6:52 AM (3 hours ago)

Hey James,

Would you be willing to write a post explaining wage slavery?

I try to explain the transition from outright slavery to wage slavery, but can’t seem to explain wage slavery.

Thanks,

-Protector of the Forest Small

The overriding aspect of wage slavery is that the government is used by the master to tax the worker, supposedly for his own benefit. This is enabled by the farce of democracy. Therefore, the greatest expense of the master is the cost of propaganda, often referred to as news or advertising.

Slavery was originally the sparring of a life, the staying of the conqueror's hand.

From there it follows that the life of the slave belongs, not to themselves, but to the conqueror. This is the pure form, the kind of slavery which is good. For instance, Ferdinand Magellan captured a Moor in battle in Morocco and the man followed him loyally around the world.

The specific term slave, comes from the racial name Slav, and refers specifically to the trafficking of pale Europeans by tan Semites.

Here is a lurid collection of orientalist paintings sent in by a reader:

In the 1600s the term Slave entered English as a type of unjust servitude, in that the slave holder was a man of enemy race and the slave lacked the succor of being owned by people of like morals and traditions. In this form, the word naturally attached itself to the plight of the African held by racial aliens. In early modern times and in all of the history of Civilization, slavery—that is forced labor of a person who is owned by another person or by a political construct, such as Thomas Hellier's father being owned by a town as a municipal slave to pay off his son's debt in 1678—was never regarded as anything other than a social good.

The Book of Leviticus and the Gospels, do not condemn slavery, but uphold it, with the exception that a man may not own a person who is God's slave. This resulted, in the early Christian Era in, not the abolishment, but the discouragement of Christians holding other Christians as slaves. Slavery did not change one bit. The slave did not own his own body, for he was owned by God and God's earthly administrators oversaw his direction, punishment, feeding, labors, and even his execution. The term slave was not yet in use. The term servant was that used to designate the unfree laborer and human property.

The slave was semantically converted to the serf. A serf is "bound" to the land, owned if you will by that which farmers saw as divine before the coming of Christianity, which then became the fief of Lord in Heaven.

But lets digress...

In ancient Sumer, thousands of years before, their were slaves and workers. Workers were wage slaves, who were paid only in food. Slaves were fed directly. Even then it was something of a semantic game. The worker could leave where the slave could not. Indeed, some of them must have. Because the name for the uncivilized folk who lived in the mountains meant "rebel." But, if the worker had a family what choice did he really have? He could theoretically leave, but would be immediately captured and trafficked back into the city as a slave, with even less food.

Semantic progress...

The servant, became a serf, bound to the land and refused Christian burial and an afterlife if he ended his misery by his own hand. Thus the Christian slave lived a metaphysic nightmare, more slave than heathen Spartacus by all measures—a slave still after death!

But there had to be exceptions, for the rich demanded them, and would require personal servants to travel with them, wipe their ass, warm their cold feet with their hot bellies, and even be armed on behalf of their master and set upon the peasant—the most hated creature of Christendom, for his working the land represented a direct relationship with God. Therefore the peasantry—who typically owned a household slave—would be the font of Protestant Christianity.

The real wage slave of the Roman world had been the soldier, literally named after what he was paid. The cash crash that accompanied the Fall of Rome gave this soldier freedom to swear oaths after the free barbarian fashion.

The key to understanding the slavery of the soldier—his servile status—was that he did not own his body could never leave, could be executed by an officer or fellows on an official decree. Only the barbarian warrior or the feudal man-at-arms or knight, is a free fighter. All soldiers are slaves first, owned by an institution, just like a corrections inmate is. Most soldiers are paid and most inmates are not. Payment is not the condition that frees us—freedom is.

But we have been told otherwise, that payment is freedom.

Can you leave?

If you may not leave, for instance, if you cannot cross from one nation to another without a freedom pass [passport] or from one province within a nation to another without a specific document [drivers license/ I.D.] than you are not a free human being. No civilization wants any free human beings. Civilization is the reduction of humanity to the life of the social insect.

Chattel slavery, direct ownership of the human by an institution or individual was a thing of the agricultural age. The slaves generally shared the food and accommodations of the cattle in the barn, eating only grain and sleeping on hay, corncobs and the dirt floor. They lived near their work, on top of it. This was the same as the house slaves.

The expenses of slave owner ship were;

-Purchase

-Feeding

-Housing

-Policing

Plantation slavery sought to breed slaves to defer the first cost ad typically defined policing as the responsibility of the non slave owner. Feeding and housing were minimalized.

Industrial slavery would make housing and policing much more expensive.

When industry outgrew the workhouse where the slave was locked inside in Philadelphia and other white picket fence paradises, the hellish nature of the factory—such as iron forges—the need for space to work and economy of scale, meant that the slave could no longer live where he worked. Indeed, in the 1770s, gangs of iron foundry slaves were beginning to riot and break out. Industrial workers must be lodged away from their work and were inherently dangerous due to the tools they used, the way they were worked together in gangs in close confinement, and the body-shredding brutality of their work, which was much more brutal than agricultural work.

The earliest industrial slaves were iron foundry workers, miners and sugar cane slaves, who were all armed with deadly metal implements. Based on the uprisings of the late 1700s it became obvious that having gangs of miserable, physically capable men housed with their weapons, was not a good idea. The human soul had its limits of bondage, and industrial slavery was it. The Romans had had similar problems keeping order among massed gangs of brutalized servants with their Servile Wars, which were larger and saw more death than most modern wars.

There was also the expense of housing your slaves outside of the workplace—that is an entirely different property acquisition—what, so those slaves that you hate can squat in it?

The company town, which was a mining specialty, in which the slave had dedicated private laws and police, had to live in buildings he rented with private script currency that was good nowhere outside the company store, and was forced to put all of his ephemeral earnings back into the company, usually resulting in taking on debt to the company, placing him in two holes: the mine and debt, until he died of his toil, was an early industrial scheme along the lines of the prison and penitentiary, which all grew directly out of the plantation setting.

But the company town clung too strictly to the plantation model and did not solve the problem of violence and the expensive need for police. Private police armies could be reassigned to the municipality if the workers were paid in real money and permitted and encouraged to live as far away as possible. These logistics could be managed by bringing in criminals of alien races to further scatter the wage slave. Now the company has no responsibility to feed, house or police his workers, and the expensive and inefficient nature of scattered urban and suburban living naturally places most wage earners in perpetual debt.

During infrastructure expansion in the late 1800s the Chinese Coolie, who would work for less and was happy to live in a tent, was regarded as the "perfect industrial beast," by the industrialists.

Wage slavery is one of multiple aspects of the bound state of the slave of modernity:

-He is owned, like the Christian before him was owned by the Church, by the State, which will punish him for attempting self-killing

-He is taxed

-He s policed by thugs who are paid from his taxes

-He is induced to live in debt, to the point that applications for government identification focus on proof of debt, not proof of citizenship. In Maryland, my federal tax return mailed to my rental was not accepted as proof of citizenship. The requested documents were primarily proof of contractual debt: cable, phone, gas & electric, credit card, etc.

-He is owned by an institution of alien morals and character—the amoral State, preventing any possible empathy

Like the first slave, his condition is based on force of arms and debt, and his life does not belong to him but to his master, the State.

Unlike the first slave, mercy is replaced by cold cruelty.

The wage slave shares with all slaves, the condition of moral and economic debt to his master.

The unique aspect of the wage slave's existence are two:

-His bondage is denied so he does not even have his unfree status recognized—his entire life is gas lit with blaring lies,

-His masters are legion: employer, creditor, police, judicial, legislative, executive, municipal, state, federal... and, to come full circle, the wage slave, like the medieval serf, with whom he most closely shares his condition, that which ultimately owns him is supposed to be the very object of his worship.