Douglass died in 1895 when the standard of living was wildly lower than what it is today, its not an equivalent comparison
“Gee, I know I said all that about wage slavery, but who could have predicted iPhones and corn syrup. This is great!”
Read the shit you’re making claims about.
Why don’t you do the same? Your original quote is 137 years old. It is in fact problematic to equate the economic landscape of 2023 to that of 1886. In that quote Douglass is specifically criticizing the treatment of freed slaves, not capitalism in general. (If you want to convince people capitalism is bad, you need to make valid criticisms, not twist old quotes to suit your narrative)
I got the quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
Where did you hear that it was specific only to freed slaves?
Your stance still needs to change then. Your issue isn’t comparing wage slavery with chattel slavery, it’s comparing slavery when the standard of living has improved.
Now this stance is still problematic, imagine we lost the civil war and the north became socialist, abolishing wage slavery. The south would have chattel slavery and the north would have no slavery. Now imagine the standard of living for chattel slaves vastly improved, and someone then tried to compare “modern day chattel slaves to wage slaves”. Your stance would then be this is wildly unfair to modern day chattel slaves because wage slaves had a worse standard of living, a position we both understand is ridiculous.
