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the worker was provided with food, clothing, and shelter by his master; under the new system the worker is paid wages with which he is made to provide himself with food, clothing, and shelter. Under the old system the necessaries of life is what constitutes the sum total of liberty gained by the change from chattel to wage slavery. The amount of wages paid for a day's or an hour's work is on average no more then a bare subsistence, and bears no relation whatever to the amount of wealth produced or the real value of the laborer's products. Wage-workers perform twelve hours' work for three hours' pay, because the extra nine hours' work is the price charged by the owners of capital for the use for three hours of the implements of labor; or, according to the United States census for 1880, each wage-worker ( and there are 17,000,000 of them in this country) is permitted to make an average of $346 annually for himself, provided he will produce at the same time $7000 for his employer, who charges this sum for the use of his capitol. These are hard terms, but they are the best that can be had from the owners of capital, since the private ownership of the means of existence, capital, confers upon its owners the right to deny its use altogether.
The question arises: what then, is the difference between the old and the new system of labor? If the wage-laborer can be locked out, discharged, and thrown into a state of enforced idleness at the will of the owner's capital, in what does the wage-laborer's rights or liberties consist? The wage system guarantees to the laborer but one right, viz: the right to starve! The private ownership of capital clothes its possessor with the authority of compulsion, the wage-laborers being driven by the necessities of human existence to accept with alacrity the offer of their capitalistic benefactors, who permit them to earn their daily bread! The laborer can never be a free man till he owns, in common with all other laborers, capital –i.e., the means of his own existence
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