The Off Topic Topic

[garbon]

It's a pretty emotive term.
It could certainly be argued that being a wage slave with an awful life of constant work in suffering is worse though you technically have your freedom than some theoretical situation where you're someone's favoured slave/pet and want for nothing.

That's a very socialist argument from you.

And a bizarre replacement of chattel slavery with I guess slavery roleplay?

[Eddie Teach]

Well I may be wrong. My comment had little to do with wage slavery, but rather the impression that the Chinese consortiums that brought workers over more or less controlled them.

[The Brain]

It's a pretty emotive term.
It could certainly be argued that being a wage slave with an awful life of constant work in suffering is worse though you technically have your freedom than some theoretical situation where you're someone's favoured slave/pet and want for nothing.

Wealthy or poor, or happy or unhappy, are not the defining characteristics of a slave.

[Josquius]

It's a pretty emotive term.
It could certainly be argued that being a wage slave with an awful life of constant work in suffering is worse though you technically have your freedom than some theoretical situation where you're someone's favoured slave/pet and want for nothing.

That's a very socialist argument from you.

And a bizarre replacement of chattel slavery with I guess slavery roleplay?

I said it's a theoretical.
In practice slavery has historically sucked.
Though being owned wasn't the cause of this.  Its perfectly within the bounds of logic that there could be a owned person who is treat well.
Clearly the word slavery then carries a lot of baggage beyond its base meaning. It is this baggage that the term wage slave is calling on.

[garbon]

It's a pretty emotive term.
It could certainly be argued that being a wage slave with an awful life of constant work in suffering is worse though you technically have your freedom than some theoretical situation where you're someone's favoured slave/pet and want for nothing.

That's a very socialist argument from you.

And a bizarre replacement of chattel slavery with I guess slavery roleplay?

I said it's a theoretical.
In practice slavery has historically sucked.
Though being owned wasn't the cause of this.  Its perfectly within the bounds of logic that there could be a owned person who is treat well.
Clearly the word slavery then carries a lot of baggage beyond its base meaning. It is this baggage that the term wage slave is calling on.

Sure we can always fantasize about how terrible things could be positive. Not sure the utility though as being an owned person is  opposed to our understanding of basic human rights.

[Malthus]

Slavery is surprisingly difficult to define with any precision. There are all sorts of gradations of forced labor - some that many people would strongly resist terming "slavery", such as conscription.

The most obvious definition is that slavery ownership of people, like any other property, where the owned have no legal rights whatsoever.

The question I suppose is whether "slavery" requires such a total removal of rights, or whether a partial removal - as in, various forms of serfdom and forced labor - also count as "slavery" as well.

[DGuller]

It's a continuum, and I think it's not productive to simplify the matters.  Situations where people are nominally free but in reality owe their continued existence to people that hold economic power over them are still problematic.  Calling it slavery is inviting backlash for overstating it, but seeing things in only slave/free terms is deliberately ignorant as well.

[HVC]

If owners of chattel slavery had to provide basic subsistence to slaves in the form of food and shelter does providing only subsistence wages count as modern day slavery. The overall outcome is the same. working purely to live.

Marxists weigh in!

[grumbler]

A slave could be bought and sold.  The relationship was entirely one-way and there was no even implicit social contract.  Serfs owed their liege their labor (within the implicit or explicit contract) but couldn't be bought or sold except when the land they were bound to was bought and sold.  Subsistence wage workers were more like serfs.  There's not really a continuum; slavery was different in form and substance from serfdom or wage slavery.

[derspiess]

It is great that young black girls can see such pictures. You can see her thinking, "if I also marry a man who is going to the top, and do lots of bicep and tricep workouts, I too may have a giant picture on the wall!"

Now if *I* had said that...

[Habbaku]

Well, AR is black, so he can say things like that.

[Malthus]

A slave could be bought and sold.  The relationship was entirely one-way and there was no even implicit social contract.  Serfs owed their liege their labor (within the implicit or explicit contract) but couldn't be bought or sold except when the land they were bound to was bought and sold.  Subsistence wage workers were more like serfs.  There's not really a continuum; slavery was different in form and substance from serfdom or wage slavery.

Serfs could be bought and sold in some places, such as Russia prior to the emancipation of the serfs, without a land purchase; they were indeed in some ways (but not all) like property, in that you could use them as collateral against loans. Indeed, the famous novel "Dead Souls" relies on that fact to a great extent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls

Unless we are playing no-true-Scotsman type definitional games in which Russian serfs are not "really" serfs, but slaves, Russian serfdom looks more *like* chattel slavery and less like subsistence workers - in short, it's a continuum. Serfs in Russia were more "like" slaves than other forms of serfdom but were not slaves, because they had some (highly theoretical) rights.

[Valmy]

It's a continuum, and I think it's not productive to simplify the matters.  Situations where people are nominally free but in reality owe their continued existence to people that hold economic power over them are still problematic.  Calling it slavery is inviting backlash for overstating it, but seeing things in only slave/free terms is deliberately ignorant as well.

Relations between humans can be problematic without being slavery. Slavery refers to not just an economic burden but also the issue of being a non-person, a piece of property, and all the vulnerability that goes with it. Working in a sweat shop or some of other type of exploitative relationship is a bad thing but it is not slavery.

If owners of chattel slavery had to provide basic subsistence to slaves in the form of food and shelter does providing only subsistence wages count as modern day slavery. The overall outcome is the same. working purely to live.

Marxists weigh in!

I don't think so since there was more to being a slave than only an exploitative economic relationship.

[Valmy]

A slave could be bought and sold.  The relationship was entirely one-way and there was no even implicit social contract.  Serfs owed their liege their labor (within the implicit or explicit contract) but couldn't be bought or sold except when the land they were bound to was bought and sold.  Subsistence wage workers were more like serfs.  There's not really a continuum; slavery was different in form and substance from serfdom or wage slavery.

Serfs could be bought and sold in some places, such as Russia prior to the emancipation of the serfs, without a land purchase; they were indeed in some ways (but not all) like property, in that you could use them as collateral against loans. Indeed, the famous novel "Dead Souls" relies on that fact to a great extent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls

Unless we are playing no-true-Scotsman type definitional games in which Russian serfs are not "really" serfs, but slaves, Russian serfdom looks more *like* chattel slavery and less like subsistence workers - in short, it's a continuum. Serfs in Russia were more "like" slaves than other forms of serfdom but were not slaves, because they had some (highly theoretical) rights.

I am confused. Is it a continuum or were Russian serfs serfs that appeared more like slavery than other forms of serfdom?

I do not understand the point of putting chattel slavery out there. The entire point of slavery is that one is chattel.

[Malthus]

I am confused. Is it a continuum or were Russian serfs serfs that appeared more like slavery than other forms of serfdom?

That's what being on a continuum means - some things are further along the line towards X, and others further along the line towards Y.

X being "owned exactly like an other property, no rights whatsoever", Y being "work for a living or be poor".

Russian serfdom was further along the line towards "X": in many ways they were like property, but they still had some rights: you couldn't do literally whatever you wanted with them.

In contrast, one could take the position that it was binary, not a continuum - that some factor makes the situation very clearly "slavery". If that factor is 'total ownership, exactly like property', then Russian serfs were not "slaves". Indeed, they aren't called 'slaves' and Russia had at one point, both 'slaves' and 'serfs' - so clearly the Russians at least thought there was some distinction between them.

I do not understand the point of putting chattel slavery out there. The entire point of slavery is that one is chattel.

That's the binary definition thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Under that definition, debt bondage (for example) wouldn't be "slavery", and the sentence "It is the most widespread form of slavery today" would be quite incorrect.