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"It is commonly thought that what is purchased in the case of a slave transaction is the ‘raw body’ of the slave, whereas in the case of athletes, employees, and tribal wives not their bodies but their services are purchased or hired.
This distinction has subjective meaning, but it makes no sense in physical or economic terms. When one buys or hires a person's labor, by implication one purchases the person's body for the negotiated period.
There is no such thing as a disembodied service, only the discreet willingness to suspend all disbelief in such disembodiment.
Present-day employers, it is true, do not demand of potential employees that they stand naked on an auction block being prodded and inspected by the employers and their physicians.
But when an employer requires a medical certificate from a worker or professional athlete before hiring him, he is not only soliciting the same kind of information as a slave master inspecting his latest cargo of bodies,
he is betraying the inherent absurdity of the distinction between ‘raw bodies’ and the services produced by such bodies. There is certainly an important difference in the way the information is gathered,
but the difference has to do with respect for the employee, recognition of his dignity and honor; it is in no way a confirmation of the fiction that there is a real difference between hiring a person's body and hiring his services.
Sidney W. Mintz argues that Marx was bothered by this problem, hence his tendency to waver between a recognition of wage labor as distinctive in that the worker sells his disembodied labor as a commodity, and a rejection of this view in favor of the worker as a wage slave."
"What…are the real differences between slaves and nonslaves who are nonetheless salable even against their will? The first difference is the relative power of the parties concerned and the origins of their relationship.
The proprietor's power is limited by the fact that nonslaves always possess some claims and powers themselves vis-a -vis their proprietor. This power has its source not only in central authorities (where they exist) but in a person's claims on other individuals.
Even in early Rome where the pater familias had enormous power over his wife and children, the father could not kill the children without justification and ‘a wife in manu remained very much under the jurisdiction of her blood-relatives.’
The slavemaster's power over his slave was total.
Furthermore with nonslaves, the proprietor's powers, however great, were usually confined to a specific range of activities; with slaves, the master had power over all aspects of his slave's life.
The power relationship also differs in its origins.
The power relationship also differs in its origins.
The crucial difference here, however, lies not in the fact that nonslaves always had some choice in initiating the relationship but, as we saw in the Introduction, in the fact that only slaves entered the relationship as a substitute for death.
Serfs and peons, for example, were obliged to enter and remain in the relationship with their lords as a result of the latter's monopoly of the means of production.
Slaves also differ from contracted athletes and bond servants in their alienation from all ties of natality and in their lack of honor & publicly recognized repute. As indicated earlier, it is the latter that partially dictates the necessity for the fiction of disembodied labor."
@threader_app compile
