From an early age, we are taught that right and wrong exist, categories which we can sort of view as buckets into which other concepts are sorted. Into the bucket of “Right” we are told to throw in certain things- “Kindness,” “Sharing,” “Self-Respect” to name a few. In the bucket of “Wrong” we throw in “Lying,” “Stealing,” “Murder,” and any number of other things.
We may be told why a given thing is right or wrong- perhaps because the bible or the koran says that it is, or because it’s opposed to or requires some other thing we’ve already classified as right or wrong. Or, as very often happens, we are told something is wrong because the authority figure telling us says so, and for us they are arbiters of right and wrong. But implicitly we understand that there is some logic to this reasoning. Christians who explain that the bible condemns homosexuality don’t simply stop there- they invariably set out to produce some sort of reasoning, however spurious, for why the bible is right. Most of us believe things are true and false for reasons, that reality is objective and there are satisfactory explanations for everything we know to be true, even if we haven’t personally worked them out.
If we told a child murder was wrong, and that child asked “Why?”, we might tell them that except in rare circumstances, people have a right to live and to rob them of their right to live without a very good reason for doing so is thus wrong. If the proverbially nosy child replied “why?” again, we might say that we try to base our behaviors towards others on those we would like to receive. Because we wouldn’t like to be murdered, we know it’s wrong to do this to others. If we receive another “why,” we could answer any number of ways, arguing from a utilitarian perspective that it would be very unpleasant to live in a society where everyone was running around killing each other, so we try to avoid it for the sake of everyone’s comfort. We could make a romantic argument and say that the thought of murdering someone feels awful and contradicts our compassionate impulse, so we don’t murder to avoid suffering, whether or not it’s “wrong.” We could make the Aristotelian argument that our actions ought to reach towards the Good and promote Happiness by acting in a rational manner, and since murder usually isn’t a rational thing to do, it would thus be wrong. And so on and so forth, until we finally accepted that we don’t really know why murder is wrong, yet we all seem to pretty much agree that it is so you should probably hop on board or else people might start to talk.
Point being, we have moral systems, but because we have to develop those systems as children, when we’re not really equipped to understand why something is right or wrong, we are always at a disadvantage. If we want to genuinely figure out why what we think is right is right, we are forced to backtrack and justify things we’ve believed for years. Most people don’t want to do that and likely end up re-evaluating things we’ve believed since we were children, so we are left with a house of philosophical beliefs adopted as adults that are built on a sinkhole of ideas we signed on to as children, before we were capable of fully investigating them. To reinvestigate those base assumptions is both tiresome and requires an unusual capacity to reform one’s belief system to a pretty significant extent. What if, for instance, you were raised from an early age to believe pre-marital sex is wrong and you are forced to change your mind after having gone through a large portion of your adult life sexually unsatisfied? To accept that you went through all that trouble and self-denial for nothing would be very hard to swallow. The same would be true if you were raised to believe in free love and then became a devout Christian later in life- you lived your entire adult life in sin!
So we usually anchor ourselves in these early moral categorizations and don’t really sway from them. We see the consequences of this in arguments by analogy. All too often we base our arguments for why something is right or wrong by saying:
X thing is wrong and everybody knows it, but Y thing is actually the same as X for reasons a and b, so we should also regard Y as wrong, and if you disagree you basically support X.
For instance, and to bring this extended preamble to what I think was the point of this essay, take a rather extreme argument by analogy that I largely agree with, comparing slavery to wage slavery.
The argument is already contained in the phrase “wage slavery,” even if its logical conclusions aren’t fully expanded. It goes something like this:
Slavery is wrong. Wage slavery is not meaningfully different from slavery in that it is coercive and diverts the profit of the worker’s labor to the capitalist, their master. In effect, wage slavery is just slavery, with the comforting palliative that the wage slave is nominally free, but this freedom is only a fantasy used to obscure the reality of a daily life that has very little freedom in it. Therefore, wage slavery is wrong.
Now this is fine. To a large degree I think it’s true. But I’m not altogether sure why I think it’s true. So to adequately answer this question, I’m going to start by investigating the initial premises. What are the aspects of slavery that make it wrong?
First, that slavery is coercive- we recognize that a slave is compelled into their labor and that if they didn’t do it they could be killed. Secondly, it takes the slave’s capacity for labor and diverts all the value that can be derived from it to the master.
We have to determine whether or not this adequately defines slavery. If we take away either of these qualities, do we still have slavery? It certainly can’t be voluntary, so the coercive aspect is definitely accurate. Must it serve to profit the master? If “profit” means to do what the master regards as beneficial to himself, then yes. Doubtless a slave master could be insane and tell his slaves to jump up and down all day just for his edification, and while this wouldn’t be very profitable in a material sense, the master clearly saw some value in it or he wouldn’t have made the demand. While there may be rare exceptions, the second premise is also true enough that I would consider it an essential quality of slavery.
There are other qualities that are common to slaves, such as reduced social status (slaves do not have legal rights and are not even legally recognized as human beings) and the quality of themselves being viewed as capital to be bought and sold. Nevertheless you could set those qualities aside and, given the aforementioned characteristics, would still be left with something that would be very hard to describe as anything other than slavery. Someone could be kidnapped, for instance, and while they might retain legal citizenship and the market would not recognize them as a legitimate security that could be legally exchanged, if they were coerced into performing labor for a master, we would still undeniably have an instance of slavery.
So if we accept that these two qualities are what characterize slavery and distinguish it from other things, to answer the question of the essay “Why is slavery wrong?”, we really have to answer why coercion and the appropriation of the value of labor from the slave by the master are wrong. Having affirmed that slavery is wrong and why, we can set about determining whether or not wage slavery is identical to slavery in these particular ways.
Coercion
The first point requires a definition of coercion, one which proves to be even more important in the (arguably) less extreme case of the wage slave, or in more radical forms of the argument where all wage labor is seen to be coercive.
Encyclopedia Brittanica defines Coercion as follows: “threat or use of punitive measures against states, groups, or individuals in order to force them to undertake or desist from specified actions.”
This is a straightforward enough definition, but we have to go a bit further to fully understand it. When someone is “forced” to do something, what this usually means in fact is that their choices have been limited such that their best available choice is one that fulfills the desires of the coercers. Almost never is a conscious, sentient being literally “without choice”. You can usually choose to kill yourself, or to attempt to resist in a way that results in you being killed, or at least incapacitated. A slave has the choice to attempt to kill their overseer rather than do the labor they’ve been tasked with; they could also run away. But the principle of coercion implies that their choice is so limited, recognizing that these alternatives are so dangerous or miserable, that in practice they have no choice at all, at least not one fit for a human being to make.
So we recognize when we define coercion that we do not literally mean that slaves are having their hand physically forced to do a task by the hand of some authority figure, but rather that the implication of suffering if they fail to do it themselves is so great that they will do it regardless of whether or not they wish to do it.
There is also a key point- the slave’s desire is irrelevant to the coercive nature of the act. The slave may be ideologically committed to doing his work. He may be convinced that doing slave labor is his duty by birth and he is content, even eager to do it. It doesn’t matter. He is every bit as coerced as the slaves who are restless and despise every moment of their captivity.
So coercion is characterized by the reduction of choice to such an extent that the best available option for the coerced is that which serves the interests of the coercing party. It is possible that the coercing party may intend, through the use of coercion, to assist the coerced. For instance, a child might be told by her mother that she has to read ten pages of a book or else she won’t get to play outside. To the mother, reading the book is in the child’s best interests. But regardless, the methods employed to get the child to do it are coercive. That doesn’t mean that coercion is always wrong, it only serves to specify what coercion is not- coercion isn’t explicitly harmful to the coerced, nor is it necessarily done against their will. It is agnostic in these respects. The coerced party’s well-being and their opinion are irrelevant to characterizing an act as coercive.
This feels to me like an adequate explanation of what coercion is- the question becomes why is it wrong?
The problem with coercion is there are different sorts of coercion. The best example I can think of is the Civil War. The south seceded for fear of emancipation of slaves being forced upon them, literally citing northern coercion in a truly historic act of unintended irony typified in this clip from the bizarre film Gods and Generals in which Robert Duvall plays Robert E. Lee. It’s a truly craven, yet fascinating piece of Confederate apologism that could be seen as a sort of window into a version of history many southerners earnestly believe (for some irony on top of irony, the film was personally bankrolled by Ted Turner, founder of phony fake news liberal media CNN) :
The use of the term coercion is especially common in New York Herald op-eds in 1860-1861. The paper at that time was edited by James Gordon Bennett, Sr., who openly sympathized with the southern right to own slaves, arguing that freeing them would lead them to run north and compete with white workers for jobs, driving down wages. Writing in January of 1861 in reference to Lincoln’s decision not to abandon forts in Charleston to the new Confederate Army of the recently seceded South Carolina, just 3 months before the Battle of Fort Sumter, a Herald editorial reads:
Let us briefly consider the probable consequences of this policy. Several federal forts at Charleston are occupied by the revolutionists. They must be dispossessed. Accordingly a fleet of armed vessels and transports bearing an army are despatched to Charleston. The forts in question are recovered. But what then? The war has been commenced, in anticipation of when, not only the States of the Southern confederacy, but all the other slave States stand pledged to make common cause with South Carolina against this policy of coercion. Thus it is apparent that any attempt by force of arms to reinstate the federal government in any United States fort, arsenal or dockyard, seized by any Southern State, will be the inauguration of a war in which all the military forces and resources of the South will be combined against the general government. The very first blow, then of coercion will involve Mr. Lincoln’s administration in a war for the subjugation of the South, an enterprise criminally foolish and utterly impracticable.
The message is clear: the federal government, we are told, was coercing the slave states to remain part of the union so that they might eventually coerce them into freeing their enormous slave population. The implication being that because it is coercive, it is wrong.
I mention this example to highlight the difference between what appear to be two types of coercion (although in all likelihood there are others). There is onerous coercion- the use of coercion to subjugate for the benefit of the coercive party. But there is also preventative coercion- coercing someone to prevent them from coercing someone else. The second is probably the best sort of coercion, the first being the worst. Both are often defended through the principle of legitimacy- the idea that the coercive act, while it may benefit the coercive party, is also in some way worthwhile for the coerced. This capacity for just violence is the defining trait of a state, as in the popular definition given by Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation:
A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Of course the Confederates were entirely right; the state was being coercive. But then, it was being no less coercive when it passed the Fugitive Slave Act, compelling northern citizens to return runaway slaves to their masters. Why didn’t they complain then?
So we must accept that coercion of certain types is usually necessary, although we don’t particularly like it. Coercion, in all its forms, is ultimately the usurpation of active decision-making. A person living under extreme coercion (as slaves do) is not able to fully express their humanity; this is ultimately the root of the injustice of slavery. The ability to say what you like, make choices, to do good or bad things and be accountable only to those you choose to be accountable to, are all set aside in favor of pure supplication. The use of one’s critical thinking capacity, while it isn’t taken away, is discouraged and made useless- there is no reason to think. The very fact of your ability to think independently only causes you to further resent your lack of freedom, making the experience all the more painful. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass talks about the pain of a free mind in an enslaved body he experienced after learning to read while still in captivity:
As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, and disappeared no more forever.
Coercion has the potential to be a civilizing force that can protect people from other, more onerous coercive forces. But we also have to recognize its potential for the degradation of people, always reducing their expression to the unsophisticated, uncreative act of submission, one’s choices being so restricted that it leaves an active mind to wallow in misery at its own wasted potential. This, to me, demonstrates why this sort of coercion is wrong.
Appropriation of Value
Now we must turn to specifying the precise nature of the acts to which a slave is coerced that make their state qualify as one of slavery. The slave’s activity is expressly dictated by the master according to their will. Whatever the master considers a worthwhile activity, the slave does for them, free of charge. It must be some task for which, without the condition of slavery, payment would be expected. Even less straightforward forms of slave labor, like sexual gratification (or, to be less euphemistic, rape) or the rearing of children, represent services for which a master would otherwise have to pay or at the very least persuade someone. The condition of slavery therefore represents a robbery, not only of the slave’s freedom, but of the value of their labor. Instead of raising their own children, they raise the master’s child; instead of having sex for their own pleasure, they are raped for the master’s pleasure; and instead of raising a crop or manufacturing a product and claiming the product of their labor as their own to sell, the value of this labor is given to the master, who receives the full compensation for it in the marketplace.
Suffice it to say, I’m not an economist. There is much debate within economics about the precise role of labor in value creation, but we can say with certainty that most goods depend largely on human labor for the qualities that make them desirable for consumption. The precise incentive to enslave people is obviously the fact that their labor is free (apart from the small costs required to keep them alive and continuously capable of working) and one can avoid having to observe human rights which might slow down production. The result was the ability to farm generally demanding crops like cotton, tobacco and sugarcane to sell at low prices, realizing significant profits for slaveowners which we can see the results of in the unusually high level of wealth inequality in the south from 1850-1860- which is saying a lot, as wealth inequality in the 19th century was staggeringly high virtually anywhere you looked.
What the antebellum south demonstrates, then, is what seems a fairly obvious point: a cheap workforce without legal rights is a profitable one, precisely because it allows for the full appropriation of the workers’ value creation. Without this motive to maximize profit, it’s hard to imagine how a slave system of the American sort could come about.
Appropriation of labor value is a far more contentious topic than coercion, justified on the basis of property rights. By the proprietarian logic of the time the wealth created by the slaves belonged to the slaveowner because the slaves belonged to the slaveowner- not fundamentally different from how the wealth created by women at the time belonged to the husband, because the husband owned his wife. One owns, in other words, what one’s property produces. Over time the realm of property has retreated somewhat, and it is recognized that people cannot themselves be property.
In the deeply crass and cynical logic of capital and commodity, if slavery demonstrates that human capital exists, we have come to agree that every adult holds themselves as a form of capital stock which cannot be sold, but can be rented out to a property owner for productive labor for a price- the laborer sells their productive capacity in return for a fixed wage. If the price they are able to get for this rent is low enough that they are only able to afford a meager subsistence lifestyle, or (as often happens) they are so poorly paid that they are driven into debt to maintain this lifestyle, we refer to their status as one of wage slavery, in which the cost of living is given to the worker as a wage, rather than simply being a fixed cost for a formal slaveowner. If the wage is substantially higher than this, giving the worker the ability to build wealth and maintain greater purchasing power than the absolute minimum necessary to survive, then we become less certain.
So again, we find the issue is one of degree. Wage or debt slavery in its most extreme forms- as in the Lowell textile mills, the sharecropper plantations of the Reconstructionist south, or the British coal miners- only bears the difference from slavery in that the worker is technically free to go. The question, of course, being free to go where? We need only look at the staggering inequality of the 19th century in France, Britain, and the United States to recognize that for most people, there was no escape from wage labor. If coercion is the condition of reduced choices, leaving the preferences of a coercive party as the only relatively tolerable option, we must recognize that this system is coercive.
We are left to conclude, then, that yes, wage slavery as the term is typically applied is a form of soft slavery where the costs of maintaining the slave population are simply paid out as a wage rather than a maintenance cost. While there are other differences, primarily the legal classification of a worker as a citizen with constitutional rights (and it isn’t to be denied that there is a psychological relief to this classification, if nothing else), this circumstance is flexible and changes according to the political and social climate of the era. Sometimes the distinction between the citizen and the slave matters greatly to the material and social freedom of the individual; often it means very little. If the recognized rights of the wage slave change, either through legal reforms, popular mobilization or what have you, such that they are able to accumulate wealth and improve their standard of living, they are no longer a wage slave by this definition. We are now looking at a wage labor system which is less coercive and less appropriative of value. Is this more humane labor system therefore just?
Coercion and Property
If we recognize that the wage labor system can be reformed such that it is no longer extreme enough to qualify as slavery, is it still wrong on account of a likeness to slavery’s characteristics?
The fundamental qualities of coercion and appropriation of value are still present. Even in the modern world, able-bodied people who don’t come from a small percentage of wealthy families are for the most part forced to work to obtain a standard of living that would be considered tolerable by most people- a large portion are forced to work for considerably less than that. As in the prior instance of coercion, whether we want to go to work or not is irrelevant- if we want to eat and have a roof over our heads, we must go anyway. It is the only tolerable choice. Many branches of left wing thought have argued that this is onerously coercive insofar as the wealth to allow everyone to work less already exists, and has for centuries. Wealth being distributed in a highly unequal manner (as the prior links demonstrated, the bottom half of the population has never possessed more than 10% of all wealth in three of the world’s wealthiest nations, even in the social-democratic heyday of the 1950s-60s), the artificial scarcity imposed by the enormous wealth hoarding of the top 1% has invariably forced the rest of the population to scrounge for resources among plenty. The wealth they could use to empower themselves is always right in front of them, yet just out of reach, defended by the constant threat of violence.
Stark non-slave examples of this logic abound, but one’s mind naturally turns to the Irish potato famine, in which 1 million people starved to death. The striking thing about the potato famine was not only the English government and landlords’ unwillingness to provide aid, but even more shockingly, their refusal to pass an export ban (page 11). A country experiencing one of the worst famines in recorded history was simultaneously exporting food, food grown by the same people starving to death. It’s hard to imagine a more insidious demonstration of the potential for brutality inherent in proprietarian ideology.
So returning to the Weberian idea of the state as the monopoly of legitimate violence, we see that coercion and property rights are intimately related. Indeed, it is only through coercion that property beyond a modest handful of possessions can exist, and the larger a fortune is, the more extraordinary the coercion required to preserve it. The reason is simple- one human being can only consume so much, and little force is needed to defend this property because it’s naturally quite modest. For a person to be rich requires a broad swath of property for which the rich person has no immediate use, but feels nevertheless singularly entitled to. When such a fortune exists beside people who are in need, one has to take more and more drastic measures to protect it in proportion to the size of the wealth. So the characteristic that defines who owns what, finally, is who has the legal right to use violence, or invoke the violence of the state to exercise ownership over it. Property is a product of implicit or explicit coercion sanctioned by the state.
If we accept that all property is coercive, we can then go back to our prior definition of acceptable and unacceptable forms of coercion. It was onerous coercion- the sort that bends people to the will of a more powerful individual and robs, stupefies and degrades them, that we identified as a harmful and illegitimate use of coercion.
So after all that, we are left with more questions. How much of today’s property distribution is the product of onerous coercion and theft? How much of it is helpful and just? What sort of world could we create that had fully rid itself of not only slavery, but its component characteristics? And how, if it is possible, can we build it?