
If you are incredibly fortunate (or unfortunate), you will have inherited lands that bring in such an income that you don’t need to work. This will place you in society’s ruling class. If you do not inherit such a fortune, you will have to sell your labour to those who did in order to survive. You will have a position on the Cheap Labour Spectrum.
This position, in turn, is primarily a matter of your negotiating position with regards to employment.
What is the best alternative for you to taking this job? For a member of the upper class, the alternative is to sit at home collecting rents. For everyone else, it’s starvation – there are no longer any commons to hunt or gather as they have all been enclosed. Everyone else is on the Cheap Labour Spectrum, where the upper class tries to pay you as little for your labour as they possibly can.
At the top of the Cheap Labour Spectrum are those in the best negotiating position. This will be friends or family of the upper class. Those who inherit the land usually have someone else manage it. These stewards of the great estates are at the very top of the spectrum. Often they are minor aristocracy themselves, and work to gain political, business or cultural contacts, not because they need to.
In more meritocratic systems, those in possession of the most important skills also have excellent negotiating positions. People who understand how the national electricity grid works, who can perform extensive surgeries, who can lecture the sciences – they will always be able to command an impressive income. They could be said to comprise the upper middle class.
The next level down are the unextraordinary professionals and managers. These people might not be brilliant, but they are willing to work hard for long hours. They sacrifice themselves for the landowners, and this is generally rewarded: the landowners can’t push people willing to work 80 hour weeks down the Cheap Labour Spectrum because there isn’t enough supply of these people. So they make up the core middle class.
In the middle of the Cheap Labour Spectrum are people like you and me (probably). Here one might have a small amount of savings or some skills of minor note, but the general trend is towards getting ground into oblivion. Even if one has a supposedly decent job, time and rent/mortgage pressures will eat heavily into one’s quality of life. This is the fabled lower middle class. In a time of high social mobility (i.e. not today’s Clown World) it’s an okay place to be.
If there’s an upper working class right now, it’s the trades. Many tradesmen today are earning more money than people supposedly above them in the middle class. However, one’s position on the Cheap Labour Spectrum is not a question of income, it’s a question of negotiating power: two related but differing concepts. Even if the tradesman makes more money than some of those in the middle class, he is still more vulnerable to mass immigration.
The middle working class, or core working class, are doing it hard. They’re low enough on the Cheap Labour Spectrum to not be considered fully human by the upper class. As such, they are targeted for replacement. All over the West right now, the simple retail jobs that would have gone to such people now go to cheap labour imports. One can see already that, at the lower levels of the Cheap Labour Spectrum, the quality of life is very low indeed.
Even further towards the lower end of the spectrum are people earning the minimum wage. These are the lower working class, the real precariat. These people have to exhaust themselves through work, but are paid barely enough to live on, and they consider the thought of one day owning a home a sick joke. In the modern West, this is the lower cutoff point of the Cheap Labour Spectrum.
Indentured servants are the next step below this cutoff. Indentured servitude might not legally exist in today’s West, but it has existed in the recent past. Over 300,000 people are believed to have crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants up until the American Revolution, mostly from Britain. A modern form of indentured servitude is when a people smuggler will confiscate a person’s passport while waiting for that person to work off a debt.
Modern wage slavery is akin to indentured servitude. It has been suggested that the secret goal of saddling young people with student loan debts is to make them more desperate and to weaken their employment negotiating position, pushing them down the Cheap Labour Spectrum. Many indentured servants in the Americas were granted land upon the completion of their tenure, a privilege never afforded to 21st Century wage slaves.
Serfdom is the stage below this. In serfdom, a person is bound to a piece of land as a labourer. In theory, the serf and his family get military protection from the landlord, but in practice the lord gets the lion’s share of the serf’s production in exchange for a few promises. The serf might not be cheap enough labour to be expendable, but they’re getting down there.
Slavery is the lowest stage of the Cheap Labour Spectrum; the purpose of the spectrum itself is to drive people towards slavery. Even here, there are divisions. The chattel slavery of the American South was one of the most brutal and dehumanising forms ever practiced. Barbary Coast slavery was also brutal. In certain other slavery systems, the law restricts the extent to which slaves can be abused. Some forms of debt slavery are little different to indentured servitude. In any case, to be a slave is to be at the bottom of the Cheap Labour Spectrum.
In ancient times, slavery meant literally capturing your enemies at spearpoint and enslaving them, or buying them off a king who had enslaved his enemies. In modern times, it’s more a matter of pushing your enemies down the Cheap Labour Spectrum. By opening the borders to hordes of cheap labour, the ruling classes push the middle and working classes further down this spectrum. This is why mass immigration takes place everywhere in the Western World, despite never having been voted for in any democratic election.
For the 99% of us plebs not in the ruling class, social status is primarily a matter of where one is on the Cheap Labour Spectrum. That’s why the number of dollars per hour a person earns is considered the ultimate measure of their value. That number is a measure of how much leverage the upper class has over them – it’s a measure of the degree to which they have not been brought to heel.
Escaping the strictures of the Cheap Labour Spectrum is not an easy task. Because so many of us are on it, a high proportion of us get pushed towards the bottom by sheer competition, making it harder and harder to escape. Perhaps the best hope is a revolution that destroys the modern labour system completely, or a mass dieoff that collapses the labour supply.
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