“The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.”

— A.J.P. Taylor

"Dissenting Rivals: Urquhart and Cobden", p. 55
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

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A.J.P. Taylor 15

Historian 1906–1990

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“In fact, it would be very easy to ‘prove’ Marx’s analysis to have been wrong, if experience had shown, for example, that the more capitalist industry develops, the smaller and smaller the average factory becomes, the less it depends upon new technology, the more its capital is supplied by the workers themselves, the more workers become owners of their factories, the less the part of wages taken by consumer goods becomes (and the greater becomes the part of wages used for buying the workers’ own means of production). If, in addition, there had been decades without economic fluctuations and a full-scale disappearance of trade unions and employers’ associations (all flowing from the disappearance of contradictions between Capital and Labour, inasmuch as workers increasingly become the controllers of their own means and conditions of production), then one could indeed say that Capital was so much rubbish and had dismally failed to predict what would happen in the real capitalist world a century after its publication.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

“The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

“When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State

“In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other.”

Kate Williams (historian) (1974) British historian

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-17945784
Meet the Author: Kate Williams
BBC
3 May 2012
2 May 2021

“The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932).Translated as “Those Damned Nazis: Why a Workers Party?

“Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
1930s

“The merchant sends the buyer far afield with instructions to invest... in... staples or novelties, as he thinks will interest the home public. He risks his money and a certain amount of prestige upon the judgment of the buyer... Much merchandise begins to depreciate from the day it arrives; practically none increases in value. The buyer then must learn to buy enough and not too much; to buy what will give satisfaction..; to pay not too much for what he buys; to know qualities and values... All this carries with it a certain speculative risk, but so certain does his judgment become, that the house conducted on scientific lines can estimate to a fraction of one per cent.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century

“The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers… It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Samuel Gompers, " Not Even Compulsory Benevolence Will Do http://books.google.com/books?id=3LVLAAAAYAAJ&dq=in%20reality%20the%20most%20potent%20and%20the%20most%20direct%20social%20insurance&pg=PA47#v=onepage&q=in%20reality%20the%20most%20potent%20and%20the%20most%20direct%20social%20insurance&f=false." The American Federationist. January 1917, p. 47.

“Those who suffer from this monopoly should form a libertarian anti-labour union movement of workers directed against what has long become a deceptive farce favouring an elite that has gained dominance in a party wrongly claiming to represent the interest of all workers. Once it is recognized that the unions prevent people from getting jobs, such a movement may readily spread.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"Jobs: the basic truths we have cast aside", The Times (7 August 1984), p. 10
1980s and later

“The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

From The Tyranny of Control, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980, vol. 2 transcript) http://www.freetochoosemedia.org/freetochoose/detail_ftc1980_transcript.php?page=2

“Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, Giving Labor The Business, p. 122
Dirty truths (1996), first edition

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A.J.P. Taylor 15

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