Wage Slavery is just Slavery. If you have an Employer, you are Owned

Capitalism is a system which believes that people are nothing more than economic units.  People can be made to migrate across the globe, leaving behind their homelands to live in new lands which have no meaning to them.  Culture means nothing to the Capitalist.  Families mean nothing, as can be seen in the stampede to force mothers of young children into employment, with the children forced into nurseries to be brought up by strangers and prepared for their own place in the economic prison system.  Children may no longer be sent up chimneys to clean them (while they have lit fires burning), nor may they be made to clean working machinery, but the contempt of the Ruling Class has not changed.  The exploitation has changed to fit changing economic circumstances, but it still continues.

African Slavery is infamous and quite rightly so.  But it is a lie to suggest that Europeans invaded Africa to steal people from their homes out of a feeling of racial superiority.  Europeans and others involved in the exploitation of Africa were motivated by profit.  They had the same regard for the African Slaves as they had for the Working Class of all countries.  This arrogance has not changed to this day.

The following is an account of the treatment of ordinary Working Class British people at the hands of the Capitalist Ruling Class.  Written by 'beautiful nightmare' this piece exposes the treatment by the Ruling Class of ordinary people as less than human and bravely confronts the myth that the exploitation of Africa was in any way 'racist'.  The Ruling Class have the same disregard for all of humanity - we are all nothing more than commodities to be used in the production of their wealth and power.  Until the Ruling Class are swept from power and permanently prevented from ever having the opportunity to dictate to anyone, we remain in their grip.  That is why we have to fight false consciousness and the abuse of other peoples as well as our own.  A Socialist England has to be one which helps those who have been pushed to immigrate to our country to return to their own countries to overthrow the Capitalist class wherever they may be.

African Slavery was immoral and unjustifiable.  So was Indentured Servitude and so is wage slavery in every form.  As the punk band CRASS put it in their song, 'White Punks on Hope', "we're all just niggers to the rulers of this land".

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White Convict Servants in the American Colonies outnumbered African Slaves.

By the eighteenth century indentured servants outnumbered African slaves in the North American colonies. Unlike the situation endured by slaves, however, the state was an impermanent one for indentured servants. Initially an attempt to alleviate severe labour shortages in New World settlements, the system of indenture comprised not only willing English women, children, and men, but also convicts, religious separatists, and political prisoners. Indentured servants laboured a set number of years (usually four to seven, though the period for convicts could be considerably longer), during which time they were considered the personal property of their masters. Couples were often prevented from marrying, and women from having children. If a woman did become pregnant and was unable to work, an equivalent amount of time was added to her period of servitude.

Convict Servants in the American Colonies

The William Brown House, an elegant Georgian brick building built in the 1760s, sits on the banks of the South River in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Now a museum, the house is the last visible structure of London Town, an 18th century tobacco port and one of the Atlantic trading sites where thousands of convicts from England entered the colonies to begin their indentured servitude.

 In 1718, the British Parliament passed the Transportation Act, under which England began sending its imprisoned convicts to be sold as indentured servants in the American colonies. While the law provoked outrage among many colonists — Benjamin Franklin equated it to packing up North American rattlesnakes and sending them all to England — the influx of ex-convicts provided cheap and immediate labour for many planters and merchants. After 1718, approximately 60,000 convicts, dubbed "the King's passengers," were sent from England to America. Ninety percent of them stayed in Maryland and Virginia. Although some returned to England once their servitude was over, many remained and began their new lives in the colonies.