A forcing-up of wages... would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.
...the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation.
- Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
And this was confirmed for me when I saw mass production of shoes in China - it dawned on me that even if these workers were given a "fair living wage", even if their working hours and other working conditions were ideal, it still wouldn't change the fact that the work they did was the most extremely redundant and reducing of human status and dignity that any job could ever be. Just imagine having to push a machine lever or other part back and forth 20 million times a day, in the same direction and manner every single time.
It's not a question of Capitalism vs Socialism then when talking about exploitation. If we wanted to eliminate exploitation, then we'd have to get rid of the division of labor. It's the division of labor that forces some people to have to churn out millions of completely identical shoes, robbing them of their creativity and the embodiment of their work and their selves in the thing they produce. But there's no going back to that kind of a society, so why continue down this road of thought? There are no simple answers :-/
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