this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Sorry - genuinely don’t understand this one. What’s the connection? No kids means… no future workers?
no kids means no slaves means no slavery
I’m not sure that any kids I might have are going to become slaves….
"Slave" like any word has contextual meaning. In this context I'm using it to refer to the workers who find themselves caught in a coercive political-economic system. Other similar words are wage slave, proletariat, or just working class. The point is that there is an involuntary aspect which likens it to slavery in the more narrow sense. (The narrow meaning of slave I have in mind being "someone forced into labor without pay".)
All that said, in the U.S. there are still slaves as defined narrowly as people who are forced to work without pay. Slavery is used in prison systems, for example, and is not uncommon among human trafficking victims and immigrants (e.g. read Tomatoland). If your children are women, indigenous, black, are born or become disabled, or belong to various other minority statuses they are at even greater risk of getting swallowed into those forms of "literal" slavery as well.
I would also lump military service under "coercive". The incentives are significant and can be life changing, but it still leads to people being considered government property at the end of the day
Ok. How about you say working class and not fucking “slave” then lol. It’s insulting to compare working at TJ Maxx for 40 hours a week to literal slavery.
there are different forms of slavery brah.
Yeah sure, as long as you don’t associate any meaning with the word.
Slavery is people literally kidnapped and forced to work in fields without wages or actual housing. Well, also, it’s kind of just when you make kind of close to minimum wage. Well, actually, it’s when you’re a computer programmer but you wish you got paid more. Who cares. It’s all the same word.
That is not the only form of slavery, and modern slavery very rarely resembles the specifics of the Atlantic slave trade.
Regardless, neither has very much to do with wage slavery, but it nonetheless remains a term in use and not a totally random use of the word.
why didn't I say working class instead of slave? I don't think most people have in mind the same meaning of "working class" as I intended, while the term slave immediately communicates the situation and the reasoning of the meme
Sure, my communication could have been more specific, but then it would have been more verbose as well. This is just how we use language, to communicate effectively. I don't want to dismiss your point that being too glib or broad with our language can be offensive to some, but I also think the TJ Maxx worker is closer to that literal slave in the field than you think. To me, solidarity for the working class and cooperation is preferable and pragmatically more likely to achieve political successes than gatekeeping suffering.
What's the minimum wage where you live?
More than literal slaves got.
In your view, what's the most important feature of slavery that makes it slavery and not something else?
Not the same person but the answer is non-biological coercion of labor even if that's not the way it's often defined. If one lives in a system where they are compelled to sell their labor to survive so that someone can skim value from their labor this is a form of slavery.
I wonder what you mean by non-biological here, why is that a helpful distinction?
I don't see why we couldn't think of human coercion of other humans isn't "biological" in some sense, so I also don't understand what distinction exactly you are making with "non-biological", but I might just be a bit slow today.
Still, I agree with you that coercion seems central to the idea of slavery.
Ah, it may have been unneeded. What I meant by that is that every living being is compelled to work on some level to survive and I wanted to be clear that I wasn't including that. Like, a lion must hunt for food, a lion is biologically compelled to do this work to survive but this isn't slavery.
To continue with that silly analogy, if some lions coerced other lions to hunt extra and took their extra food, that would be a form of slavery.
ah, I see what you mean - it's an important distinction, and one that I think some existentialists looked at (not necessarily in terms of slavery, per se, but certainly in terms of freedom). Ultimately we can't avoid constraints and in that sense there is always coercion from the environment. However, there is a big difference between those inescapable constraints and the immoral and unjustified hierarchies a tiny minority of humans have successfully imposed on the rest, and pointing that out is definitely worthwhile.
Thanks for the clarification!
I think it’s insulting to compare working 40 hours a week to afford to live to literal slavery
First of all, I think I completely understand where you are coming from. This was the same reaction I had when I heard words like "slave" or "slavery" being thrown around to describe contemporary working conditions.
Coming from a U.S. context where slavery overlaps with racism, it seemed even racially insensitive to me that an office worker would be compared to a slave, which in my mind was an African slave working in a cotton field.
The reality is that working conditions vary considerably in the U.S., so when we speak of the working class we include everyone from the undocumented immigrant who is forced to live in shacks and pick crops without pay or even basic access to sanitary or safe conditions all the way up to cozy financial workers who work in skyscrapers. Something as big as an economic or political system is a difficult thing to analyze and talk about.
But I noticed you did not answer my question. If you're not open to a discussion I understand, at least I have had a chance to put some of my thoughts out there. I just want to offer the opportunity to discuss the topic if you would like to, but no worries either way.
I think it’s more like, can’t take advantage of me if I’m not born. It’s a little odd to me as well.
I got more of a, "You can't continue to take advantage of us if we don't have anymore children and kill off your workforce through gained apathy to our future." Kinda vibe.
It helps if you look at it from the perspective of the capitalist class. Workers are a form of free capital. Capitalists don't have to assume any of the burdens involved in creating life, raising a child, acculturating them to social standards that make them suitable workers, etc. They don't even have to pay for the education or training that makes them capable as human capital in various industrial contexts.
All those costs are dumped onto the working classes, not just as parents (usually the woman) who are expected to deliver a baby, nurse the baby, raise the resulting child until they are the age of the majority all without any wages, access to benefits like retirement plans or health insurance, etc. but also onto taxpayers who subsidize the rest of the costs outside of the home such as their schooling and transportation to the schools.
There is a huge leverage here that the working class does not take by organizing the production of themselves. If we all agreed to not have children and demanded fair compensation for any new production of human capital, society would be much more just and the capitalist class would have less room to exploit us.
i think this is also the reason the far right pushes so hard against contraception and abortion.
also the marxist concept of reserve army of labour: the more imporvished and desperate workers are lining up for shitty jobs to survive, the less then can get away with paying.
It certainly does benefit the right to some extent, but I wouldn't ignore the strategy that the right uses of exploiting Christians, and that's where contraception and abortion come in as issues (stemming from theological convictions).
No future workers. No future consumers (including being bent over a barrel for essential goods). No future taxpayers. No future people to fight their wars.
That seems like super lame throwing in the towel.
You (and a great many number of people) disagree with it. I'm simply explaining the concept.
The point for people adopting this mindset isn't to win. It's too avoid losing. It's a risk management strategy.
I don’t think you’ve avoided losing if you’ve made major life changes in order to not give some CEO down the line $50,000 in equity.
That sounds like the biggest form of losing I can think of.
Not "$50K" of equity, an entire lifetime(s) of equity. A child will have a lot more than $50K of impact of their lifetime if we are talking about first world developed nations.
Obviously it can make life easier on the would-be parents as well, but that isn't really the main focus here.
I don’t think you’re really getting the point if the main thing you got hung up on there was “calculating the approximate value of a worker to a CEO during their tenure at a company”
I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything here. Just explaining what the position is. You obviously disagree with it, as does the majority of the population. It is an unpopular position.
The labor market is a market - that means it is regulated by supply and demand.
Now, there's a demand for workers.
Now, think about what happens when the supply goes down - prices go up.
In other words: If there are fewer workers on the labor market, that means the price for labor goes up, in other words: wages go up.
Ok. That’s a very fine system if everyone in the country works in a button factory where they just push buttons on a keyboard all day and don’t actually produce anything.
What do you think businesses are… making products for??