Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Better than slavery

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Aug. 16, 2013 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

24:30

Better than slavery

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	England is a nation of shopkeepers.
	Napoleon Bonaparte Whilst this statement by the great Corsican general may initially seem to be derogatory, Napoleon actually meant it as an astute observation on the nature of Britain and as an explanation as to why the British Empire was so successful.
	To be the master of your own financial destiny, you must own a business.
	You must be the one to whom profits are paid.
	You must be the one who makes the decisions on your day-to-day activities.
	You must be the one who controls the direction of the business and you must take responsibility for any mistakes or problems that occur.
	Britain's empire, notable for being the largest empire in history, was a maritime trade empire.
	The purpose of it was to secure resources against competition for import to Britain and her markets.
	The interests of the state, increased power, influence, security and wealth were directly aligned with the interests of the average man, a shopkeeper who wanted access to these resources to be able to earn his own living.
	It was a win-win situation for the average Englishman and his government.
	It was incumbent on the government to ensure that man's life, liberty and property because the state directly benefited from it.
	This is self-evidently not the world we live in now.
	A wage slave is a person who is not in control of the source of their ink.
	They do not have any control over the work they perform and they do not get set the amount of money they are paid for the work that they do.
	Their livelihood is a product of their labour alone.
	Wage slavery is the natural conclusion of monopoly.
	A wage slave is not the master of their financial destiny.
	They are entirely subject to the will and whims of a greater, larger entity.
	Usually, this is a multinational corporation.
	To have financial control over a person is to control every aspect of their lives and make them completely dependent on you.
	They can't go anywhere, buy anything, pay their rent, bills or enjoy any kind of entertainment without money.
	Money is so vital to every aspect of modern life that it is easy to forget how much we rely on it as a method of resource distribution.
	Of course, not everyone is a wage slave yet.
	Small businesses in the UK are closing at an alarming rate, and there is not a city in Britain that does not have a McDonald's, Starbucks or Walmart-owned subsidiary.
	Multinational corporations have no need to care for their workers.
	In the UK, there are approximately 2.5 million people who are unemployed and presumably actively looking for work.
	Unemployed people are now being forced to work for multinational corporations as part of being unemployed in the Orwellianly named workfare scheme, where, for example, an unemployed university educated individual is forced to stack shelves at a supermarket to help gain experience.
	In addition to this, it is virtually impossible for these unemployed people to start a business of their own, given their lack of capital, time, and the ability of huge corporations to simply price them out of the market on volume of sales.
	Across the length and breadth of the country, high streets are closing down.
	Independent stores have been replaced with franchises of multinational corporations if indeed they are replaced at all.
	The latest G eight summit in Northern Ireland saw two million pounds spent on renovating high streets with fictional images of bustling shops plastered across the ruins of the old.
	Alliance and Leicester's business startup calculator suggests that to start a bookshop such as the ones displayed in the BBC's images would cost twelve thousand pounds.
	You could populate an entire high street with new independent shops for less than a million pounds.
	Of course, this would be a fool's errand, as such shops would be uncompetitive in a marketplace dominated by high volume, low cost sales offered by major corporations.
	These corporations transfer wealth away from the very countries in which the wealth was generated to the shareholders at the top of the pyramid.
	And with numerous loopholes in law, tax avoidance is a major problem.
	Note that these laws were not lobbied for by your average taxpaying citizen.
	Amazon's sales in the UK were 3.35 billion billion in 2011 and Amazon paid only 1.8 million in tax.
	Starbucks had paid no corporation tax in the UK since 2009, four years of solid tax avoidance on a £400 million turnover.
	Four years.
	These corporations are extracting wealth from the countries they operate in and are not paying back into the systems that are making them rich as Croesus.
	Multinational corporations do this because they can.
	A corporation can pay Indonesian workers an average of twenty two pence per hour to make shoes that are sold for a hundred pounds in a wealthy nation like Great Britain.
	The savings from this huge disparity with the minimum wage in say Britain at £6.19 per hour make it obvious that if you are going to save yourself £5.99 on every hour that every employee you have works, then it is not only the obvious choice, but it is the only choice if your main goal is to make profit for your shareholders.
	But again, not everyone is a wage slave yet.
	When there is such a surplus of labour, corporations can afford to treat workers as if they are disposable because they are.
	If an employee is treated poorly by their employer, their only option is to quit.
	This has no ramifications for the corporation employing them as there are literally millions of people who are available to replace that person.
	The employee who has quit is now in severe financial dire straits.
	Their working income is likely to be the major, if not only source of income they had, and without it they are unable to financially support themselves and must turn to the state for assistance.
	To become self-sufficient again, they must find another source of income, another job, but now they are part of the vast reservoir of potential workers all actively looking for a chance to become a cog in the machine just to make ends meet.
	To quote Raisal Malarangen of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies on Indonesian labourers, for those workers, the question is always the alternative.
	Without that job, where would I go?
	There are no benefits to quitting your job.
	The corporation does not suffer.
	You cannot be a martyr to rally others.
	The only ramifications are to you personally, so one must endure it as a means of survival.
	This is what it is to be a wage slave, to be trapped in perpetuity in a system that does not care about you and seeks to exploit you for the maximum gain at the minimum expense.
	To a multinational corporation, that is what the people working within it are an expense to be minimized.
	That is a bold assertion, so I will provide my proof.
	That the manufacturing is exported to poverty stricken countries to take advantage of the low wages and not any kind of specialized skill set is positive proof of this statement.
	These corporations are not busy inventing phrases like banana republica for the good of the native people of these poverty stricken countries.
	They are doing it for their shareholders.
	I believe this is beyond dispute at this point, judging only by the actions of multinational corporations.
	It is entirely subversive to a person's liberty to trap them within a system that makes them dependent on an impersonal entity that dehumanizes them into administrative or industrial drones.
	There is no option for the exercise of your rights if you are forced to support a system that has victimized you to ensure that you have food on the table and a roof over your head.
	It is a system that is better than slavery.
	A slave owner endured the following expenses and hardships.
	They must first purchase the slave outright, which was a substantial financial investment.
	Like any livestock, the slave must be fed, housed, and treated for disease, illness, or injury.
	Human livestock must also be clothed and educated to a minimum level to perform the work required.
	Unlike animal livestock, human livestock do not appreciate their captivity and are wont to perform slovenly, escape or outright revolt against their masters.
	Human livestock are a direct threat to their owners because of the obvious injustice of their lot.
	Great time, effort, and expense must be taken to ensure the slaves remain slaves.
	They must be prevented from escaping, retrieved if this does occur, and controlled so they do not revolt and destroy their owners.
	We can actually work this out.
	I do not like to use the Bible as an authoritative source on anything, but in matters pertaining to money I feel surprisingly inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.
	Matthew twenty two The Parable of the Vineyard Workers For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.
	When he had agreed with the labourers for a denarius for the day, he sent them to his vineyard.
	A denarius was the going rate for a day's labour around 33 AD during the successful early years of the Roman Empire.
	And we know that Diocletian's Edict of Maximum Prices in three hundred one AD set the day's rate of labour at twenty five denarii at a period of hyperinflation in the Roman Empire after the crisis of the third century, which had left the coinage utterly debased.
	Seven point five hours of unskilled labour at six pounds nineteen an hour is forty six pounds and forty three pence.
	The purchasing power of this wage is the value in Britain that we put on this work.
	Manual labour is manual labour, no matter what time period you are in.
	It is tedious, repetitive, and requires a low or non-existent skill set.
	It is always a job that exists in any society that builds or produces anything.
	There will always be manual labour available, and it will always have the same low but consistent value to the society that requires it.
	It is safe to assume that the purchasing power of a denarius was roughly analogous to fifty pounds today, because these are the respective approximate values of almost exactly the same work.
	In the parable of the vineyard, there is no technological difference at all.
	If one denarius is equivalent to fifty pounds, then during a period of hyperinflation, such as the crisis of the third century, twenty five denarii per day is one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds, which seems like a reasonable upper limit on the wages of a basic day laborer during a period of hyperinflation.
	It is notable that in the edict, one modius of wheat was worth one hundred denarii, four days' wages, and the slave would normally get one modius per week to eat.
	Our day laborer would have been roughly able to afford one of these per week and an extra one every other week.
	I think we can agree that this is practically the lowest one can get to being at the poverty level of a slave without actually being a slave.
	Before the crisis of the third century, we know that slaves in Roman markets cost approximately five hundred denarii for a male slave and into the hundreds of thousands of denarii for a particularly exotic one.
	five hundred denarii is over a year's worth of wages to a day labourer in a vineyard.
	To use our labour as our unit of conversion, that's twenty five thousand pounds the Roman buyer has just spent purchasing one male slave to work for him.
	At seventeen thousand pounds per year for a minimum wage labourer, the slave is a much wiser investment if you can afford an initial payment.
	However, we are now operating under a system where the owners no longer have to purchase the slaves.
	The slaves offer themselves up willingly for the minimum wage in overwhelming numbers.
	Indeed, there are not enough opportunities with which to put each slave to work.
	If a slave is not cooperative, they can be removed only for another to volunteer for his place.
	The slave has no intrinsic value because there were no expenses met for their acquisition.
	It is no concern for the owner as there is no initial investment and each slave is easily replaced and the corporation can continue to function without issue.
	The slave owner no longer has to bother themselves with the material well being of their slaves as this cost has been directly exported to the slaves themselves.
	You will be given six pounds nineteen pence per hour of labour and in return you will have to make that money cover the costs of your food, housing, clothing, transport and entertainment.
	If this meagre wage does not stretch far enough to cover these costs and wages have not risen in line with inflation, then it is simply not the owner's problem, it is the slave's problem.
	They are giving the minimum the law demands they give and after that they can wash their hands of the consequences with a clean conscience.
	In addition to this, wage inequality is on the rise.
	Unsurprisingly, a system that exploits the labour of the poorest sections of society for the enrichment of those already at the top is leading to a polarization of the people into two classes, the rich and the poor.
	There is almost no middle class anymore.
	In 1950, a single wage earning household earned enough to purchase a house, a car and support a family of four.
	In 2013, both parents are required to work simply to maintain themselves with a rented house, a single car, and they have to scrape to get by.
	And this is in the West.
	The average wages for sweatshop workers in Indonesia are twenty two pence or thirty four cents per hour.
	If they worked for seven and a half hours per day for three hundred sixty five days per year, the expense to the corporation for that worker's labour is six hundred and two pounds and twenty five pence per year.
	This is even below the average wage for Indonesia.
	By working seventy hour weeks, the worker can actually exceed the average wage of the country by working seventy hour weeks.
	For the purchasing price of the cheapest male slave twenty five thousand pounds, a corporation can instead afford to pay the Indonesian sweatshop worker £602.25 for 41 years before that worker had cost the corporation enough to equal the initial price of the slave.
	This is without the corporation having to pay any additional costs for their slaves because all of the costs have been transferred to that worker.
	The profit margins are literally better than the profit margins on owning these people outright.
	It is better than slavery for the corporations to own and operate sweatshops.
	Not only that, but there are no drawbacks for the company at all.
	These slaves are free to leave at any time even though there is nowhere else for them to go.
	The systems that dominate your life control every aspect of it that you rely on for everything that you have in the world and your own continued existence do not operate in your best interests or in the best interests of anyone who is not a shareholder in these systems.
	There is ample evidence to support such a conclusion and therefore that conclusion must logically be drawn.
	I do not have any evidence for the motive of this.
	It is entirely possible that it is intentional.
	It is also entirely possible that it is the result of the confluence of multiple instances of mutual self-interest that has perpetuated a downward spiral.
	I would rather believe the latter because it means that there is no reason that we as a society cannot stop this decline by simply recognising it and addressing it like adults.
	If everyone would simply stop arguing and agree that things have gone too far, perhaps something could change.
	Not everything needs to be sacrificed for the sake of profit.
	Corporations are not run as democracies.
	They are run as tyrannies.
	The people at the bottom have no influence or power over the people at the top who make the decisions.
	The people who actually perform the labour that makes the system run are unimportant as slaves on a plantation, paid only enough to do their jobs and not extend their own personal prosperity, and there are almost no means for them to do so.
	It would be counterproductive to the corporations that dominate the world for them to allow competition to threaten their hegemony.
	It is not in their best interest to ensure that the individual's liberty and property remain inviolable, and they are the only entities with the vast wealth required to influence the political systems that we claim to live by.
	The political system in which one lives means nothing if the facts of day-to-day life make it irrelevant.
	Instead of people exercising power over themselves and their own destinies, they have their destinies decided for them by the plethora of corporations through whose agency the entire world is run.
	It is almost impossible to purchase anything or use any service that is not already produced or owned by a major corporation.
	It is almost impossible to be employed by anyone but a major corporation, and almost all government policies are bought and purchased by corporate money for the benefit of corporate shareholders, many of whom hold positions in these governments.
	Your life is dominated by tyrannies of which you are a willing participant.
	The wage slave is in an operant conditioning chamber, otherwise known as a skinner box.
	American behaviorist B. F. Skinner devised an experiment in which an animal was taught to perform specific actions, such as pulling a lever in response to specific stimulus such as a light or sound.
	If the animal performs this correctly, they are rewarded with a morsel of food.
	If they perform it incorrectly, they are punished with an electric shock.
	The rats in Skinner's box learned very quickly how to ensure that they were rewarded and not punished by cooperating with the system.
	If you cooperate in your relatively simple task, you receive your wages.
	If you do not, you are fired and you are reduced to a life of destitution.
	You will quickly learn which way you have to take.
	If a person's interests are not directly aligned with the interests of the powers that govern their lives, they will find themselves disenfranchised.
	This will lead to apathy, resentment, self-neglect.
	This feeling of powerlessness is already so pervasive as to be the norm.
	Have you ever heard someone say, well, what can we do?
	Nothing.
	And so people get up on Monday mornings and drag themselves to jobs they cannot stand, but will reward them with a pittance so they may continue to exist.
	You cannot build an efficient system that has apathy, resentment and self-neglect as a core part of it.
	When effective purchasing power goes down, when giant corporations are operating a system that is more profitable and safe to themselves than outright chattel slavery, and when everyone is telling each other that nothing can be done to stop it, nothing will be done to stop it.
	The people of the Middle East demonstrated that in fact something can be done.
	It was dubbed the Arab Spring, and we in the West desperately need one of our own before we are trapped within our operant conditioning chamber and unable to find our way out.
	This is not about placing blame.
	This is not about finding who we need to punish.
	This is about fundamentally altering the methods of incentives and rewards that are on offer.
	We are sleep walking into systems of soft totalitarianism, where the need for critical thinking will vanish because of the lack of motivation to use it.
	Follow your instructions.
	You will be given a pellet of food and you can feed your family.
	Don't, and you'll be left destitute and discarded to die of malnutrition.
	England is no longer a nation of shopkeepers, a nation of people who are required to think about the consequences of their actions, and are encouraged to make the best choices for their own personal benefit and by extension the benefit of the state.
	Instead, not only England but the entire Western world is becoming a skinner box, and unless something is done to break it, it will remain as such in perpetuity, for the slaves on the plantations will not even have the wit to understand that they are slaves.
	Ask yourself one question Who benefits from this and who do they benefit at the expense of?

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