Voluntary slavery

Forty-nine years ago, I started my adult life as a wage slave, working for about a third of the total time in manual jobs, another third as a part-time teacher and a final third as a full-time teacher. For about half of that period, I was simultaneously involved in left-wing politics and read several thousand pages of text about the history of the labor movement since the nineteenth century. I even managed to contribute a few dozen more pages myself of published articles on the same subject. Nowadays, in preparation for retirement, I often reflect on the recent evolution of the class-based societies in which all human beings are obliged to live.

When I first started out back in 1965, most people in North America, Western Europe and Japan were industrial workers, slaving away five or six days a week to make their employers a lot richer than they would ever become themselves. A half century later, the bosses have transferred most of those factory jobs to newly industrialized parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where billions of low-cost laborers are doing their best to keep nineteenth century British economist David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages” fully operational. Which means that most of them are still being paid only a few dollars per year more than what is biologically necessary to keep them alive and reproducing.

In those same countries, hundreds of millions of other people are still poor peasants, most of them lacking any title to the land. About a billion of them earn as little as one or two dollars per day, making them even poorer than the cheap labor contingents in the factories. Many commentators in the world media often make a big deal about how still other millions of people in those same regions have recently left behind abject poverty to join a huge new “middle class”. But those observers seem to forget that the Third World definition of the middle class refers to people earning a few thousand dollars a year, less than a tenth of what is required to get into the lower ranks of the middle class in the world’s richer countries.

Meanwhile, back in those somewhat richer countries, tens of millions of people are still working in factories, but the majority of the population now toil instead in the service sector. Professional optimists also classify many of them as middle class, ignoring the fact that most of them earn only slightly more than the minimum wage. In any case, even though the total wealth generated in such countries has increased hundreds of times since the 1960s for rich people, it has not increased at all for the middle class. In the USA, the American dream has been dead in the water since 1972, overall upward mobility in all the rich countries having become a thing of the past.

At the same time, a very small number of people spread out all over the world are making twenty or thirty million dollars per day, while hundreds of millions of much less fortunate people are barely avoiding starvation. Since the urban revolution in the Middle East 6000 years ago, at no time in history has the income gap between the social classes ever been higher. In Marxist lingo, this means that the objective conditions for world social revolution have never been better.

Unfortunately, however, the subjective conditions have never been worse, since no organized, world-wide, genuinely labor or socialist movements currently exist. The abject failure of state capitalism, back in the twentieth century, to provide a credible alternative to private capitalism, has completely eliminated whatever hope for the future that people may have had in the past. The only international organizations for progressive social change that exist right now are intellectual chimeras, comprising only a few thousand members each. Most working-class people nowadays are either not involved in politics at all or support neofascist parties instead.

In most countries, people are so desperate for jobs that they will do anything to get work. At the bottom of the heap, hundreds of millions of people have been tricked by fraudsters into becoming real slaves with no income at all, even though slavery as an institution became illegal in the last remaining slave state (Mauritania) back in 1980. Millions of young people, including many of those in the so-called rich countries, have also signed on for voluntary slavery by accepting unpaid internships in order to get the work experience necessary for (maybe) acquiring a real job later on. Employers have no compunctions whatever to support slavery nowadays as long as no one uses that term in public, since it was supposed to have died out as an institution back in the nineteenth century.

On a world scale, the industrial working class has never been bigger. The total working class, including agricultural, industrial, transport, service workers and illegal-service workers (prostitutes, criminals, etc.) make up the vast majority of the world’s population. Landed peasants, genuine middle-class people (making between 20 and 100 thousand dollars per year) and homeless beggars make up most of the rest. One percent of the world earn over 100 000 dollars per year, but only one percent of one percent (one person in every ten thousand) belong to the ruling class, defined as all those people (major investors and leading politicians) making decisions every day that are worth at least one hundred million dollars.

Once upon a time, more specifically between 1945 and 1975 (the thirty glorious years), most of the people in the world’s richest countries could feel relatively good about themselves, because in those days most of the world’s large investors were involved in productive investment and only a minority were hooked on speculation (negative investment). This meant that most people’s incomes were rising significantly during those halcyon decades, not only for a privileged few. But since 1979, with the election of politicians like Margaret Thatcher and the simultaneous onslaught of monetarism and neoliberalism, most of the world’s largest investors have moved instead into useless forms of speculative investment. They still claim to be the only ones creating wealth, but in reality they are only robbing the rest of the world economy to create wealth for themselves and no one else.

In other words, nowadays only about 70 million people, out of about seven billion, really have the freedom to do whatever they want. They are the only ones who see life as an amusing comedy, in which they have the power to enjoy themselves to their heart’s content by deliberately ruining the lives of millions of dirty, inferior peons. Most of the rest of the world’s people are forced to see life as a disgusting tragedy instead.