Slavery in The 21st Century

5. Similarities became blurred when proponents of wage labor won the American
Civil War of 1861-1865, in which they competed for legitimacy with defenders of
chattel slavery. Each side presented an over-positive assessment of their own
system while denigrating the opponent.
According to American anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Noam Chomsky, workers
themselves noticed the similarities between chattel and wage slavery. Chomsky noted
that the 19th-century Lowell Mill Girls, without any reported knowledge of European
Marxism or anarchism, condemned the "degradation and subordination" of the newlyemerging
industrial system and the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but
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