this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
34 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
808 readers
27 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wage labor allows a higher rate of surplus value extraction by turning not just bodies, but labor power itself into a commodity. It also absolves employers of the need to feed, house, and pay for sleeping and non-work time of the person, now only needing to account for their active working hours.
Discovering this seemed to come along naturally with industrialization and more mobile capital requiring more mobile labor. Its part of the stable transition from feudalism -> capitalism, mostly starting in Britain and spreading to the rest of western europe.
It also requires less immediate force on the part of the owners, which is also generally a lot cheaper (both in terms of hired guns and psychologically, in that an individual boss doesn't have to directly hold their employees at gunpoint in the way a plantation owner might).
Also, it creates enlarged markets for many consumer goods, even if those markets do not entirely fill whatever need they purport to be supplying.
Probably no coincidence that the Unionists had a more diverse economy with more mechanised production while the southerners were just demonic slave whippers.