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It's never been about helping people (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[+] -6 points 2 days ago (3 children)

In the country with some of the most gruesome history of slavery in human history, it feels pretty disingenuous to call waged labour slavery. This feels like the stock standard yankee settler aspirational landholder bunkum to me

It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

Joseph Stalin, 1936

https://redsails.org/stalin-and-howard/

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once 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. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment

    -Engels

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch05.htm

    The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.

    The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

    -Engels, again

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

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