Wage slavery names a real historical constant, not just a metaphor

Evidence

Hence, ‘the dialectical process had to be described in terms of perennial categories, which needed only to be modified to apply, for instance, to the modern, rational, form of society. This is why, in Marx, such expressions as “wage slavery”, which he applied to free wage labor, are something more than metaphors’. Rather, they are the expression of the historical constant of relations of dominance and exploitation, from slavery to wage-labour. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1456

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains why Marxian terms like ‘wage slavery’ are literal categories of the historical constant of domination, not rhetorical metaphors.
• XREF: Directly serves the book’s revisionist project: Adorno’s insistence that Marx’s categories are perennial constants anticipates the critique-of-political-economy reading versus the historical-teleology reading.