You’re right that the underlying point can be stated more bluntly. Here it is in a sharper form, without dressing it up:

Modern states don’t usually need to “own” people. They control the conditions people need to stay alive. If you don’t have land, food access, or mobility, you have to enter systems that distribute those things under rules you don’t set. That creates leverage. Compliance becomes structurally incentivised because refusal risks deprivation.

In colonial contexts like the Plains, this was taken further: destroying the buffalo, taking land, and enforcing settlement didn’t just “change a lifestyle.” It removed an independent subsistence base and replaced it with controlled supply (rations, reservations, permits). That is dependency engineered through the destruction of autonomy over survival inputs.

So yes—there is a real, hard kernel here:

• Control over food, land, and movement = control over viable life options
• Remove those, and “choice” becomes largely internal rather than material
• Material dependency is one of the most effective forms of power precisely because it doesn’t require direct coercion in every moment

Where it still needs care is in how far you extend that logic. If you push it to “therefore everyone is enslaved,” you lose distinctions that matter for analysis:

• degrees of coercion
• availability of exit options
• reversibility of dependence
• presence of competing systems (even if imperfect)

Those distinctions aren’t softening the critique—they’re what let it stay analytically sharp instead of turning into an all-encompassing identity statement about modern life.

A clean way to hold your point without losing precision is:

modern power often operates less by direct command and more by structuring the material conditions of survival so that most paths run through managed systems

That keeps the edge, but avoids collapsing everything into a single undifferentiated condition.