There is a still more deep-seated form of violence, and that is the strong hand of the power of money. This is the hidden dictatorship in a capitalist society. They do not use violence upon a man directly, in a noticeable fashion. The life of a man depends upon money, the most impersonal, the most unqualitative power in the world, and the most readily convertible into everything else alike. IT is not directly, by way of physical violence, that a man is deprived of his freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, and freedom of judgment, but he is placed in a position of dependence materially, he finds himself under the threat of death by starvation and in this way he is deprived of his freedom. Money confers independence; the absence of it places a man in a position of dependence.
But even the man who possesses money find himself in a state of servitude and he is exposed to an unnoticed form of violence. In the Kingdom of Mammon, man is controlled to sell his labour and his labour is not free. Man has not known real freedom in labour. The labour of the artisan has been more free, relatively speaking, and so has intellectual labour, which by the way, has also been exposed to unnoticed violence. But the mass of human beings has served its time in total toil which is servile, in forced labour, in the new slave labour of the capitalist world, and in bond-service after the pattern of the communist society. Man remains ever more and more a slave.
Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom. Trans. R.M. French (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 65-6.
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