more comment (re: wage labor is "slavery lite")

[m_d_h]

Slavery has become one of those “cancel” topics in modern American arts even though slavery was nearly ubiquitous in human culture prior to the industrial age and usually had nothing to do with race (and race is a made-up category here in the US that doesn't map well to the world's underlying ethnic group distributions).  It’s weird that it remains fundamentally OK to RENT somebody’s labor so long as you don’t OWN their labor.  Slavery was not abolished because everybody suddenly got woke, it was abolished because it is cheaper for capitalism to rent labor than to own it.  If you rent labor you aren’t responsible for it after the work period has ended. You don’t have to take care of its children, or provide for its old age.  You don’t need to whip the labor into shape, you can simply fire it.

Firing people is more depraved and nihilistic than slavery ever was.  You wash your hands of them, they were not adding sufficiently to your capital accumulation, they're no longer your responsibility.  If they starve or die without income, that's not your problem.  The market will provide.

As though the market has replaced God.