No, I'm not talking about people as “technical” property, or chattel slavery, as in ancient Rome, the old Confederate States or modern Chinese slave shops. I'm talking about your average Joe and Jane living in suburban America, Canada, Australia or Great Britain, etc, who's life, work and holdings are owned by parties other than themselves. What I'm talking about is similar to wage slavery, but without the pressure of poverty or starvation, it's like wage slavery but combined with massive levels of consumer debt. It is definitely indentured servitude, and much more like outright slavery or wholesale human ownership than any sort of real freedom. The scary thing about this condition is that it is openly encouraged by society, that people sell themselves to asset holders for what is little more than trinkets and shiny bits. That people's natural drive for status symbols and want for convenience is enough to warrant entry “by choice” into a condition of slavery.

    The debt is the scary part of the bargain, the trinkets and shiny bits, are dangled like the proverbial “carrot before the donkey”. But in this case, you Joe/Jane worker, are the donkey and the stick holding the carrot elongates through a process called, interest. You may think you own your status symbols, but if they were purchased with credit, you probably don't own them at all. If you think about the property the average suburbanite actually owns in full, it is usually little more than some clothes, some kitchen wares, a car and some odd consumer electronics. For many suburbanites, even that was bought on credit, and may not be fully owned yet. So even though you may be able to stand on the lawn of your bank owned house and feel the sense of ownership, that monthly payment you make to the bank says something quite different about who actually owns it. But if you want to keep feeling like you own it, keep showing it off as you symbol of status you will have to keep paying the bank every month.

    So how do you pay the bank every month? By selling your labor of course, which in essence is completely acceptable. Not everyone has what it takes to run their own business, but they may have skills or other resources that someone who does run a business is willing to pay for. In prosperous economic environments there are very few negative elements to this sort of lifestyle, you work, you eat you get a home to live in that you may one day call your own and you may even get a fair deal of time with which you can play and blow off the stress of working all week. Which is really just a sort of indentured servitude, eventually you'll get your house and other stuff if you just keep working and paying for 20 years or so. It's when the economic environment gets rough that this lifestyle begins to really look more openly like slavery.

    Take for instance the current housing market in the United States, houses sold a few years ago will never be worth the amount that was borrowed to pay for them. And when I say never, I mean never, suburban properties will become unfeasible as the global energy crunch worsens and they will never have the value they had just a few years ago. So what is the lender to do? Well they either keep working to pay off the debt, or they default. Now the social pressures for avoiding default are massive, no person in this society will easily accept a move from owning all the status symbols, trinkets and shiny bits to owning few or no status symbols and greatly reduced trinkets and shiny bits. In choosing your living space it may actually make more sense to rent close to where you work, but the social pressures of modern society will make many people(most in the US) think it is actually a better idea to “buy” far away.

    This very human pressure to maintain status, or social pecking order, is apparently all it takes to keep people slaves to their credit holders. You now must work to pay off a debt that cannot be justified by the final reward. What is worse, is that too many people are working to pay off over valued debt objects, then it is quite possible that the value of the work itself needs to be reevaluated. Such reevaluation of the value of labor must correspond to what that labor produces, that's real world production, not debt production. So, in the instance of the house, the debt is corrected for real world value and the wage is determined to be overvalued since it would actually buy much more house that it currently is paying for. Of course, if the value of your wage drops, things get even worse.

    Of course you are not strictly tied to any one job. You are not forced to live in your suburban home. You are not forced to drive an SUV 100 miles a day to work and back. You are free to move about at anytime and change any of the specific conditions of your life. That is, as long as you make sure to satisfy your outstanding debts first. You can move anywhere in the world, and your credit rating will follow you. The chains are not made of iron, they are made of numbers.

    The reality of this “credit slavery”, is tied to the economic prosperity of the society in which it occurs. The better the economy the less apparently bad this slavery is, the worse the economy the more the slavery appears to be bad. This is particularly concerning because the impending energy crunch will dramatically undermine the global economy and specifically it will have a dramatic impact on the US economy because of how energy hungry our economy is. Compound that with how widespread credit slavery is in the United States and you'll have our future. It may be completely acceptable to sign a 2 year salary contract right now in the US, but what happens in the future when it's a minimum 10 year contract with dynamic wages and massive credit penalties for breaking the contract? It's not so hard to see widespread slavery in forms far worse than they currently are here in the US in the none to distant future.