Wage Slavery
Discussion
Tom Walker:
"Is the "kindred system of wages slavery" really an analogy? After all, as the Sandwichman reported previously, Simon Kuznets warned against the dangers of analogy, citing Sidney Hook as authoritative. For his part, Hook scorned analogies as "formally worthless and never logically compelling."
Analogy? What analogy? The cotton picked by slaves in the South was not "similar" to the cotton subsequently spun and woven in Manchester with the aid of steam-powered machinery. It was the same cotton. Alf Hornborg has documented that "investments in steam technology in nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, were indissolubly connected to the Atlantic slave trade and the cotton plantations in the American South":
- "...capital, however much it tries, will never be able to ‘delink’ itself from labor and land. The rationale of machine technology is to (locally) save or liberate time and space, but (crucially) at the expense of time and space consumed elsewhere in the social system."
Chattel slavery and the wages system were thus constituent parts of a single, vertically integrated production process -- cogs in the same machine, so to speak! And speaking of machines... in a more recent book chapter, "The Fossil Interlude," Hornborg referred to the notion of "energy slaves" as "more than a metaphor."
If the category 'slavery' is defined not primarily in terms of being victims of immediate violence, but more fundamentally in terms of being coerced to perform alienating, low-status tasks for the benefit of a privileged elite, a significant part of the world’s population would qualify as slaves. Seemingly neutral concepts such as 'technology' and the 'world market' organize the transfer of their embodied labour and resources to an affluent minority. From this perspective, the operation of technology represents the deflected agency (the labour energy) of uncounted millions of labourers, harnessed for the service of a global elite.
Machinery, in Hornborg's view doesn't simply enhance the productivity of the laborer using the machine. It does so by displacing a great deal of the work time and effort to someplace else where it can be performed more cheaply and invisibly. The beneficiaries of this unequal exchange have failed to discern that what they enjoy as a gain is actually an inequitable distribution of costs and benefits. Resource exhaustion and constraints from climate change make the sustainability of this illusion doubtful.
What happens, then, when the wages system -- temporarily spared the lash of hunger through its insatiable consumption of fossil fuel and displacement of "degrading, low wage toil" to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind periphery -- runs out of cheap fuel to power the displacing machinery? " (http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2015/06/cotton-abolition-and-lash-of-hunger.html)