In a village called Chalky Mount on the East Coast of Barbados, villagers carry a whip when herding cows or small livestock to be milked unaware of its history. In fact, what they carried is a “hunter” whip once used to beat slaves on the sugar plantations.
The “hunter” whip was described by William Dickson, who had lived in Barbados during the 1770’s and 1780’s. In his classic work on British West Indian slavery, he wrote:
The instrument of correction commonly used in Barbadoes, is called a cow-skin, without which a negro driver would [not] . . . . think of going into the field . . . . It is composed of leathern thongs, platted in the common way, and tapers from the end of the handle (within which is a short bit of wood) to the point, which is furnished with a lash of silk-grass, hard platted and knotted, like that of a horse-whip but thicker. Its form gives it some degree of elasticity towards the handle; and when used with severity . . .it tears the flesh, and brings blood at every stroke. (Letters on Slavery London, 1789 pp. 14-15).
In slavery exploitation was transparent. The slave produced goods, farmed the land and picked cotton at hours dictated to by the slave-owner who kept all that was produced while ensuring the slave and his family were fed, housed and in good condition to continue to work the following day.
However, the slave was the property of the slave owner and the slave owner enjoyed legal controls over his slaves and could inflict punishment including beatings and even death on slaves who refused to work, tried to escape or rebelled against their condition of servility.
Slavery has never entirely been replaced even in modern capitalism. The number of slaves recorded in 2010 was over 12 million according to the United Nations’ international labour organisation (ILO). http://www.ilo.org/global/Themes/Forced_Labour/lang–en/index.htm.
The average cost of buying a slave in today’s market is $90.
Most of the slaves identified by the ILO are debt slaves, largely living in south Asia, who are under debt bondage incurred by lenders, sometimes, even for generations. However if trafficking is included in the figures the numbers approach some 21 million people almost equivalent to the entire British workforce.
However, the dominant form of exploitation in world capitalism is wage labour where workers sell their labour power to capitalists on the labour market in exchange for a wage and salary. In commodity production workers produce not only the value equivalent to their wage and salary but a surplus value which passes to the capitalist class in the form of rent, interest and profit.
Wage Exploitation
How is the working class exploited?
Unlike chattel slavery and Feudalism, exploitation under capitalism is veiled by the economic relationships between buyers and sellers “freely” meeting on the market. Opponents of slavery like the ILO and particularly trade unions have no problem with the wages system as long as the wages being paid are “fair”. In economic text books there is no critique of wages, the labour market and the buying and selling of labour power.
All these economic features of capitalism are seen by economists as unproblematic and taken for granted. Some economists even praise wage-labour as a social and economic freedom enjoyed by workers in preference to previous social systems where labour was bound by slavery and serfdom.
Unlike the slave owner, the capitalist does not need legal controls over the working class in terms of ownership and confinement to a particular place or locality. Instead the capitalists make their wealth by owning the means of production and distribution to the exclusion of the working class and employing wage labour on a contractual basis where they gain access to the use-value of the commodity Marx called labour power.
In this respect workers, unlike slaves or serfs, are free in two senses of the word. Workers are free from the ownership of the raw resources, factories, and machinery, transport and communication and distribution points. And workers are also free not to work for an employer although they might starve if they do not find employment.
Marx’s fellow Socialist, Frederick Engels gave an early commentary on the difference between slavery and wage labour. According to Engels:
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.
The Principle of Communism
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11.prin-com.htm)
While Marx in Wage-Labour and Capital wrote:
The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him. But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labour power, cannot leave THE WHOLE CLASS OF BUYERS, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or to that capitalist, but to the CAPITALIST CLASS; and it is for him to find his man, i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class (loc cit).
So how are workers exploited as a class? To understand how exploitation works, workers must have some acquaintance with the scientific ideas of Karl Marx contained in pamphlets like Wage, Price and Profit and his three volume work, Capital.
Marx showed that workers sell their labour power or ability to work to capitalists for a wage and salary. In a working week of eight hours a day it might take the working class five hours to produce enough commodities to equal the wage or salary needed to produce and reproduce the workers and their families as a working class. Marx called this necessary working time.
However, because workers are contracted to work an eight hour day they have to continue working for a further three hours a day which Marx referred to as surplus labour time.
In this period of surplus labour time workers produce surplus value and it is from the sale of commodities on the market, produced by the working class, that the capitalist class realise surplus value as profit. Profit is then divided up into the unearned income of rent to the rentier, interest to the banks and profit to the industrial capitalist.
Many workers and certainly the defenders of capitalism do not see employment as wage slavery. Economists, for example, view wage labour freely choosing who they want to work for. However the argument that workers are imprisoned within a wages system of wage slavery can be substantiated by looking at the question of class and the ownership of the means of production and distribution in its totality.
Capitalism’s economists do not look at the question of economics in terms of class ownership, class relations, class struggle and class interest. The subject-matter of economics is conveniently confined to individual buyers and sellers, supply and demand and prices.
However the buying and selling of labour power is a class issue because opposing classes with different class interests can only arise in capitalism where a capitalist class minority monopolises the means of production to the exclusion of a working class majority. Within capitalism the worker is never free from capital and the power of capital. As Marx noted; the worker belongs to the capitalist class a whole.
Wage Slavery: Metaphor or Reality?
So, is the term “wage slavery” a metaphor or a social reality? Socialists argue that wage slavery represents a very real social condition of life under capitalism and it not a metaphor or piece of rhetoric. Wage slavery is just as real as chattel slavery. One similarity, for example, between wage slavery and chattel slavery is that in both social systems a subservient class is put to work for the benefit of a small private property owning class.
Wikipedia has a useful entry on wage slavery showing that the first articulate use of the phrase “wage slavery” dates from 1763 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_Slavery.
However, “wage slavery” is cited as a purely descriptive definition rooted in historical usage and does not give a Marxian explanation of the differences and similarities between chattel slavery and the wages system. The entry also evades a Marxian explanation of the exploitive process of the wages system.
Nevertheless, the Wikipedia entry for wage slavery does record how early workers referred to their condition of employment as wage slavery by recalling the 1836 strike by female workers at Lowell Mill. The striking workers highlighted the degradation and humiliation of the wages system and wage slavery in the following protest song:
Oh! Isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I am fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave
The coercion of the wages system which forces the working class into employment is as very real as the hunter whip described by William Dickson which forced the slaves into the cotton and sugar plantations. The coercion is in the absence of workers owning the means of production and distribution; a non-ownership which prevents workers producing and distributing goods and services just for human need.
And the coercive power of the wages system rations what workers receive to the level of their wage and salary income. As a consequence workers are denied direct access to what they and their families need to live worthwhile and creative lives.
And within employment, the working class are forced to confront what they produce as a commodity fetish; something alien which dominates their lives. Then there is the stress, worry and, uncertainty of employment where the workplace is often a hostile and dangerous environment in which workers are forced to compete with other workers, where workers are bullied and pressurised by managers to meet targets and where workers are coerced to be increasingly more productive and to produce more and more commodities in as little time as possible.
During employment workers lose control over time and time controls their activity denying them the most basic of all human needs; creative and fulfilling work. And no one asked the working class if they wanted the wages system forced upon them. They did not vote for the wages system into existence any more than they cheerfully agreed that wage labour was a good idea. The wages system was imposed by the capitalist class on the working class.
If the employer no longer has the sanction of the whip – and we should not forget that children in the 19th century cotton mills were often beaten with straps – then there is the threat to the working class of redundancy, dismissal, being fired, shed like leaves, unemployed, sacked, re-structured, de-skilled, locked out and so on.
Workers also face physical violence, imprisonment and death when the State
– the executive of the bourgeoisie – uses the police and troops to break strikes.
Striking coal miners in South Africa were recently shot by the police, in many parts of the world trade union activity leads to imprisonment and sometimes torture and while the last Labour government used troops on two occasions to break strikes by the fire service union.
And Marx gave a clear warning to workers who do not look consciously and politically beyond the wages system when he wrote at the end of his pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit:
At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!“
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm#c14)
