Yes. I'd go even further and say it's just another form of slavery. The lash just happens to be economic in nature rather than physical. Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.
In my opinion, this is an uncreative misuse of the term "slavery". Words have meanings, and slavery doesn't mean "someone with a shitty job", it means "someone who is fully owned by someone else".
I recognize that you're just trying to further a leftist "boo companies" narrative, but even if your employer treats you badly and you're hard pressed to imagine an alternative job, your employer does not own you and you are more free in your choices than any slave has ever been.
I recognize that there are jobs that are modern slavery (eg banana plantations), but I don't think that's the kinds of jobs this threat is about. The context is tech employees, or even amazon warehouse workers etc, and even when those are bad, it's not slavery.
I'm not trying to further a narrative, I'm stating my opinion. The fact we're more free today doesn't matter, we're still compelled to work if we wish to avoid misery. Your employer regulates your actions, your speech. If you aren't financially independent and can't afford to quit your job, your employer has so much leverage over you that they do pretty much own you.
Worst part is when capitalism finally automates itself into irrelevance we won't get a post scarcity society, we'll get some cyberpunk dystopia with corporations inventing artificial economies for the sake of maintaining the status quo of continuous consumption.
> The fact we're more free today doesn't matter, we're still compelled to work if we wish to avoid misery.
This is part of the human condition. Goods don't magically appear out of thin air
(at least not yet) - they're created by directed action, i.e. - work. By your definition, every human that exists and have ever existed is/was a slave.
Of course it is. You asserted that by my definition every human was a slave. This is obviously false since there is a minority that managed to free themselves from this suffering somehow. They make others do the work for them.
People with means also have to work to preserve their position - at the very least they need to navigate laws, invest smartly, be on the lookout for possible political upheavals etc. Nothing is free, and wealth preservation can be a lot of worry in itself. Just ask anyone in the FIRE subreddit.
Of course, technically you're right - there will always exist a minority of people who were so wealthy (and lucky) that, even though they didn't care about wealth preservation, their wealth didn't run out before they died. If, in addition, these people inherited all their wealth (as opposed to doing any work to obtain it), then they are the (only) non-slaves by your definition, proving that not EVERYONE is a slave.
Slavery is so much more than employers having leverage.
To be clear I also don’t like or care for the current hyper consumption in our capitalist society, but this coercive behavior isn’t slavery and we should limit the term to people that are currently under suffer under human trafficking.
Well, I just don't see the distinction. Workers will also travel to places they don't want to be in. I just looked these ideas up and it turns out they're centuries old. I'm far from the first person to notice this.
Wage slavery is much different and I do t have an issue with that term- its well established to describe a specific phenomenon of coercive relationship with the employer. I have an issue broadly with describing it as slavery itself, given slavery in the classical sell-your-children, force-people-to-sex, trap-people-in-your-house-for-unpaid-housekeeping sense still exists and needs addressing.
Slavery has many types and as the Yes Men pointed out in their leisure wear for the future managerial class, one of the most efficient forms of slavery is wage slavery. There are many other forms of slavery that differ from chattel slavery and while I prefer better conditions of my enslavement, being forced to work for others in order to eat and live is still slavery. The conditions which people must navigate in the modern world to survive are not natural and are purposefully set up in order to force people to work for the benefit of others in order to survive. There are many good arguments that wage slavery is still slavery and they are not all a leftist take on things.
But the important thing is not whether something is labeled slavery but rather looking at the dynamic where someone coerces another to spend their time working for someone else. Labeling the dynamic based on the amount of time and degree of suffering is counterproductive. I think most of us can agree that reducing how much that dynamic is in play in the world is ideally a goal for any civilized society. And that the current amount that people are forced to work for the benefit of others is far more than they need to for their own well-being and the wellbeing of society. The amount of labor many, many people are coerced to perform is used as a control mechanism as often as it is for productivity, and in some countries, its use as a mechanism of control rivals productivity as its primary purpose.
So you prefer owning people? Or you just object to work? It's not clear what you are advocating for. We live in a world where people need three square meals a day, they want heating and transportation and energy, and other people have to work every day to provide those services.
It seems a bit entitled to be moaning about the fact that one must work to survive in life -- that's kind of how this whole life thing works.
The important thing is not whether something is labeled slavery but rather looking at the dynamic where someone coerces another to spend their time working for someone else. Labeling the dynamic based on the amount of time and degree of suffering is counterproductive. I think most of us can agree that reducing how much that dynamic is in play in the world is ideally a goal for any civilized society. And that the current amount that people are forced to work for the benefit of others is far more than they need to for their own well-being and the wellbeing of society. The amount of labor many, many people are coerced to perform is used as a control mechanism as often as it is for productivity, and in some countries, its use as a mechanism of control rivals productivity as its primary purpose.
The problem is when you start classifying voluntary exchange as coercive, then language loses meaning and you can start reaching really dysfunctional and foolish conclusions.
So no, needing to provide a good that someone is willing to pay for in exchange for getting a good that you want to pay for is not "coercive". It is not slavery. It is a recognition of the fact that humans constantly need support from others. We are dependent on each other. Animals need to hunt every day. That's not coercion, its dependency on the environment. Humans are dependent on each other. That means we have to do stuff we may not feel like doing, but that others are willing to pay us to do. But the only reason you need to work is to get money, and the only reason you need money is to buy a good or service provided by someone else. If you start calling that "slavery" or "coercion", then you are distorting the language, and the only reason to play language games like this is to deceive, not to get to the truth of the matter or make any meaningful, practical, improvement.
So if you feel that, for example, modern industrial economies are too bureaucratic and have too many paperwork jobs, or if you feel inflation is unfair, or that wages are too low, then just discuss those issues. Don't twist the language to try to call needing to work "slavery" - which is a highly charged term - in order to hope that this type of rhetoric will get you over the finish line. The questions of things like wages and pensions and working standards are too important to be subject to this type of polarizing linguistic obfuscation.
> The problem is when you start classifying voluntary exchange as coercive
Is it really voluntary though? Without money, you'll starve, lose your home, etc. People need to get a job and make money.
Voluntary is when I sit down at my computer to hack on some project for fun. I'd do this all day but unfortunately I have to work.
> Humans are dependent on each other.
> That means we have to do stuff we may not feel like doing, but that others are willing to pay us to do.
If you have to do anything at all, you're being coerced. Being forced to work for someone else is slavery. All that's changed is the means of coercion: it used to be force, now it's debt.
> "slavery" - which is a highly charged term
The fact the term has connotations doesn't matter. The similarities are there, so I will call it what it is.
I understand there is this religion of "liberation" in which being bound by the law of entropy or subject to electroweak forces is considered coercion and slavery.
That is not what these terms mean. Man is a limited creature dependent on and subject to many things by necessity of being real rather than a mind object. He is also subject to biology, geography, customs, etc. Those who attempt to rip man out of these constraints in the name of liberation always fail and in the process hurt humanity just as lifting a fish out of water to "liberate" it from being dependent on water is doome to fail and to hurt the fish.
> If you have to do anything at all, you're being coerced
So you are coerced into needing air to breathe. You are a slave of entropy. This is not what these terms mean. Words like "coercion" or "slavery" refer to an actual person forcing you to do something that you could conceivably not do if they didn't intervene. If you expand the definition to coercion to include the second law of thermodynamics, then everying is being coerced and the word loses all meaning. Another attempt to lift the fish.
The only the reason you need money is to get something from someone else. So if you can't get that thing voluntarily, you need to coerce them into giving it to you by force so that you can be "liberated" from paying for it. In other words, you are defining liberation (for you) as coercion (of the other) and freedom from coercion (for you) as slavery (for the other). But even this wont work because it takes a great deal of effort to coerce someone into giving you stuff for free, and that effort itself is work which you need to do yourself or pay someone else with money to do. So it is inescapable -- getting that sandwich always requires work:
We don't live in a universe in which things like food appear out of nothing (entropy again) but they require effective effort to create, and money is just one technology we use to track that effective effort, also called work. This basic fact is just the result of electro-weak forces and entropy. Complaining about being subject to these forces as "coercion" or "slavery" serves only to obfuscate.
There are real slaves still in the world - Libya has open-air slave markets - and there was real slavery in the past.
Saying "I'm a slave, too, because I can't get free sandwiches" damages what the word "slavery" means and hurts the language.
Similarly declaring yourself subject to "coercion" because you are subject to the laws of physics makes everything subject to coercion and thus the word is rendered meaningless, making it harder for people actually undergoing coercion to be helped.
So please try to help rather than hurt. Please use the words in their commonly understood meaning if you intend to engage in productive discussion rather than in destruction.
The Yes Men pointed this out explicitly in their presentation to the WTO on Leisure Wear for Managers of the Future. The golden penis suit was just the cherry on top.
>Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.
Even if they did, we'd all starve if it happened in an unorganised way. I'm toying with a postindustrial fiction setting where one of the libertarian-inspired factions is explicit about this - capitalists whose highest value is freedom, where anyone can mint as much currency as they like, but it's backed by hours working as a slave. The eventual goal of the society is to have nobody redeem slave-tokens any more, but of course a lot of people's individual goals are more about accumulating as many slave-tokens as possible. I think it would take that kind of massive collective intelligence to really solve such a fundamental contradiction like our love for freedom and our love of telling other people what to do.
It's impossible to resolve this contradiction when an economy exists. The ambition to accumulate wealth and secure independence immediately manifests itself. The solution is to automate everything and free humanity from want permanently. When everything is abundant, there is no need to economize: post scarcity.
Post-scarcity is a noble goal! But a lot of people seem to put the cart before the horse and imagine eliminating the economy would cause post-scarcity to show up.
To my mind the economy is a jagged, violent tool that aligns everyone's petty, selfish interests roughly with everyone else's. As the 'everyone's a central bank minting slavery-backed currency' thought experiment highlights, it's self-contradictory in some important ways. I still think it's the best tool available for the kind of changes that might lead to post-scarcity if we're lucky.
Yes. I'd go even further and say it's just another form of slavery. The lash just happens to be economic in nature rather than physical. Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.