Make No Mistake

The Slave Wars Have Begun

And so, the slave war—a twisted civil war—has begun. It’s not a united fight against the bosses, but brothers turned against each other: the producers, taxed to the bone, clashing with the dependents, trapped in handouts. The state stirs this conflict to stay in power, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a bloody scramble over scraps, while the real masters—financiers and elites—watch from afar as society tears itself apart, forcing a painful rebirth or even harsher chains.

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Herbert Spencer, in 1884, perceived with piercing clarity that socialism, in whatever guise, leads inexorably to slavery—not the overt bondage of the past, but a subtler form where labor is compelled to satisfy the desires of another, whether that other be an individual or society itself. “The severity of his slavery,” he wrote, “varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society.”

We’ve congratulated ourselves on abolishing the older cruelties, yet in the United States and the United Kingdom and all of the West as of January 2026, we’ve surely and utterly quietly entered the servitude Spencer foresaw. The plantation hasn’t vanished; it’s been reconfigured. The new plantation’s the welfare state itself: a system sustained by the votes of a dependent class, which in turn grants politicians the power to extract from a productive class. This isn’t conspiracy but a logical outcome of deindustrialization, financialization, the erosion of wages and the unchecked rise of the bureaucratic state at the careful manipulations of rent seeking monopolists. The masters are distant—executives, investors, and the political class—while the slaves are divided into two interdependent classes: those who still produce, compelled to yield their surplus, and those made dependent, whose votes secure the continuation of the system.

The Vanishing of Productive Labor
Manufacturing employment peaked at 19.6 million in 1979. By late 2025, it had fallen to roughly 13 million, a decline of more than one-third amid a population growth of over 100 million. This number not all taking into account the 100 million illegal and fraudulent immigrants brought in during the same period. These are not mere numbers; they represent the disappearance of pathways to self-sufficiency. A high-school graduate once could enter a union shop, earn a living wage, buy a home, raise a family, and retire with dignity. That world has been dismantled.

Capital discovered higher returns in destruction than in creation: close the plant, relocate, pocket the savings, borrow against remaining assets for dividends or buybacks, and repeat. Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) now claim over 20 percent of the economy, up from 12 percent postwar. Another 20 percent for healthcare. Value is no longer produced; it is extracted, leveraged, and securitized. The productive base shrinks while the financial superstructure expands, leaving a hollowed-out middle class increasingly reliant on government support.

The Stagnation of Wages
Since 1979, net productivity has risen more than 80 percent. Yet real hourly wages have grown by less than 20 percent, with median real weekly earnings essentially flat over four decades. A worker in 2026 buys roughly what a worker bought in 1980—only now it often requires two incomes, debt, or both. The dwindling fruits of labor flow locally to governments and upward to shareholders and executives, while workers’ purchasing power remains stagnant. Full-time work no longer guarantees escape from precarity, pushing more into supplemental programs and deepening the welfare state’s reach.

The Dual Classes of Slaves: Producers and Dependents
This is Spencer’s gradation made manifest.

The first class comprises those who still produce—truck drivers, nurses, warehouse workers, remaining factory hands, small business owners. They labor under coercion no less real than chains: income taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, and inflation’s hidden burden claim a growing share of their earnings. That share is transferred through an expanding welfare apparatus to the second class: those rendered surplus by deindustrialization, intentional mis- and dis- and simply inadequate education, unable to find dignified work at living wages.

The second class is told they are free, even privileged—recipients of “benefits,” “entitlements,” “safety nets.” Yet their freedom is illusory. Subsistence is calibrated to keep them just comfortable enough not to revolt, just desperate enough not to escape. Eligibility rules discourage savings, marriage, or modest gains; fear of losing support traps them in managed dependency. Spencer would recognize this as qualified slavery: the slave given just enough to remain efficient, and no more.

The political cycle completes the plantation. Dependency correlates with electoral behavior. Politicians court this bloc with promises of sustained or increased benefits, securing votes that grant the mandate to tax more aggressively. The state becomes the overseer, collecting from producers to pacify dependents, while the true owners of capital—executives, private-equity partners, hedge-fund managers—pay lower effective rates and reside where the yoke is lightest.

The Breaking Point
This arrangement is fragile. Arithmetic forbids its indefinite continuation.

The productive class shrinks while dependents grow. Every recession, plant closure, or asset-price surge swells the second class. Public debt mounts, pension systems strain, medical costs soar. Producers are told to work longer, pay more, receive less—because the system “cannot afford” otherwise.

When realization crystallizes, withdrawal begins: skilled tradesmen work for cash, small business owners close or relocate, young people decline families. Labor-force participation falls, tax revenue erodes. The state, desperate to maintain the transfer machine, raises rates, tightens enforcement, floods communities with welfare state supported foreign masses, and mobilizes dependents as political enforcers against producers: vote for us, or the benefits end.

We’ve seen precursors: populist uprisings, trucker convoys, farmers blockading cities, riots in major cities. Producers refuse; dependents, fearing loss of their pittance, are arrayed against them. The state chooses sides—not from ideology, but necessity. It has no choice but to protect the system that sustains it, to feed the monopolies that created it.

The Path Forward: The Inevitable Conflict
The path forward, as of this writing, appears to lead to an inevitable civil war—a slave revolt of a perverse kind. It will not be a united uprising of the oppressed against the masters, but a fratricidal war orchestrated from above. The dependent slaves and the productive slaves, both bound to the same decaying system, are being set against one another.

The state, functioning as the plantation steward, will have no choice but to direct the violence downward, channeling the desperation of the dependent class against the resistance of the productive class. The conflict is being framed as a fight over resources—benefits versus taxes, “fair shares” versus “selfishness”—obscuring the fact that both groups are being drained to serve the distant masters of monopolists, financiers and political power.

This war won’t be a clean revolutionary struggle, but a bloody, demoralizing struggle of neighbor against neighbor, community against community. It’s the terminal phase of Spencer’s prophecy: when the system can no longer expand, it turns its slaves upon each other to maintain control. The violence will be a final, grotesque mechanism of extraction, consuming the remaining social capital and productive energy until the plantation itself collapses from within, leaving the masters to salvage what they can from the ruins. The path forward, therefore, isn’t toward liberation, but through a crucible of mutual destruction, from which a new form of society—or a deeper, more explicit bondage—will eventually have to emerge.