slaves" in the popular sense (chains, beatings, whips, rape), and "slaves" in the economic sense, but both are premised upon the unjust abrogation of freedom at the hands of another.
This article describes the latter case quite well:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/the-new-american-sla...
Impossible to know for certain, but I suspect he wouldn't be terribly pleased with a comparison of the current "lower class" to real slaves.
(Though we should recall that the rights of slaves and whether slave-owner could be prosecuted for manslaughter obviously depended on era and jurisdiction).
I find it astonishing that people compare modern-day income equality and the position of the poor in our time, in the Western world, to that of historical slavery (slavery in United States, or slavery in other slave-based economies in the New World prior to 19th century, not to mention slavery in the Old World which continued officially well into later half of 20th century).
In the West, no one is legally killing, whipping or dismembering the poor workers for not being obedient. Even the poor are still free to leave a place if they find life there unsustainable. Modern-day comparisons to "slavery" typically involve something along the lines "you are expected to do something in exchange for money that is given to you and you feel unpleasant about it".
It just doesn't compare with the actual, terrible injustice of real slavery.
No kidding! Believe it or not, even in 2016, there are tens of millions of people around the world living in actual slavery[0]. Most of them would probably still literally give a kidney to trade places with one of these lower-class people in the US.
What does this mean?
Or it can be used in an expressive way, the way that normal people write and talk and communicate, where people say things that are technically inaccurate but express meaning and and allow the listener or reader to understand the position, emotions, facts, thoughts and experiences of the speaker or writer.
For example, "I'm starving, let's get a bite to eat." Do you say "No you aren't, that's technically inaccurate, how dare you minimize the concerns of the starving multitudes across the globe" or do you say "Okay." because you understand what he means? That first response is how the "that's not real slavery!" thread of discussion here looks to the rest of us.
I think what he meant by that was he is communicating in the second, expressive way.
I wrote a blog post recently that somewhat excoriated the technical community for a blunt and mechanistic approach to argumentation along these lines:
http://likewise.am/2015/12/06/nitpicking-is-the-lowest-form-...
I do understand that 711 shift workers don't have their feet cut off if they leave.
When I say things like "we need a bit of Socialism right about now" .. I don't mean hardcore enforced-total-equality Socialism, I mean nice Socialism like the kind Bernie Sanders has been raving about.
It's taboo to point this out, especially on HN, but I'm feeling bold today:
You can't discuss the socialist policies of Western European countries without addressing their wealth. And you can't discuss the current wealth of Western European countries without acknowledging the process by which they acquired that wealth.
The "nice socialism that Sanders has been raving about" is the kind that is practiced in countries with a long history of colonization and slavery[0]. During this timeframe, they "earned" a massive amount of money by extracting resources from people that they literally enslaved. This started before the 17th century and continued into the 20th century.
Those people who were colonized and enslaved (and their countries) are still feeling the effects of that today, and they would not be so quick to describe that kind of socialism as "nice".
[0] Denmark and Sweden are the two that Sanders has called out specifically by name.
This doesn't change the fact that the current economic status of Denmark and Sweden today is directly linked to their status as colonial powers and slaveholders from the 17th-20th century.
> since the 19th century when slavery was practiced.
This entire subthread began with the claim that being "low-class" in the US is tantamount to slavery. If that's the case, there should be no problem with accepting colonialism, as it was practiced by Sweden into the late 19th century and Demark into the early 20th century, as a form of slavery, since it resembles slavery far more closely than being a member of the working poor in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark_in_World_War_II
AFAICT, Denmark (and Germany, Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, and everybody else) have whatever 'economic status' they have due to a lot more to what happened during the post WWII years than to colonial times.
I mean, yes, if you compare Sweden only to the really lucrative colonizers, it'll look "poor" by comparison. But all you're really saying is that Sweden was less effective as a colonial power than its neighbors who were even "better" at it (England, France, etc.). That doesn't change the original point. If you look beyond simply Europe at where Sweden was with respect to the rest of the world, especially the regions that were colonized and enslaved, it's clear where they stood, and clear how much they benefited by being the ones who colonized, as opposed to the ones who were colonized.
The point is, you can't just look at "nice European socialism" in a vacuum and ignore the reasons why that philosophy has succeeded in Western Europe and why that exact same philosophy has been an empirical disaster in countries that were previously colonies of Western European powers and are still impoverished enough that they cannot export the working class down the economic chain any further (the way Western European powers - and the US as well - have).
Over the course of the 20th century, the Ottomon and British empires crumbled. World War II happened. The US and Soviet Union became superpowers, there was a Cold War, and the Soviet Union split apart. The US pursued aggressively open trade. Western Europe unified to a common economic zone. World power structures have been reorganized several times over since colonial times.
For example, how does your theory explain Singapore going from a British colony, occupied by Japan during WWII, to US$56,319 GDP per capita in 2014?
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything of the sort.
I said that one can't understand Western European socialism (the kind which OP appears to advocate) without understanding this aspect of those countries' history. The implication is that calling such socialism "nice" is ignoring and whitewashing the negative side, both historical and contemporary.
In any case, I know better than to seriously engage in a discussion about this on HN; it's really not the forum for these sorts of conversations.
It's my interpretation of your viewpoint.
Of course, I agree wage slavery is better than chattel slavery. Better to have some choice of master than one imposed on you. (Though slaveowners made the interesting argument that they must take care of their workers because they own them, unlike the capitalist who merely rents them.)
In the US, the prison system replaced slavery as the mechanism to control the black population. So the US has not improved much in that regard, with even children killed in broad daylight by the state.
> In the US, the prison system replaced slavery as the mechanism to control the black population. So the US has not improved much in that regard, with even children killed in broad daylight by the state.
You're going to compare working graveyards at 7-Eleven to slavery?
You should read a little bit about slavery and human trafficking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.