New Zealand was appalled yesterday by the news that a Samoan chief named Joseph Matamata had been convicted of enslaving 13 of his fellow Samoans. Matamata had brought the slaves to New Zealand as cheap labour to work in vineyards and orchards, and had kept for himself the vast bulk of their wages. New Zealand may have been appalled, but the average Western worker is a slave anyway.
A slave is defined as a person “who is someone forbidden to quit their service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as their property. Slavery typically involves the enslaved person being made to perform some form of work while also having their location dictated by the enslaver. Historically, when people were enslaved, it was often because they were indebted, broke the law, or suffered a military defeat.”
The position of the average worker in the current economic and political paradigm of the West fits this definition. We currently live in a system where the average worker can labour all week long and have all of their productivity taken off them so that they are left with nothing at the end of it all. They might, in theory, be able to choose their location, but in practice they either don’t have enough money to change location or the remuneration is no better anywhere else.
The chattel slavery of the American South before the Civil War is held up as one of history’s worst human rights abuses. We are told that slaves in America were treated so poorly that they had every moral right to kill their enslavers. This is a belief with potentially serious implications, given that chattel slaves weren’t treated significantly worse than the average Western worker, who also labours all week to be left with nothing.
Profits, taxes and rents are so high in New Zealand that even those earning above the median wage are left with almost nothing that they can put towards owning their own house one day. Not only is the average house price now close to a million dollars, and not only is saving any real money restricted to the very wealthiest of income-earners, but what little savings one can accrue is getting rapidly eaten up by interest.
According to the New Zealand Government’s own cost of living calculator, a general practitioner living in Auckland with a partner and two children and making $133,000 per year will run a $317 deficit every week if they want an average standard of living. So not even a qualified doctor can afford to save anything towards a house now.
If a qualified doctor, in the top 1% of the population by education, can’t afford a house, that effectively means that no worker can. The only people who can afford houses now are those who already have money and those who manage the workers on their behalf, and the rest of us are just slaves, doomed to labour our entire lives for a standard of living lower than that our ancestors enjoyed 100 years ago.
Some might argue that the situation of the New Zealand worker is different today because, although the New Zealand worker is left with nothing after their workweek, at least they don’t have to endure the physical abuse that chattel slaves did.
But physical abuse has simply been replaced with psychological abuse. The New Zealand worker isn’t hit with whips, but they are told every day in the media that they are racist, sexist, hate speakers, wrongthinkers and generally a river of filth. This psychological abuse has a similar end effect to physical abuse: it depresses the spirit into a state of abject submission.
Moreover, at least a slave in the American South could rely on the solidarity of his fellow slaves. The New Zealand worker can’t even rely on that. Should the New Zealand worker complain of their poor situation, they’ll be told to “suck it up” or “just work harder”. As if how hard one works means anything when all one’s productivity is taken away!
Although workers have an easier time of it in other Western countries (Europe, North America and Australia), these countries are all also trapped in the low wage/high house prices and inflation death spiral.
Goethe once said that “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Workers of the West don’t have physical shackles around their ankles, but they have psychological shackles around their minds. These shackles have made them submit to a system where the vast majority of workers are left with no surplus for even the most physically or psychologically challenging work.
*
If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.
*
If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!