By Noel Ignatiev
At first sight, not a bad idea. Wages would have been an
improvement over what they had. Yet the abolitionists never proposed it.
The struggle was for freedom, not wages.
Freedom could be and was taken to mean various things: family-owned farms operated individually, family-owned farms operated
cooperatively, sharecropping, cash rent, working for wages,
collectively-owned farms, communal farms, maybe other schemes. The
overthrow of chattel slavery throughout the western hemisphere led to
one or another of the above and various combinations among them (except
for the last, which was never tried), but depending on the balance of
forces the result might have been different. How would it have helped to
define the goal as wages?
If dependent household labor
is domestic slavery, then why not struggle to abolish it, leaving open
what abolition will mean, rather than seek to transform it from unwaged to waged labor?
First freedom; then, if it turns out that no more is possible, wages!
