Freeing Labor from its Chains: Indenture, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery in America – Speaker: Peter Fay

Freeing Labor from its Chains:

Indenture, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery in America

Speaker: Peter Fay

American labor is deindustrialized, deunionized, fragmented, and pauperized. Its debased condition is a prisoner of its form: that of a commodity, forever cheapening, like any other. Bereft of political leadership, labor instinctively reacts in populist protest at its own demise, rejecting neoliberalism and the “new world order”. In response, the ruling class shames it as “deplorable”, “far-right”, and “Putin’s puppets”. In a world devoid of class identity, American culture proffers individual identity as the new religion, as the new “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world”. Labor, the unifying property of humanity, is hidden in plain sight beneath the media’s vilification of all against all, a society anatomized by gender and race.

Our speaker, Peter Fay, is a former officer of Steelworkers Local 2285, and lifelong Communist and public historian, emphasizes the commonalities and unities of labor, rather than its disassociation, across its many historical forms in American history.

Mr. Fay uncovers capital’s driving imperative for the extraction of surplus value while abetting the bifurcation of labor by race. He shares exemplars gleaned from decades of labor research — Eastern Algonquian tribal wampum (‘money-beads’), bills of sale of the New England slave trade, and ledger books of the first industrial sites in America. Capital first relied upon indigenous labor for the colonial economy, then imported indentured labor from Europe, later expanding into chattel slavery and free labor. Labor took variegated forms: colonial artisanal labor, slavery, formal subsumption of artisans and freeholders by merchants, and finally free industrial proletarians. But in each form, capital’s craving for expansion formed and reformed the labor commodity into the one most advantageous for its reproduction. The result was the most massive expansion of capital in human history, with race as a prime facilitator in the extraction of surplus value.

Mr. Fay concludes with his own experience in the struggles of Black and white steelworkers in the metal forging industry against industrial capital. He uses Marx’s Capital as the essential guide not only for understanding the labor process but for the potentiality and necessity of eliminating wage slavery itself. Only the elimination of labor as a commodity can unleash labor for what Marx called, “not only a means of life but life’s prime want”.

Bio:

Peter Fay is a Marxist public historian, and co-founder of the Newport Middle Passage Project.

As a 23-year-old machinist and open Communist, he ran for the executive board of a 1,100-member Steelworkers local in Worcester, Massachusetts winning 2-to-1 despite company red-baiting. He uncovered company ownership of a titanium mine in apartheid South Africa and called for divestment. He also served as an organizer for UE and District 1199.  He advocated for bilinguall education in public schools and an NAACP school desegregation suit.

After a job injury, he became a software engineer and public historian, researching New England slavery and early labor movements. Today Mr. Fay publishes histories of labor and Black history, leads classes on Marxism, and sits on the boards of several historical societies.