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In both your examples the person laboring is forced to labor for one specific lord/owner.

In our economy, you can go work for anyone, or for yourself, or to some degree even not work at all and collect various social benefits.

Comparing programmers in 2021 to medieval serfs or ancient debt-slaves is literally absurd.

Programmers don't even really need any substantial capital to do their own thing. You can start a business with a laptop costing under $1,000.

No, it's not. Serfs in a lot of Europe had the possibility to change their lords. Either by asking another lord to buy them, or by leaving to a city or to another lord's land without being taken back for a year, in the example of England.

The capital for a programmer's startup is not the laptop, its the intellectual property. That costs way more than a 1000$, typically the equivalent of at least a few tens of thousands of dollars in IP. But beyond that programmers are very far from the average.

The average person in the 2021 worldwide economy cannot live off social benefits on a whim.

The difference is in the degree of which one can switch. The vast majority of serfs, even if they might have been able to, did not switch out their lords. Programmers and really any white collar workers can do so readily and easily, every few years even.

So to compare these things is not equivalent.

Not really. To me it seems like you're latching onto a single not so relevant point of the difference. I could use the same argument for why serfdom is not at all equivalent to debt slavery because you can choose to grow the land however you like.

It's not true that all white collar workers can switch jobs every few years. Some white collar workers in the US can, and even then with asterisks (non-competes, wage fixing, etc...)

The biggest reason why serfs would stop moving is to have children and a wife.

Wasn't there a big scandal some years ago about the big tech players making deals under the table about wages and not poaching each other's talent? At some point, when there is too much to lose, big companies are going to start collaborating on things that are not beneficial to the worker. At that point, you might say that you have total freedom in your choice of where to go to work, but you are also limited by the 'invisible hand of the market'

But yeah, I do agree that a direct comparison of programmers to serfs is a bit overboard. However, I am also seeing it in the sense that things don't really change much, even in a few centuries. The world is probably getting better for the people, but that doesn't mean that the same old tactics by the rich and powerful don't appear in new clothes.

Of course. I didn't mean to literally say that working as a programmer is like being a serf, just that the arguments for lopsided employment relationships are the same millenia old agreements that justified debt slavery and serfdom.

> It's not a choice. You have a (metaphorical) pistol to your head to engage with the system as it is, die, or be killed.

This is ridiculous. In the US people constantly quit to start small businesses, work for other businesses, or just not work at all. There is zero threat of violence if you choose not to work.

Additionally, there is no concept of debt slavery at all outside of the military (which is probably the most successful socialist institution in the US). There is no forced labor to pay down debt.

> private property in absentia (ultimately based on theft, might I add)

Based on theft from who? If I grow some cucumbers in my garden, who have I stolen them from?

> If I grow some cucumbers in my garden, who have I stolen them from?

The cucumbers aren't stolen, but the land is. Ultimately almost all private property in land was dispossesed of common ownership or previous inhabitants. Not that you need to feel guilty about it, but you do need to pay your taxes.

>In the US people constantly quit to start small businesses, work for other businesses, or just not work at all. There is zero threat of violence if you choose not to work.

SOME people. Median savings are ~$4k, realistically the average person needs access to credit (which they may not have), a strong support network, or some other way of surviving longer than 2 months without work.

And whether or not you do have the wealth or support network needed to choose not to work is determined mostly by who your parents are. This isn't a fair system.

I don't think you understood what I meant, I probably wasn't clear.

There is no threat of violence if you choose not to work. The violence is if you try to subsist to your means without engaging with the economic system. So you are forced to engage in the economic system as it is.

As for debt slavery, I'm simply saying that the arguments used to justified exploitative labour relations are exactly the same as were used to justify debt slavery.

If you grow cucumbers in your garden, your first need to buy the land for the garden, which was ultimately stolen from someone else. But growing a cucumber in your garden is not private property in absentia, it's private property in present use.

All you're saying here is that a person can't survive completely on their own. That's always been true, and is just part of The Human Condition, not a plot by evil capitalists.

Division of labor is the foundation of civilization, and how we have become so incredibly wealthy.

In a division of labor system, everyone needs to contribute as much as they benefit, on average, and the system of mostly voluntary trade is how we keep track of that. You trade your labor for money, that you in turn trade with others for the result of their labor.

Demanding to share the fruits of that system - which come from the work of countless other people - without being willing to contribute to it with your own work is both selfish and antisocial.

That’s meaningless though. It’s been stolen by literally every non voluntary change of control. Dinosaurs stole land from each other.

Taxation is stealing money from your citizens and we don’t describe it that way because it makes the term somewhat meaningless.

Thank you for reminding me that reading comments online is mostly a complete waste of time.