> To describe "wage slavery" as coercion simply robs both "wage slavery"
> and "coercion" of meaning.
And how, pray tell, is that? Rather than "robbing" it of meaning, defining wage slavery - which is a really-existing phenomenon and not simply an inflammatory slogan - as coercion assigns it its proper meaning.
While Chair of the Dept. of Anthropology at Columbia, Morton H. Fried wrote, in The Evolution of Political Society, "[I]n stratified societies ... whole sectors of the population have precarious relations to subsistence while other sectors are not only free to accumulate surpluses of both productive and consumption goods, but are encouraged to do so by the very structure of their society and the ideology which supports it."
Those "sectors of the population [that] have precarious relations to subsistence" are compelled to rent themselves into the service of those who enjoy closer relations to these means. If they don't, they fall into penury, starve, etc. As Erich Fromm said, "When man is born, the stage is set for him. He has to eat and drink, and therefore he has to work; and this means he has to work under the particular conditions and in the ways that are determined for him by the kind of society into which he is born." (Escape from Freedom).
> Capitalism can't exist (and couldn't come
> into existence) without a great deal of coercion -- but what makes
> capitalism capitalism is that the actual extraction of surplus is
> performed through "economic" means rather than (as in all tributary
> modes of production) through direct coersion.
I agree with this. Coercion can be direct, as you indicate, or it can be indirect. The latter - indirect coercion - is employed in the wage labor relationship.
> Moralism again fucks up understanding.
Does it, now? I must have missed the moralizing. Care to elaborate how it "fucks up understanding" here?
> The term "wage slavery" itself is
> a metaphor, and primarily an agitational rather than an analytic
> metaphor. But wage slavery is, precisely, _not_ slavery, nor is property
> theft.
Wage slavery isn't formalized, juridical slavery, I agree. It's economic and follows from the logic of capital. Rather than legally belonging to an individual as his property, wage workers are compelled to put themselves at the service of a class that has the means to provide them with the means to life. (This is not an absolute rule; there are exceptions; but it is the general rule).
As another writer put it: "The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to doso? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the firstemployer. Thus the worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realisation, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession. of terms of serfdom -- voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense -- broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery."
Again, there are exceptions: we have some welfare measures in the US (always under attack and shrinking daily) and we have the kindness of friends and strangers. But that's about it.
Brian