Yesterday, I posted an excerpt from a speech by Abraham Lincoln from 1859 in which he critically compared wage labor—especially life-long wage labor with no hope of ever graduating to independent production—to chattel slavery.

As hard as it is to imagine today, there was once a robust public debate in the US in which words like “capital” and “labor” and “wage slavery” were explicitly used. Today, the slightest whiff of these would have you accused of communism and brayed off the public stage. Our discourse has gotten *more* restricted over time.

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