 So what is wait slave because you know every interview every debate I do these days and it's it just seems to have just popped out Because I've been doing debates for a long long long time and I have to say The term wait slavery never came up now I'm familiar with the term because it goes about back to Karl Marx and even before Karl Marx But certainly Karl Marx Marx or Ingalls popularized. I've got a couple of quotes from Ingalls We popularized the term It goes back to the antebellum south to the to the south during slavery Uh, it's got roots in the labor movement of the late 19th century early 20th century But I really hadn't seen the term Being used regularly in the united states by people on the left and yet just recently Every single debate I do I mean really every single one of them The issue of wage slavery comes up And every time it does It shocks me anew Because what is wait slavery? it's A term used to describe a situation I'm reading for Wikipedia, but you can find this I mean it's the same thing I've checked the number of different sources because I don't typically just trust wikipedia It's a term used to describe a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary Especially when their dependence is total and immediate Which means What is total and immediate up mean even? It has been used to criticize exploitation of labor and social stratification With the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital Right particularly low wage wages like sweatshops And the lack of worker self-management fulfilling jobs and leisure in the economy Fulfilling jobs and not enough leisure in the economy And the purposes and here i'm not reading for wikipedia The purpose is obviously it's in the term To associate wages with slavery Now I think that's pretty disgusting Now to to realize how Discussing and offensive that is and and that's what I said to varsh varsh get saying wait slavery wait slavery um Think about what it means to be a slave It means every aspect of your life Every second of your day Is at the control of your quote owner Of the person who is your master Female slaves were raped regularly With no legal recourse Slaves were whipped beaten killed With no legal resource Recos they were treated as property They were owned And a anything could be demanded of them And if they refused their punishment was violence If they ran away They were brought back beaten Often hung and killed Slavery is the brutal use of force To force people to to force people to do your bidding I cannot think Of a human institution more evil Than slavery Not treating human beings As human beings But treating them as animals Cheating them a sub human indeed much of the defense of slavery in the south and around the world Has been that they are subhuman It is not an institution one voluntarily enters into as a slave It is associated with violence Married couples were separated Sold to different owners Marriage had to get the consent of the master Children were separated from their parents and sold I mean only a You know middle class spoiled brat Would not understand and who has not thought has not used his mind to think through The meaning and the significance Of what slavery is and what slavery meant And what slavery represented Now let's think what wages are Even wage labor Even in the worst circumstances, let's take the worst Let's take a sweatshop Southeast Asia or early factories In england or in the united states Just Think about the difference People were toiling on land They could barely make a living It was not very efficient Opportunities came up in the city Opportunities to Work for somebody else for x number of hours a day and early on it was many hours a day And it sweatshops in southeast Asia. It can be many hours a day Almost as many hours a day As a First year Employee at goldman sacks. I think it's a hundred hours a week Which is what a goldman sacks New employed goldman sacks is expected to put in a fresh out of business school, right? They would they went Not because they were expecting a worse life They went to the city because of the promise and expectation of a better life A life that would have owned them a living that was higher and better Than what they were owning Being on a farm They went to the city and took jobs Because those jobs had been created those jobs did not appear out of no way Those jobs were not a consequence of some social evolution Those jobs were not just something that had to happen They were jobs created by entrepreneurs by business people By capitalists who provided capital to set up factories that then employed Then employed people Who then employed people and provide them with wages attractive enough To lure them from the countryside for a better life in the city in those days there were many new businesses being formed and labor at least to an extent could choose Who to work for and they were compensated based on How good they were how productive they were in spite of what vast says It's generally how people are compensated The more productive you are The the more you produce the more resourceful you are the better you are at what you do The more money you gain They chose to be there they were not forced to be there and they could leave They could switch jobs They could in theory even go back to the farm They ended their labor They worked they they could go home They could do what they wanted They could marry who they wanted Nobody forced Nobody sold off their children They made enough money they might send their kids to school They didn't make enough money they might Have their kids working as they did on the farm where the kids worked Because they now lived under better work better conditions than they did out in the country In spite of the romanticization of the countryside As a consequence of living at a higher quality, you know, having more money And the improved sanitation And just generally the improved life in the city They lived longer they lived healthier life expectancy rose Children didn't quite die at the same rate Walt was created some of their wealth was funneled into things like sanitation Into things like healthcare Doctors were trained and civilization arose Yes, people worked at jobs they didn't like People have always worked at jobs they didn't like the only difference between today For people who have jobs they didn't like is that 400 years ago They didn't know there was an alternative They couldn't conceive of an alternative There was no alternative They did the work they were born into And they would always do the work that they were born into They would never make more or less They would die with about the same stuff as they had when they were born No wealth or very little wealth was actually created Workers in the 19th century Died with much more than what they began with Their children died with much more even Than what they had started with and indeed the standard of living went up constantly In spite of these what these So-called slave wages These were voluntary transactions. They could leave Nobody beat them. Nobody whipped them. Nobody raped them if they did They had legal recourse. They had full rights under the law Now not to say they weren't abusers not to say that they some You know bad people exploited other people but generally The system was such that people had rights That people protected by the legal system The exact opposite of slavery We went from a feudal system A system which Unless you were an aristocrat nobody had rights Aristocrats had privileges. This is where the word privilege comes from and why I hate The term privilege applied today Hate the term privilege Because aristocrats have privilege. They could do what they wanted. The law didn't apply to them or it applied to them only when somebody Above them felt like applying it to them The commoners had no rights And no law applied to them except a law of the master They were closer to being slaves But once the feudal system was broken up Once people were freed To engage in activities that bettered their life They were no longer slaves So it truly is Horrifying to think of voluntary interaction Volunteer interaction that That if done right Improves one's life Volunteer interaction That restricts one's behavior if you will By contract by voluntary agreement to a certain fixed number of hours a day to to to Imagine that that is slavery is disgusting and despicable And let me point out importantly dishonest It is dishonest Now on some sites i've seen Wade's slavery only applies not according to this description. Wade's slavery pretty much applies to anybody who receives a wage Including the ceo who by the way receives a wage High wage, but he still receives a wage and some ceos do not get stock options Might not even have stock Which is bad Just receive a wage are they wage slaves? But i've seen the term applied only to those people who do jobs they don't like doing they don't want to do But the beauty of the world in which we live Is that if you apply yourself and you see lots of examples of this If you apply yourself You have a choice of kind of jobs available to you and all over Both geographically both type of job You can get better at your job. You can rise up And improve and get to the point where you do like the job I mean almost every job Is not particularly likable Early on when loans one gets better Yes, there's a bunch of 20 year olds who are baristas in starbucks and Dream of being i don't know rap stars I don't know where rap stars came up, but anyway You know some glamorous wonderful profession that allows them to make gazillion dollars Do they do anything to change their profession? Did they invest in themselves? Most of them do not But they imagine they want they wish they desire And because they desire They don't you know, they don't enjoy what they do. They don't look for realistic jobs that they might yes enjoy And they get themselves stuck in life They lose all meaning to life And they are upset Upset They resent the world They resent reality They certainly resent capitalism for putting in the position where they either work in the barista or they have to go to their parents basement Or be on welfare. They don't even starve today so Well, we want to talk about Is some of the roots of this attitude where it comes from And uh the various sources the various Elements that make it as evil as it is Let me give you a few quotes just to show you that this is uh, this is uh His this is not just a modern phenomenon. Although I think it's on the rise And I think I know the reason it's on the rise, but we'll get to that This is from Engels Engels, of course was uh Marx's uh wealthy benefactor partner in crime friend associate Marx basically lived off of Engels and Engels lived off of his uh wealthy parents Marx didn't really work other than write books that but he he he without the funding of the benefactor He couldn't got in anyway Um Engels writes the only the the only difference is compared with the old unspoken slavery is this That the work of today seems to be free because he is not sold once and for all But piecemeal by the day the week the year and because no one owner sells him to another But he is forced to sell himself in this way instead being the slave of no particular person But of the whole property holding class You're selling yourself when you negotiate to work for somebody Yeah, he sounds like varch. No varch sounds like him. Don't don't give varch too much credit. This is Engels This is oh This is uh socialist royalty It's slavery when you negotiate The human condition Under nature Is poverty The human condition under nature is work Or die Hunt or die Grow stuff or die Pick berries and nuts or die That is not an invention of capitalism That is not an invention Of civilization of the modern world You either apply yourself To living which acquires work Even animals work they hunt now they know how to do it And they're not very ambitious So a lion eats x amount and two x is meaningless to him Because he has nothing to do with the extra There's no advantage But for human beings there's an advantage To working more earning more achieving more The advantages material comfort Access to spiritual values Human beings have lots of advantages of accumulating more rather than less But to accumulate more To live a more comfortable life To be more successful at living Requires work That's just metaphysics That's the nature of reality and the nature of man And it requires work and an effort in a way that you don't see a lion Express or an animal generally express I mean they just seem to be lazing around and eating the not lions But I don't know the zebra just eating the the grass or whatever But it's because man does not have There are two reasons one we're not satiated easily There's so much more we can achieve so much We can improve our lives by so much That we don't stop we keep accumulating And second we don't have it automatically programmed into us how To achieve how to survive how to create we need to figure it out We need to work at it and then we need to go work to do it Now instead of having an appreciation for that For a hard man Must struggle in order to survive And how he has struggled For hundreds of thousands of years at least tens of thousands of years To survive and to slowly get better and to slowly advance And to slowly achieve more comfort to slowly achieve more security to slowly achieve more Privacy and a life and then to see the last 250 years When man has accelerated the progress in ways that are just unimaginable The last 250 years where human life has gotten thousands of times better Where wealth has gone up by 300 times by 300 percent but In terms of quality of life by thousands and thousands and thousands of times For people to look at that and say and see see slaves is insanity now You can somewhat and I emphasize somewhat because you can't really Okay angles was writing in 1845 it had just started The magnitude of the success of the next of the next 200 years Was unthinkable even to angles they couldn't see it So they were mistaken All right, maybe No, I don't think so. I think they were purposefully blind But today With the amount of wealth and comfort we have To talk about weight-slavery for workers Who have iPhones air conditioning automobiles Homes with roofs Give me a break Morphem angles the bourgeois Let let him have the appearance The bourgeois lets him the worker have the appearance of acting from free choice Of making a contract with free unconstrained consent As a responsible agent who has attained his majority Find freedom Where the parliamentarian has no other choice Than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeois offers him or of starving Of freezing to death of sleeping naked among beasts of the forest Why are those so many choices? Why can't the worker come up with an idea of himself and start his own business? Why can't he Go back to his farm and grow food And who are these bourgeoisie and workers know That angles as do all of all of these leftists. They only talk in terms of groups, collectives Classes There is no individual Business owner and individual employee. No, there's all business owners exploiting all of employees There is no competition between owners for labor And the ability of labor to switch owners as they prove themselves more productive and compete None of that Completely evaded completely thrown out all they see is groups collectives masses And what they miss is reality What they miss is facts truth. What's actually going on in the world What's interesting is that this idea of white slavery Was part of The south's defense of slavery of real slavery actual slavery This is john calhoun one of slavery's Worst apologists or not apologists defenders The liberty of the northern wage owner Amounted to little more than the freedom to sell his labor for a fraction of its value or to starve again labor starvation Putting that down, but it's not labor starvation. It's labor starting your own business Going back to the farm hunting it's Reality That has created the conditions that say work or starve Not man. Not capitalism. Not the north Indeed the south claimed that they treated their slaves much better Then factory owners treated their workers up north. That's part of their defense of slavery Here's uh, here's uh, uh, george fitzern also a Defender of slavery He wrote a book called cannibals all or slaves without masters. This is 1918 57 We don't know where the free laborers ever sleep They are fools to do so for whilst they sleep the wily and watchful capitalist is devising means to ensnare and exploit them The free laborer must work or starve. Oh my god He is more of a slave than the negro Because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave and has no holiday Because the cares of life begin when his labors end. He has no liberty and not a single right God you can understand the evasion of slave owners. You can understand people trying to protect a slave society I mean, it's truly truly amazing right um The amount of evasion it turns out lia uh toy story use uh He wrote an essay toy story of war and peace wrote an essay called the slavery of our time Where he can play his compares wage labor to slaves And you can see this throughout the 19th century and then You know labor unions use these terms of course If they were slaves, how did they have unions? How did they get the form unions? Slaves don't have unions slaves don't negotiate Slaves can't come together It's just it's just astounding That people can't see the difference. Well, they can't see because they will not look They can't see because they will not think The evil of it is truly astounding And what does it achieve? It achieves the meaning of labor achieves the demeaning of wages The demeaning of working for living As vaas said, why can't I just not work? I mean, this is an anti-concept wage slavery is an anti-concept both Aimed the destroying Which is it aimed at destroying the difference between voluntary transactions that labor engages in labor was engaging and Slavery What we need today what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason By the intellect not by feelings wishes wins or mystic revelations Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's Cult of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world To the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads All right before we go on reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now 30 likes That should be at least a hundred. 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