This is a problem that comes up with a lot of white people who try to deny the horrors of slavery. They point out that all cultures and races have had slavery throughout history. The chattel slavery of the Atlantic Slave Trade in the Americas was particularly brutal in that it was racialized and that they enslaved the children of slaves, which created institutional pressure for slaves to have kids. A lot of the awful conditions were particularly bad, even by slavery’s terms, because of these pressures. There was no situation in which a white person could become so poor or unfortunate that, not only would they become enslaved, but all of their children and their children’s children would become slaves. There was also not situation in which a white person could be so poor or unfortunate that they would spontaneously change race. The torture and murder this enabled is what most modern westerners think about when they think of slavery, which is why the comparison is at least misguided. But I do think that in terms of prior forms of slavery, that wage slavery is an apt comparison. The whole point is that markets put an abstraction over top of the exploitation