Member-only story
Will We Overcome Slavery To The System?
When the version of slavery we’re familiar with through films like Roots, 12 Years a Slave, and Django Unchained was practiced in America, the slave owners would still provide food and housing for the slaves, as meager as it may have been. In capitalist slavery, servants are largely required to work for the owners of capital in order to pay the owners of capital for food and housing, as well as the other necessities of life. Unfortunately, the servants are having to work longer and harder to appease the insatiable appetites of the owners of capital.
“The parallel between ancient Rome and the present day is striking,” says Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics. “Now as then, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. Now as then, people must go into lifelong debt that they can never pay off just to have access to the necessities of life. Then it was through access to land; today it is through access to money. The slaves, serfs, and tenants gave a lifetime of labor to the enrichment of the landowners; today the proceeds of our labor go to the owners of money.”
“Over the past half-century or so,” says Richard Florida in The Great Reset, “the amount of money the average American family spends on housing and cars has skyrocketed. From 1950 to the mid-1980s, the amount allotted for housing and cars doubled from 22 percent to 44 percent…
