Author Description

This pamphlet – the second in our new series – is about employment. That is, the relationship between employer and employee, boss and worker. Or, in collective terms, between the capitalist class and the working class. Employment is a basic and pervasive institution of our society. Most people take it for granted. Politicians never question its continued existence, nor do the mass media. Even so-called ‘communist’ regimes have never abolished it, merely replacing old bosses – private capitalists and their representatives – by new ones – state-appointed directors and officials. In our heart of hearts we – employees – hate employment. We hate being at the beck and call of a boss. After all, the word ‘employ’ means ‘use’ – to employ a tool means to use it. An employee is a person used as a tool by another person – his or her employer or user. Why is it that we beg to be someone’s tool? We enter into this humiliating arrangement only because the sole practical alternative – being unemployed, i.e., unused – seems even worse. We are driven to seek employment in order to obtain a livelihood. It is slavery all the same. Not full-time or chattel slavery, where whole human beings are property, but part-time slavery – what socialists call wage slavery. That is one of the main reasons why socialists look forward to a new society without employment – a society in which the class division into employers and employees, capitalist class and working class, has been overcome – the society that Marx called a ‘free association of producers.’ Chapter 2 aims to clarify the concept of ‘wage slavery’ by analyzing the similarities and differences between wage slavery and chattel slavery. Chapter 3 presents a few short pieces in which socialists express their attitude toward employment and the basic division in society between employers and employees. Chapter 4 looks at a crucial aspect of employment – working hours and their tendency to rise in recent decades. Chapter 5 discusses the physic