Tonight, I’m going to explain how anyone who makes enough to pay taxes (and does so) is subsidizing the slavery of those who do not make enough to pay taxes.
First, a brief, conceptual description of chattel slavery: during chattel slavery, owning a slave meant feeding, housing, and taking care of said slave until it was no longer economically advantageous to do so. Conditions were often horrible, but capitalists don’t really care what their slaves’ experiences are like. Any problems are simply blamed on market pressures.
After the slaves were “freed”, employers had to pay employees a wage. This wage needn’t be enough to feed, house, and take care of the slave, only enough to keep the slave coming to work. However, slaves still need to eat and have places to live. This is where government programs and charities come into play. If a job doesn’t pay enough for someone to survive, wherever the extra income that pays the difference is coming from is subsidizing that slave’s employer’s ownership of said slave.
An economist would claim that if a job doesn’t pay enough to live, no one would be willing to work that job. Anyone who actually lives in the real world knows that that is bullshit. Slavery is a buyer’s market. There are always more people than jobs, and as technology advances, this problem only gets worse. This means that the labor market is perpetually flooded with people so desperate for a source of income that they’ll take whatever they can get and be terrified of losing it. Letting alone the loss of rights that comes with a job (mostly freedom of expression), these bottom-rung jobs also come with schedules so chaotic and life-consuming that they make it drastically more difficult to seek alternative work and prevent people from getting things done at home that they would otherwise do themselves, resulting in further expenditures. This feedback loop essentially keeps the person trapped in their dead-end job.
This gets worse when healthcare comes into play. A chattel slave owner had to make a large initial investment to purchase a slave. This meant that, in order to make that slave worth the money, they had to keep them healthy enough to work hard. In a wage system, the only initial investment is the hours it takes to train for the job. With a multitude of desperate people lined up around the block, if something causes a slave to not be capable of work, it is often cheaper to replace them. You may be thinking, “but what about workman’s comp?” There’s two problems here. First, a slave owner had an incentive to keep their slave healthy, regardless of whether an injury took place on the job or not. Second, because they have no other incentive to provide care, employers actively make getting assistance difficult, to avoid paying. At minimum wage, slaves are often afraid to seek treatment, because they might get fired for something “unrelated”.
Back to government programs: if government programs are subsidizing the slavery of the working class, who’s funding the programs? First and foremost, all wealth being the product of the working class (and stolen by our masters), we do. But more directly, let’s consider a few facts. Major corporations use loopholes to get out of paying taxes, so not them, even though they own the most slaves. Bottom-rung wage slaves don’t make enough to pay taxes. Small businesses lack the clout to get out of paying taxes. Individual artisans/contractors pay an absurd amount of taxes. Skilled labor pays taxes, and then has to pay extra just to maintain the organizations that attempt to help improve their conditions but in almost all cases, fail to address the systemic problems of capitalism itself, thus making those unions (basically everyone but the IWW) well-intentioned class traitors to everyone who isn’t a member of the union. Essentially, small businesses and independent workers pay for the slavery of unskilled labor to bigger businesses. This is one of the many ways that the “bigger fish” eat the “smaller fish”: by manipulation of the state and the work force. In Marxist terms, the petit bourgeoisie is fooled into funding the bourgeoisie. The working class is simply the ball with which this game is played. Slaves weren’t emancipated to help slaves; they were emancipated to relieve bigger businesses of the responsibilities associated with slave ownership. This is why small businesses, and especially independent workers should benefit from minimum wage increases: As they employ less slaves, the higher the minimum wage gets, the less they’re paying for larger businesses’ slaves. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning fails to hold up, because when a government program requires less money, they simply redirect the funds, rather than reduce taxes, usually to weapons manufacturers. Note here that either way, the working class only receives marginal benefit from a minimum wage increase, simply taking the price for our perpetuated desperation off of the tax base, and putting it back on our owners.
This is of course not to say that living conditions for slaves are worse now (the ability to leave, however rarely used, is definitely beneficial), but to point out that those conditions are irrelevant to the decision-making apparatus. Even in the cases of skilled labor, where there are benefits and retirement packages, those things exist to keep one tied to their employer and are luxuries that only larger businesses can afford. Ultimately these things are part of the problem.
And here’s what pisses me off in my situation: I work for minimum wage, but the majority of my bills are paid by student loans. Following my own logic, I am subsidizing my own slavery at a fucking gas station, with interest. Our only possible escape is the abolition of capitalism and the state, which only exists to protect capitalism. We must seize the means of production and strive for a working class that feeds itself with mutual aid and defends itself by whatever means necessary. The rest is all bullshit.
dissident351 