A few linguistic distinctions concerning some concerning notions

“Forced labor,” “slave labor,” and “wage slave” all have a certain commonality. Is this contention a stretch? Well, read on as I attempt to reason this out/over and come to a certain conclusion that places these notions upon a socio-political-economic spectrum, a sort of three-dimensional Cartesian system in the spirit of Spinoza.

X = Society; Y = Politics; Z = The Economy. Simple enough. The, and only then do we come up with a three-dimension system which has even a hope in hell of “being realistic” in this lingering day when the dubious and the idiots are upon occasion the same, as with reference to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

In nearly all the books I’ve ever read about the hard days (for the Russian people) of Stalin’s rule, the term “forced labor” was typically used to discuss what the imprisoned men exiled to Siberia had to go through in their logging and mining operations. Solzhenitsyn wrote his novels based upon his life as a “zek” in one of several labor camps, the elite squad of engineers and mathematicians described on a daily basis in “The First Circle.”

Now, journalists in the United States are fond of describing the “re-education camps” in the People’s Republic of China as hot-beds of “slave labor.” But let’s be clear: these are “indoor jobs” the poor Uighurs are compelled by the Chinese Communist Party to perform.

And finally we come to the most familiar of these three expressions: “wage slave.” Anyone in America who has ever worked outside of a trained profession knows what it is like to be a “wage slave,” which means nearly all of us — except for people like Donald Trump, his daughter, his son-in-law, and all the other sons and daughters of millionaires and billionaires.

Linguistic philosophy has taught us that you can never put too fine a point on . . . well, upon even a single word. Propagandists know this; ad men and women know this; public relation experts know this; and, particularly, journalists know this. And now the English language has become the universal language of our World, of which we have only one. Namely a planet called Earth.