Consent and Labor

As has been previously discussed, Consent is often taken as an indication of an acceptance of an interaction as 'just', i. e. that what one is receiving is commensurate to what one is giving. However, its face-value is not always unequivocal, e. g. when voiced by a minor, by someone psychologically debilitated, or under duress, in which cases the other party can be held liable for an injustice. An important example of an economic exchange consented to under duress, though not commonly recognized as such, is a condition of slavery, in which consent to work is given in preference to undergoing punishment, if not death. Now, the historical significance of that scenario is that Marx analyzes the acceptance of wages by a laborer in industrial conditions as slavery with a trivial degree of difference of duress, an interpretation that the Capitalist tends to not so much dispute as ignore, resulting in the manifestation of the conflict in more than a century of global violence that has only recently abated somewhat. The cardinality of the thesis that Capitalism violates the principle of Retributive Justice is also one reason why traditional Marxists repudiate the variations of the doctrine that embrace forced labor as a means to their ends.