“Even the slave owner is restricted in his ability to manipulate his labor supply, for he must protect his investment in slaves by feeding them during times when they do not labor. In contrast, capitalist entrepreneurs can hire and fire laborers or very their wages in response to changing circumstances.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 12 The New Laborers, p. 356.

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Eric Wolf24

American anthropologist 1923–1999

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Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

Source: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 162

“In the management of slave labor the gang system predominated. The great majority of owners, having at the most only one or two families of Negroes, had to work alongside their slaves and set the pace for them. Slavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient. The slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken. If the owner got ahead of the gang they all would shirk behind his back.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

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“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”

Friedrich Engels book The Communist Manifesto

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George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

August 22
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Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

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“The worker is no longer the slave to his reproductive urge. He is a free bargaining agent who enters the market to dispose of the one commodity he commands — labor power — and if he gets a rise in wages he will not be so foolish as to squander it in a self-defeating proliferation of his numbers.
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Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Source: 1860s, Second State of the Union address (1862)
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Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 550.

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Eric Wolf24

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