Talk:Wage slavery

gender neutral pronoun change

The contributor must have traveled to the future and forgotten that in the 21st century we don't use male pronouns anymore.

'Defenses of wage labor and chattel slavery in the literature have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to nature'

Hopefully it was changed; unless quoting someone, it's best to use gender- and sex-neutral pronouns.

Joking/trolling? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.139.85.146 (talk) 12:23, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Engels quote

The article has quoted the following --

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 labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.

The quote is taken from the Principles of Communism where Engels differentiates slaves from proletarians. This is loosely related to what the quote is being used for (as impinging on the individual liberty of the worker but really, this is not what Engels is trying to at it) i.e. the quote is not about the contradiction between the illusion of liberty, freedom, etc in capitalist society and the reality of bondage. Engels is clearly making a distinction between slaves and workers and that is all. So to use the quote for any other purpose (infringe on individual liberty and thus contradict capitalist ethos) counts as ORIGINAL RESEARCH unless the contributor can find a secondary source supporting this interpretation.

Pasted below is the section in full --

(Section title=) In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?

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 labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

property as relation and as thing

"To Marx and anarchist thinkers like Bakunin and Kropotkin, wage slavery was a class condition in place due to the existence of private property and the state. This class situation rested primarily on: -the existence of property not intended for active use,"

The way you have defined property above ('for active use') implies property is a thing. But property has another very different meaning (not as a thing owned or possessed) but as a social relation between and among members of a social unit in reference to the use and disposal of things. For example, private property refers to exclusive rights to possess, use and dispose goods and services and is essentially a social relationship between the owner and persons deprived i.e., denial of the private property of others. This is the way Marx used the term property when he wrote "capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things” (Fowkes translation, p.932).

See also:

"Property denotes not material things but certain rights...A property right is a relation not between an owner and a thing, but between the owner and other individuals in reference to things" (Morris Cohen, American jurist)

Property designates "relations between people and understandings about the rights of individuals to the use or benefit of things" ()Wallace Clement, 1983, p.219)

Cover photo for this article when linking

The current cover-photo when sharing this article is the McDonalds protest, which is just so wrong given the historical subject of this. McDonalds workers might not be paid well but they are not a good example of the meat of this topic. Is it possible to change it to a better one? Lawrie (talk) 02:03, 22 December 2022 (UTC)