"Wage Slaves Of The World Unite!" Cannot Work As A Rallying Call If They Believe The Fascist Indoctrination That They're Not Slaves!
A wage slave is a worker who must sell their labor power to an employer to obtain the means of subsistence, especially for survival. Formal legal freedom, limited to the ability to quit one job and seek another, is largely illusory. Because the worker does not own productive property or independent means of survival, the alternative to wage labor is poverty, homelessness, hunger, or worse. This creates a structural compulsion that makes the employment relationship coercive rather than a free contract between equals. The worker is free only in the narrow sense that no individual owner legally owns their body; the system as a whole forces them to work under conditions set by capital. The wage relation extracts surplus value while leaving the worker with just enough to reproduce their labor power for the next day. Various types of slavery happen every day in the US, UK, and Scandinavian countries that are so common, the population ignores them and views their treatment as necessary and na...
