I’ll offer a couple of thoughts in response and then wait to see the bit where you explain how you think the term is useful.

My field is African history, so I understand quite well that slavery can be everything from an absolute to a nominal condition. There were systems of chattel slavery in Africa, as well as, of course, the possibility of sale into the Atlantic system, but more common were forms of household slavery, in which an individual and their descendants were gradually absorbed into the wider society (though, even in these cases, knowledge of their status of heritage was often maintained, even if not openly discussed, and used to exclude them from certain marriages or offices). So yeah, slavery was/is lots of different things.

So, “Why can’t waged slavery be one form of [slavery]?” Well, because it’s not. Slaves have occasionally been paid wages, but more commonly wages were paid to their owners. Self-purchase generally occurred through slaves being allowed to sell their own goods or services in addition to whatever labor they were expected to provide their masters and was restricted or outlawed in much of the U.S. South. But slavery with wages is different from wage labor that one wishes to compare to slavery for whatever reason. You could certainly make an argument that debt bondage grades into pawnship which in turn can become simple slavery, and from there make the point that larger systems of poverty and indebtedness create a situation that’s effectively the same as debt bondage. I’m all for comparing this stuff, but calling wage labor wage “wage slavery” isn’t engaging in this comparison, it’s simply using metaphor to invoke a degree of badness.

My point about abolitionists wasn’t that they all had pure motives or a clear view of racial issues or that the “stealing thunder” thing was about a direct competition (a better term for what I meant might have been “nostalgic appeal”). The uses I’ve seen for “wage slavery” all occurred after abolition in the U.S. and were used to draw a moral equivalence between conditions under slavery and the conditions facing workers. This isn’t racist in and of itself. It’s indicative of the loaded use of the term, however, that it was being invoked by white rather than black labor leaders and using it and that these leaders weren’t all that concerned about the sharecropping and other systems of debt bondage being used to oppress African-Americans. Find me a place where A. Philip Randolf uses it and I happily concede the point, but still say that it’s a wrongheaded term analytically.

That said, chattel slavey and slavery are not identical. Not all slavery is chattel slavery: not all slavery involves the children of slaves also being slaves. That’s one distinction. All slavery is awful, chattel slavery is probably the worst. But the point is that there’s multiple forms of slavey. Why can’t waged slavery be one form of it? (And some slaves did receive wages, by the way, there’s a book on this - Divided Mastery - not wages from their owners but wages from people they were rented to by their masters: not trying to minimize any of this, just be clear on these differnces.)

I agree with JPool about the differnces in legal status between slaves and workers, important stuff and real differences. But again here too I want to say it’s a continuum. I don’t have time right now but I’ll find it later - there’s groups doing work on slavery now even though slavery is illegal. The legal status isn’t the issue. Likewise post-Emancipation many African Americans lived in debt peonage which recreated slavery-like conditions through the 1940s, despite the illegality of both slavery and peonage (stuff on this in the book The Lost Promise of Civil Rights). There’s other important forms of legally disqualified or legally secondary labor too, which are also on a continuum with this - women workers at many points in time, child laborers, non-citizen workers (either undocumented or documented in a variety of ways like visas tied to one and only one type of work, “guest” workers, etc).

While I share and do want to preserve the horror at chattel slavery, I think the move to section that off as unique is problematic. THat’s not well put, I’m not sure I can do better — what I mean, is the depth of the horrors of slavery were (are?) awful, no question, and more awful. But more awful is a quantitative relation - others things can have some quantity of awfulness too. Sectioning off slavery as not just the most awful but a qualitatively different order of awfulness seems to me to minimize other awful things which shared common origins and functions.

As for not using the term because it makes lefties sound like relics - yes, of course. Likewise with talking about Marx and many other topics. All you’re really saying is ‘be deliberate about how you walk with different people’, to which the only answer can be ‘yes, of course.’

Re: factories and wage slaves - I was nothing like a chattel slave in the factory jobs I did. I’d say many restaurant workers and certainly home health care workers (both growth industries I believe) have it worse than I did, and I can think of other examples. So I don’t find the “wage slave/factory worker” equation convincing - if you mean that the term wage slavery was once appropriate for factory workers and was generally appropriate because there were many factory workers but is no longer appropriate because there aren’t many factory workers.

Finally, on the function of the term in the old days as a way to steal abolitionists’ thunder, I’m unconvinced. I’ll get back to you on this. Certainly some uses of the term had that function. I don’t think all did, and I think abolitionists had multiple agendas and I don’t feel much affinity for some of them beyond shared opposition to slavery (ditto for a lot of reds etc today, not to mention liberals etc). I get some of this from a book called From Bondage To Contract. The other agenda for me here is emphasizing the capitalist nature of slavery and getting at the idea of free or voluntary labor - the difference between involuntary and voluntary labor is super, super important, but as just an opposition it’s inadequate and lots falls into the gaps between the two. More on all this later, I gotta run.

take care,
Nate

The first, as MIke notes, is that historically the term emerged from a tendency in the white labor movement to steal the thunder from earlier abolitionist movements and to marginalize the concerns and expreience of black workers. Look at the way that Debs used it, nearly half a century after abolition. Essentially he used it to argue that this whole negro problem thing was either a distraction or a very slight variation on workers conditions. If you get a chance, go see the August Wilson play, “Gem of the Sea”, at the Guthrie right now. At one point in it, a young man, born after the end of slavery, is describing the combination of legal and economic coersion being used to control African Americans in both the South and the North, and he says, “It’s worse than slavery.” The older man he’s been talking to responds quickly and definitively, “Nothing is worse than slavery!” I could go on, but it should be clear to anyone has has studied systems of chattel slavery that they mark something of an ultimate instance of coercion and dehumanization. As with rape, there is a kind of violence that comes with trying to turn the experience of slavery into simply a metaphor.

Second, Mads doesn’t go nearly far enough. The position of labor that Debs and others were describing at the end of the nineteeth and beginning of the twentieth centuries just aren’t the conditions that most folks face in the contemporary U.S. Of course capitalism is still theft and folks are still suffering, but let’s not pretend that, say, most people still work in factories. The term has a kind of retro-cool feel to it, but as anything other than an in-joke it’s likely to reenforce the perception of socialists/labor activists as a relic.

Third, and probably least importantly, the term is just technically wrong. This isn’t so much a problem, becuase it’s never been used as a technical term, rather as either cultural critique or rallying metaphor. There’s a fundamental difference, however, between the legal status of a slave and that of a free worker. Depending on the society, this doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the conditions of their lives after that, but if one can be bought and sold its always different than if one cannot.

Don’t get me wrong, I use the term fairly often and I think it has a usefully provocative character, but to borrow a phrase we shouldn’t white-wash its origins.