Click to listen
Job is the slavery of the twentieth century.
(Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad)
In 1907 AD, Abbas Mahmoud al-Akkad, the well-known Egyptian writer, wrote a newspaper article entitled “Using the Slavery of the Twentieth Century” after he resigned from his government job. He worked in Al-Dustour newspaper from 1907 until the newspaper stopped in 1912, then he worked in Al-Muayyad newspaper and Al-Ahali newspaper, then Al-Ahram newspaper, followed by Al-Balagh newspaper in 1923.
But the journalistic work did not provide Al-Akkad with sufficient income to meet his needs, so the need for money prompted him to search for the government job (employment), which he had long shunned. All of them one after the other[1], and after he resigned, Al-Akkad wrote his article “Using the Slavery of the Twentieth Century,” in which he described the revolutionary decision to resign at the time, saying: “One of the precedents for which I rejoiced was that I was likely to be the first Egyptian employee to resign from a government job of his own volition, on the day Resigning a job and committing suicide were all in one layer of weirdness and misguided opinion for most.”
Al-Akkad explains the reason for making this decision, continuing: "My distaste for the government job in such a time that sanctifies it was one of the precedents that I was so pleased with and I thank God for. I do not forget to this day that I received the news of my acceptance in the first job that circumstances forced me to ask for, as if I was receiving news." Sentenced to imprisonment or captivity and slavery...as I believed with all faith that the employee was a slave of the twentieth century”[2].
It seems that the use of man by man is inherent in the stratification of any society, and therefore the idea of using man for man becomes an idea that is impossible to cancel within the framework of any civilization or human society (communication sites)
Al-Akkad was one of the first Arabs to call for getting rid of the families of the monotonous job, likening it to slaves in ancient times, and today some sayings are repeated that there is a similarity between the contemporary concept of the job and the concept of the old slave, so what are the similarities between them?
How are they compared?
Is the job really a form of slavery?
How did the slave appear in human history?
By definition, servitude in the language means submission and obedience, but in the terminology it means the possession of man by man, which is what is called the slave, and the slave or the slave is the human being deprived of capacity owned by others, all or part of it [3].
There is no known time when the phenomenon of slavery began specifically, but what we have found from historical documents shows that the phenomenon of slavery is ancient to the extent that it was known to almost all the world’s historical civilizations[4], from the Pharaohs to the Assyrians, from the Arabs to the Persians, and from The civilization of China to the civilization of the Greeks, so why did the phenomenon of slavery arose in the first place?!
Will Durant, the American historian, believes that the phenomenon of slavery began with the transition of man from the hunting stage to the agricultural stage. But when people gathered in towns and cities and human societies began to appear, the demand for food became greater, and then the need for laborers appeared, and the idea of slaves and human ownership of man was resorted to as a means of providing for this labor force.
Durant says: "While agriculture was creating civilization, in addition to ending in the property system, it also ended in the system of slavery, which was not known in the groups that used to base their lives on pure hunting" [5].
It appears from Durant's words that man's exploitation of man is one of the characteristics of civilized man, and not, as some think, an exclusive image of primitive societies and cave man.
Since the inception of human societies, slavery has appeared according to class division, whereby people are divided according to the social structure into two categories: the owner category and the owned category (communication sites)
Karl Marx, the left theorist, agrees with Durant, who sees that human societies are essentially based on slavery, whereby humans are divided by nature into two categories: a possessing class and a possessed class, and he believes that "society and slavery are born together"[6].
Hence, the question becomes for him not whether there is slavery or not, but rather the form of slavery on which the stratification of society is based.
It seems, then, that the use of man by man is inherent in the stratification of any society, and thus the idea of man using man becomes an idea that is impossible to abolish within the framework of any civilization or human society.
And in an era when people claim that they live in a progressive era in which the slave trade and man’s exploitation of his fellow man have disappeared, then how do we understand slavery in the modern era?
To what extent can we compare the concept of employment with the concept of slave?!
From slavery to wage slavery
"Today, as it has always been, people are divided into two groups: slaves and freemen. He who does not own two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave, whatever his occupation may be: statesman, businessman, official, or scholar."
(Friedrich Nietzsche)[7]
With the transition of human civilizations from the agricultural phase to the industrial phase, the definition of a contemporary job within the framework of the modern capitalist world has shifted to “deducting certain hours of a person’s time for the benefit of an institution, company, or person, in exchange for a specific wage or specific benefit” [8].
Marx explains this change in the form of slavery from traditional agrarian serfdom to modern employment, saying: "During the process of prohibiting slavery, no one claimed that wealth or its privileges had been abolished...thus it was necessary that things remain as they are, with only different names...Slavery, then." It was immortalized in the land, but under a nicer name, it is now adorned with the name of the service [job]” [9].
This nice name [the job] made people accept the idea of working for a master under the title of "employee" and not "slave", but despite the two different words, the meaning is almost the same, and for this reason David Graeber, professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, believes that the first labor jobs that appeared After the industrial revolution, I first grew up in slave farms, and he says: "Instead of people buying and renting us, we rent ourselves out."[10]
This modern functional slavery is what prompted Frederick Douglass, one of the African slaves in the United States of America who got rid of the inferno of slavery for the white man and was able to free himself, to say after his liberation from slavery: “Experience shows that there may be (wage slavery) but it is Less disturbing in its effects than traditional slavery, this wage slavery must be abolished along with that of slavery” [11].
Job and slavery..the main similarities
In several lectures, the eminent American thinker Noam Chomsky emphasizes the simple differences between slavery and employee slavery. He says in one of his interviews: “In the past, slaves were sold and bought, but now people are rented. There is no big difference between selling yourself and renting yourself[12]. ".
American thinker Noam Chomsky (networking sites)
And Chomsky states in another interview: “Wage slavery is not very different from slave slavery, and until recently this was not a strange opinion, but rather a common one. While working as a slave is a permanent matter”[13].
Such comparisons raise questions about the extent of the similarity and difference between the modern job and the old slavery, and perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when the word slave is mentioned is the hard work and unlimited effort throughout the year for the master in exchange for the employee’s leave and his weekly or annual rest, but is this image really realistic? ?!
In 2013, the global network Reuters published a surprising article entitled “Why did the peasant in the Middle Ages have more vacation time than you?” The article reported that the old peasant under his feudal lord was given annual vacations ranging from 8 weeks to 6 months, but after the industrial revolution With recent technological developments, the number of vacation days per year for the average American employee is now only 8 days per year [14].
Which shows that the conditions of class exploitation tended to get worse, not better.
Once people were liberated from the humiliation of slaves, they found themselves tied up in job restrictions, which prompted many movements and thinkers to coin the term “wage slavery” (communication sites)
But if slaves in the past refused to work for their master, they were subjected to physical punishment or deprivation of food, and in the context of the current job market, if the employee refused to work, the only option in front of him was to resign from the job, which often means also poverty and deprivation of employment the food.
But there is a fundamental difference in the job, which is the ability of the employee to leave his job and move to another workspace, which is not available in the slavery system, in which the master owns the neck of the slave.
However, this does not prevent the areas of exploitation from being changed from one phase to another.
Thus, the cycles of man’s use of man and the subordination of one person to another continue. Since the establishment of human societies historically during the agricultural phases that were based on slave markets, to the industrial revolution that created a market for employees and workers, the economic conditions of slaves or employees do not seem significantly different in both cases, and what To liberate people from the humiliation of slaves until they found themselves tied to job restrictions, which prompted many movements and thinkers to coin the term “wage slavery” to compare it with slavery.