User:RD/9k/wage slavery (Q40,84)

Main entry

4084. wage slavery / slave class of workers (Marx) [1] / slave labour (in reference to proletariat; Marx) [2] -> I have never really liked this motif when people bring it up today. when it appears in Marx... I'll let that by because of how extensively he described capitalism and how brutal he could be on calling out some of the specifics. but as for anyone that lives today, especially in the United States, the context of everything has really changed a lot since 1900.
      the separations between nations and racial subpopulations and union republics and named Marxisms have all become nearly as important as the separations between owner and worker subpopulations in a given country. now you have to deal with things like people desperately wanting to become workers in the United States so they can be part of United States nationality and not be forced into the "inferior" economically-stagnating population of Mexico, or historically, the "inferior" war-torn slowly-rebuilding population of the Soviet Union. since the original Cold War the way people are trapped in capitalism is very racialized and nazified — it's now all about chopping populations into slots and trying to gain exclusive entry into the world's best races so you can brag about how awesome you are and beat up on the world's worst races. on this note, it's worth thinking about something. United States chattel slavery in the Confederacy was tightly intertwined with a very proto-fascist racism. whether any particular Confederate landowner was thinking of things in terms of old-style pseudo-biological "fringe genetics", or new-style Identitarian mysticism that tries to mark countries as better based on abstract "cultural values" doesn't really matter because the outcomes are about the same. but, United States chattel slavery was woven together with a certain kind of deep built-up alterity where Black people weren't just treated like second-class citizens but were really being pushed into the status of another species where human rights and human empathy simply couldn't apply. the gap between the two ethnic populations was molded into the shape of a gap between species populations, to where you could consume Black people (as slaves) the way a fox consumes an extra rabbit, or a human farmer consumes a cow. so, the sheer difference between White racists and Black slaves in the Confederate population was core to the definition of slavery. all of this is to say that when slavery was abolished, what basically happened is that wage "slavery" specifically became this kind of predatory chaining to being one of the "Whites" and being part of the population that considered itself the superior race. wage "slavery" turned into this weird special form of being in slavery to being a slaveholder, while the former slaves were arguably the ones that were more free. I think people really resented that. I think the slowly emerging phenomenon of the Black subpopulation just being able to form new communities out of itself without so much experiencing the kind of fierce competition between individuals built into the White subpopulation since early on thanks to containing more large-scale owners and people who opened smaller businesses to claim frontier plots made people mad and fed into a big division between White people (the British/French/German/Dutch axis that didn't always include Irish immigrants) and all other ethnicities. I think this separation of populational characteristics right at the end of the Civil War did a lot to eventually fuel the huge explosion of charcoal and blue anarchisms. all of these anarchisms (and in practice nearly every movement you can term The U.S. Left) disproportionately focus on concepts of humans 'really just being built to clump into organic Communities when capitalism suddenly chopped that up into corporations and installed cops for no real reason' [3] or humans 'just trying to clump into organic Communities when suddenly out of nowhere The Colonizer Attitude or Domination convinced everyone to smash them to pieces and take the land'. whatever weird narrative anarchists come up with — or, you know, purported assertion that narratives and ontologies are inherently racist — the major recurring theme is that minorities and non-minorities have fundamentally different populational class structures causing them to behave differently and separating them from ever truly being a single nation with a single "democratic process" or transition process.
      as I've said, anyone from the United States but especially Black people would know there's quite a substantive difference between Southern slavery and capitalist exploitation. this is what that is: the people whose ancestors would have been slaves are not the ones entering into the same particular "wage slave" relationships that would have formed right before the end of the Civil War. which has both good and bad connotations: some people are "not good enough" to be trapped and exploited, some people are actually more free, and they sometimes overlap but not always.

Related

4089. wage slavery in fiction / workplaces as wage slavery, portrayed in fiction -> appears in: Kiki's Delivery Service.
      it's a little bit of an editorial decision to make this charcoal, but it has to do with the idea that Marxism has a lot of unexamined anarchist ideas embedded into it that are Idealist/non-Materialist. as such, the charcoal swatch actually has a positive connotation here as opposed to many other Items — if mainsteam Marxist-Leninists can't figure out something is non-Marxist and is better labeled anarchist, then as an anarchist you've somewhat succeeded.
4091. Wage slavery is when somebody is blocked from being a Careerist and forced to be a proletarian [4] -> in recent decades this term has weirdly caught on among non-Marxists, but for totally the wrong reasons.

Implications

4088. Whites working for Blacks is slavery / White people working for Black people is slavery -> this is why I really don't like the phrasing of "wage slavery". it ignores the completely different historical connotations of slavery that have developed in North America. and of course, anyone can say that without having any idea what it means, but here's what I think those specifically are: there is a certain inherent nazi connotation to slavery the moment that Confederate slave plantations were created. not to suggest that slavery was ever "good", but Confederate slave plantations were the seed of turning slavery to the particular tint of nazi eugenics and the eradication of ethnicities and the entitlement to never have to share the earth with other ethnic groups, such that the mere concept of Black people winning at capitalism and becoming bosses fuels utter rage. why would such a small change to a system without actually changing it become so charged that it's almost unspeakable? the ultimate reason is the shift from medieval spatial hierarchies to networkisms. in spatial hierarchies, someone actually defends the land itself and it can simply continue to add people. in networkisms, the leaders of particular groups of people are tasked with defending the group from incoming attacks directly launched by other groups, and are incentivized to either pretend they are the nicest most moral people on earth who know everything about being way human better than most regular idiot hardly-even-humans who the planet hardly needs when they could do everything human all by themselves, or to act like outside groups are evil when they attack and must be exterminated. either of these kinds of behavior generates prejudice — the second directed out of the group, the first directed in. many people do not realize how destructive internally-directed prejudice can actually be, and start to regard it as perfectly normal, although it will eventually turn around to bite them the moment Tory types become "the best at being human" and at preventing blood feuds and crimes. the antagonisms between subpopulations and really any break in the population are distinctly "nazi", on a populational level, no matter how much you don't want to be one. in a sense, any act of being the bourgeoisie is passively loaded with fascism. it really isn't this way in the Third World; it isn't this way in much of China or Cuba, although things could be different in Iraq where the population can be highly divided. owning is fascism. working is fascism. attacking the bourgeoisie is sectarian or ethnic violence rather than productive. after capitalism has been going a long time and avoiding Bolshevism by a wide margin a long time the whole dynamic of it becomes drastically different. it turns into something vaguely like teeny tiny nation-states having a tiny World War I, or even a tiny World War II where they want to exterminate each other.
      this proposition, properly disproved, is key to solving what actual small-scale historical processes and levels of structure exist in the United States.