I'm afraid the Ironborn economy confuses me. They spit on those who buy things, but they don't buy, how do they get anything? They can't raid that much to support (I think) a million and a half people, they don't produce much food (Theon says the farmers have the hardest life). What, exactly, keeps these islands going?
The way to understand the Ironborn economy is to understand that it functions under massive cognitive dissonance: the vast majority of the population actually works for a living, they're fishermen and farmers and miners and merchants and craftsmen, etc. The Iron Islands aren't the richest of the Seven Kingdoms - as I've said before, they're likely the poorest - but they have industry and trade and fishing and some farming.
The issue is that they have this lunatic ruling class that insists that Ironborn absolutely should not be doing any of the productive activity that actually makes the Iron Islands' economy function, and that ruling class has this whole ideology (the Old Way) that gets into the heads of even a bunch of the people who aren't part of the ruling class, such that you have a whole bunch of fishermen who show up to the Kingsmoot and chant along with the rest, because owning a fishing boat means you're a reaver at heart and certainly not some New Way member of the working class.
It’s true that the ironborn live under a massive cognitive dissonance built from marking one sort of labor as essentially different and lesser than another, which allows them to continue the practices of reaving and sexual slavery. However...
“Ironborn” were people who were not thralls.
Thralls were people captured from reaving: plundering coastal and even inland locations of precious materials and people made into thralls and saltwives. And the thralls are the ones who did the all the mining, all the farming, most of the crafting.
Reaving was the most prestigious, respected, and sought after labor/role. Fishing is next.
And thralls weren’t really considered to be ironborn (especially considering how “ironborn” could not be reaved themselves or lose their status/identity).
Two important quotes:
The endless stoop labor of farm and field was suitable only for thralls. The same was true for mining.
and about fishing being important:
The soil of the Iron Islands is thin and stony, more suitable for the grazing of goats than the raising of crops. The ironborn would surely suffer famine every winter but for the endless bounty of the sea and the fisherfolk who reap it.
In AWoIaF, pgs 176-178
Pics:
There is no “working class” in ASoIaF or in any real-life medieval period. Peasants were not working class, but proto-working class.
Marx, Marxists and socialists define the working class as those who have nothing to sell but their labor-power and skills.
Thralls did and could not sell their labor or use it as a bargaining chip in negotiations. There was no systematic room for negotiations.
They are quite literally only a step above slaves since the ironborn had complete and utter authority over whether they lived or died, and maintained that system through force and religious perpetuation. Their status is similar to female war prizes like Alys Rivers, and in truth, all thralls were war prizes. It defines them.
While unlike “chattel” slaves in that they could own property, could have kids, their kids were not thralls, and married however they wanted (as long as it wasn’t a noble women or some freedman’s wife, etc), they still belonged to ironborn masters and their lives were in their hands directly.
While Yandel says “rights”, a right is a thing that is either granted by the government’s laws OR, like human rights, is an unchanging human guarantee of security and dignity. Thralls had no dignities except what their masters gave them. The real-life industrial working class, though at first unprotected by legal rights, still had protections because they were not seen as possessions brought from force. So it would be far accurate more accurate to say that those described by OP are enslaved laborers with more privileges.
While the thralls are similar to the industrial working class and it’s safe to say that they are symbolically so, in reality the two are different.