Funny how they conflate actual slavery with 'wage slaves' which is something totally different and also wasn't different in the south at the time anyway.
Slaves were also not guaranteed food, housing nor even life. Conforming slaves got the minimum of those things so that they could continue being slaves.
Unfortunately, when I was growing up in the south, this sort of bullshit was actually being taught in schools.
Worse than that, conforming slaves got the housing they made, the food they grew
Fuck it, this isn't going away, can we appropriate "Northern Aggresion" to mean anti slavery? You want to keep slaves? You're about to get some Northern Agression. It seems justified but that might just be me
Haha he slipped up saying "wage slave", as in a person who is paid money for working and is allowed to quit.
The concept of "wage slavery" refers to the idea that many people are not free to quit a bad job unless they enjoy being homeless and starving. Or having their kids be homeless and starving for that matter. Given this period was prior to the labor movement in America it's more fitting than I think a lot of people would want to admit, even if the rest of his argument bounces between equal parts of distasteful, ignorant, and insane.
Also, he's just flat out ignoring that poor Southern whites existed as well, often in even worse straits than their Northern equivalents because they had to compete with actual slave labor.
I don't really like the term for exactly this juxtaposition. It's just disrespectful to the sheer scale of cruelty in chattel slavery, and opens your arguments to pedantic types who will ignore any reasonable points you have to quibble about your questionable word choice.
is that copium i smell? or even rationalization gas?
