I'm very late to the party here, but in the context of Debt, I see why you're dunking and people in the comments aren't. Graeber had such a great ability to take some bit of our reality that we take for granted and shatter it with historical context. In a historical context that extends beyond the shallow memory of living in capitalism, we would all be horrified by what the dad is doing here. Because wage labor was seen as worse than slavery. Shit, this is effectively identical to this bit I just read in BS Jobs where Graeber points out that the historical context of wage labor was people selling the time of their slaves. In that context, here the dad is subjecting the son to a labor experience fundamentally more similar to slavery than any other, to teach him the lesson that labor generates value. If we weren't so used to it, it would be obviously cruel.