Benjamin Tucker on Wages vs Wage Slavery
Thanks to BGreen for this quote from mutualist Benjamin Tucker’s “Should Labor Be Paid or Not?”, April 14, 1888:
“If the men who oppose wages - that is, the purchase and sale of labor - were capable of analyzing their thought and feelings, they would see that what really excites their anger is not the fact that labor is bought and sold, but the fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labor, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labor by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labor, and that, but for the privilege, would be enjoyed by all gratuitously. And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one.
But the minute you remove privilege, the class that now enjoy it will be forced to sell their labor, and then, when there will be nothing but labor with which to buy labor, the distinction between wage-payers and wage-receivers will be wiped out, and every man will be a laborer exchanging with fellow-laborers. Not to abolish wages, but to make every man dependent upon wages and secure to every man his whole wages is the aim of Anarchistic Socialism.
What Anarchistic Socialism aims to abolish is usury[*]. It does not want to deprive labor of its reward; it wants to deprive capital of its reward. It does not hold that labor should not be sold; it holds that capital should not be hired at usury.”
*It seems clear from the context here and in other sources that Tucker’s condemnation of “usury” was not a condemnation of interest on loans in principle, but the statist banking cartel’s ability to artificially drive the market price of capital higher than it ought to be, an ability fundamentally rooted in the privileged position the banking cartel has guaranteed to it by the State. Such statist privilege is, of course, opposed root and branch by all genuine Rothbardians and exemplified by Rothbard’s own implacable hostility to the Federal Reserve, in particular — as well as even minarchist students of Rothbard, such as Congressman Ron Paul.
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