Slavery is the laboring condition where your means of subsistence are provided to you by your master, provided that you labor for your master.
Wage labor is a system where your means of subsistence are provided to you by the capitalist, provided that you work for your capitalist.
There can be very nice slavery situations, maybe with healthcare benefits and reasonable hours. The government may have even enacted laws for how to exploit labor from slaves in a proper manner. The same is true for wage laborers. It may seem that wage labor is very advanced and pleasant in our modern day, at least to the minority of workers who get these boring office jobs with benefits ( this is not the majority of wage labor). But the extreme advancement of technology and productivity since only a 150 years ago is so tremendous that the capitalist can afford to increase his profits while at the same time slightly increasing the wages and bettering the working conditions of the workers. In fact, the capitalist has no choice but to better the working conditions since if he doesn’t he workers will mutiny against him because they know with such advancement of productivity there should come a better standard of living.
We should not compare the conditions of slavery and wage labor. This is a subjective aspect of the types of labor since there can be very pleasant slavery and wage labor and there can also be horrible slavery and wage labor. To be more objective we have to look at how the masters and the capitalists extract their value from the slaves and the workers. It’s here that we’ll understand how the slave and the worker are one in the same only with different outer shells. The master must work the slave more than is required for the slave to compensate for his means of subsistence. The slave’s means of subsistence may even include health bene’s and such in this modern day, but it is essential to this relationship that no matter how nice the slave is treated that he provides extra value above any of the expenses that the master spends to maintain his slave. This point about extracting labor from the slave over and above directly translates to the capitalist and worker relationship as well. The worker will absolutely never stay employed if he does not produce a profit, i.e., the extra work the worker expends for the capitalist over and above what the capitalist spends providing for the necessaries for his worker.
There is another superficial difference between slaves and workers, but it is only superficial. One might say that the slave is bound to his master and is not free to leave as he pleases. The worker on the other hand is thought to be in a much better situation because he is free to leave his capitalist whenever he wishes. Both of these points are true but miss the essential compulsion of capitalism. Within capitalism the worker is free to leave his capitalist, but then to do what? He must find another capitalist to work for, i.e., another boss that will only hire him on the condition that he will make a profit off his labor. One might say that the worker can become a self-employed person. But this self-proprietor is commanded by the market, he must compete with other capitalists that dominate the market. But this second situation is a little different because in this case you are attempting to become the exploiter and not the exploited. This shows how even if one tries to take the road of a capitalist, by having employees and exploiting their labor for oneself, that one cannot liberate themselves from the compulsion of capitalism. And it should be easy to see how not everyone could be a capitalist since to be a capitalist, by definition, requires that you exploit the labor of workers. If everyone was their own “capitalist” there would be no capitalism. So wage labor appears to be more free than slavery because on the one hand slaves are restricted to only their master, whereas on the other hand wage labor allows workers the freedom to be exploited by the capitalist of their choice, and capitalists themselves are compelled by the markets.
So the central point is both systems are essentially the same: they both rely on the forceful expropriation of extra labor from slaves and workers. The fashion is different but the clothes are the same. It does not matter whether there are very nice wage labor or slavery conditions or very horrible wage labor or slavery conditions.
