Quotes about laborer
page 9

“I have pleaded (labor's) case, not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”

John L. Lewis (1880–1969) American labor leader

Speech at United Mine Workers convention at Indianapolis (March 1940), quoted in Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren R. Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (1986), p. 278

Men

“Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. […] His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 108
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

Death

“I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I. I must say that so often in earlier times when I saw people of the lower classes, simple manual laborers who could believe so rightly with their hearts, I always envied them, and now tell me how does one begin this?”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

A reply to Rudolf Wagner's on his religious views as quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 305.

People, Time, Heart, Envy

“The rigors of membership in the Progress Labor Party and its Stalinist tendencies only create a mental brick wall for the members of the sect. The Progress Labor Party and its vacuum-minded Communists should not be marked for government control merely because they are Communists. The illegal actions of PL do,…”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 103

“The smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity — a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: "Institutional Economics," 1931, p. 652

Pleasure, Nature

“[A world-system is] a system that is a world and which can be, most often has been, located in an area less than the entire globe. World-systems analysis argues that the units of social reality within which we operate, whose rules constrain us, are for the most part such world-systems (other than the now extinct, small mini-systems that once existed on the earth). World-system analysis argues that there have been thus far only two varieties of world-systems: world-economies and world empires. A world-empire (examples, the Roman Empire, Han China) are large bureaucratic structures with a single political center and an axial division of labor, but multiple cultures. A world-economy is a large axial division of labor with multiple political centers and multiple cultures.”

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) economic historian

Immanuel Wallerstein (2004, p. 98), as cited in: Graham Scambler. Contemporary Theorists for Medical Sociology, 2012. p. 255

World, Reality, Parting

“Any cleric or monk who seduces young men or boys, or who is apprehended in kissing or in any shameful situation, shall be publicly flogged and shall lose his clerical tonsure. Thus shorn, he shall be disgraced by spitting in his face, bound in iron chains, wasted by six months of close confinement, and for three days each week put on barley bread given him toward evening. Following this period, he shall spend a further six months living in a small segregated courtyard in custody of a spiritual elder, kept busy with manual labor and prayer, subjected to vigils and prayers, forced to walk at all times in the company of two spiritual brothers, never again allowed to associate with young men.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 31:38. To Pope Leo IX, A.D. 1049. The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, Peter Damian: Letters 31-60, Owen J. Blum, tr., Catholic University of America Press, ISBN 081320707X ISBN 9780813207070, vol. 2, p. 29. http://books.google.com/books?id=3PkYNcU0k94C&pg=PA29&dq=%22Any+cleric+or+monk+who+seduces%22&hl=en&ei=lrZHTP3EHcL78Aac2uDWBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Any%20cleric%20or%20monk%20who%20seduces%22&f=false

Men, Boy, Business, Kiss

“The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Communication

“As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 111

Communication

“Every man who labored for the rebellion in the field, who murdered Union prisoners by cruelty and starvation, who conspired to bring about civil war in the loyal states, who invented dangerous compounds to burn steamboats and northern cities,, who contrived hellish schemes to introduce into northern cities the wasting pestilence of yellow fever, calls himself a Democrat. Every dishonest contractor who has been convicted of defrauding the government, every dishonest paymaster or disbursing officer who has been convicted of squandering the public money at the gaming table or in gold gambling operations, every officer in the army who was dismissed fur cowardice or disloyalty, calls himself a Democrat.”

Oliver P. Morton (1823–1877) American politician

Arraignment of the Democratic Party (June 1866)

Money, War, Game

“Plainly, the most powerful exception to the notion of a voluntary excahnge in a market economy is the labor market. The existence of a market for labor is one of the distinguishing features of a market economy: workers compete to sell their labor at the most favorable price—meaning, in practice, the highest possible wage. At the same time, however, it is clear that the market for labor is qualitatively different from the market for goods, because workers need to sell their labor to survive.”

Mimi Abramovitz (1941) non-fiction writer

Joel Blau and Mimi Abramovitz, The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy (Oxford University Press: 2010) p. 68

Time

“I see no reason why children as young as six, seven, or even three shouldn't be allowed to produce corporate comic books to relentless monthly deadlines. And have to write several titles at once to make a decent living. That's what a proper childhood's all about isn't it? This is the 21st century after all and these unruly little bastards have been milking post-Victorian sentimentality for all it's worth for way too long. Time to get kids back where they belong - up chimneys, down mines, and tied to the printing presses! If you can pick up a brick to smash a car window, then you can build me a textile factory, son … here's a whole half dollar for your day's labor. Now put down that Justin Timberlake bio-comic and get back on the production line!”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2003
http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597
On comics

Children, Books, Cars, Way

“By the 1990s, it was no longer possible to speak, with any intellectual integrity, of a Soviet Union of Stalin as having been informed by a ‘proletarian’ economic system, or possessed of a ‘working-class’ government. No more credence is invested in the Stalinist, Maoist, or Castro ‘proletarian state’ than was invested in the ‘proletarian’ character of the ‘German National Socialist Workers’ Party’ or the ‘Fascist State of Labor.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 6

“The major difference between the left and the right when it comes to any movement dedicated to overthrowing the free-market order—corporatist, authoritarian, etc.—is which groups will be the winners and which groups will be the losers. A left-wing system might empower labor leaders, government bureaucrats, progressive intellectuals, universities, certain minority groups, and one set of industries. A right-wing system might reward a different set of industries as well as traditional religious groups and their leaders, an ethnic majority, aristocrats, or perhaps rural interests. But both systems would be reactionary in the sense that they rejected the legacy of the Lockean revolution…”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Socialism is So Hot Right Now (2018)

Sense, Universe

“I don't know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies. I do know that we don't have free trade. What goes for 'free trade' is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies—national and transnational international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please. My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump and Trade," http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/trump-and-trade/ WorldNetDaily.com, March 11, 2016. 2010s, 2016

People, Health, World, Law

“Don't we hear nowadays objections on the part of the labor unions to importing goods from China, which are made with slave labor? Is the existence of slave labor not a reflection upon the idea of a free commercial society?”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

Idea, Parting

“A society’s stock of knowledge is structured in terms of what is generally relevant and what is relevant only to specific roles… the social distribution of knowledge entails a dichotomization in terms of general and role-specific relevance… because of the division of labor, role-specific knowledge will grow at a faster rate than generally relevant and accessible knowledge… The increasing number and complexity of [the resulting] sub universes [of specialized knowledge] make them increasingly inaccessible to outsiders.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p.77-87

Knowledge, Universe

“Any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this "working class" supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments [in the New Yorker] the fact that "Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway," he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren't the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

"The First White President" (October 2017)

People, Error, Support, Problem

“…another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

World

“In doing so, socialist, labor, and social democratic parties contributed to -- though they were not the sole authors of -- the development of the mixed economies that exist in advanced countries today. If these mixed economies are a far cry from the centralized systems that were created in Eastern Europe under Leninist rulers, they are also very far from the classical liberal model of a self-regulating market economy. If we look to the most advanced economies for guidance, then we should not allow ourselves to be misled by dogma about "free markets."”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 3 : Democracy and Markets

Cry, Country

“The greater part of the systematic soldiering, however, is done by the men with the deliberate object of keeping their employers ignorant of how fast work can be done.
So universal is soldiering for this purpose, or under any of the ordinary systems of compensating labor, who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Shop Management, 1903, p. 1351.

Men, Study, Universe, Time

“By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all "respectability" to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Two, The Concept Of the Economic Surplus, p. 25

“They think we should be more “spiritual;” that is to say, willing to live upon the labor of others; willing to ask alms, saying, in the meantime, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” If this is so, why not give the money back?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"The Brooklyn Divines." Brooklyn Union (Brooklyn, NY), 1883.

Money, Thinking

“Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Poétique

Art

“It is a self-evident truth that in a healthy community there is no place for the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless, or the improvident. As Professor Sumner, of Yale, asserts in his book. The Forgotten Man, 'Every part of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless, is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Truth, Books, Communication, Parting

“[One of my friends] was in labor for 36 hours. (I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.)”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

On childbirth
Essay 2, p. 7
Naked Beneath My Clothes (1992)

Feeling

“The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their [Javan] subjects, with less regard or consideration than a West India planter formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, because the latter had paid the purchase money of human property, which the other had not, employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labor, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous Government, by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians, and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders.”

Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) British statesman who founded Singapore

T.S. Raffles, The History of Java (London 1871), book 1, pg. 168. Here as quoted in the New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853 by Karl Marx https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm.

Money, People, Evil, Selfishness

“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 29

Life, Hostility, World, Education

“If a Martian were asked to pick the most efficient and humane economic systems on earth, it would certainly not choose the countries which rely most on markets. The United States is a stagnant economy in which real wages have been constant for more than a decade and the real income of the bottom 40 percent of the population declined. It is an inhumane society in which 11.5 percent of the population, some 32 million people, including 20 percent of all children, live in absolute poverty. It is the oldest democracy on earth but also one with the lowest voting rates among democracies and the highest per capita prison population in the world. The fastest developing countries in the world today are among those where the state pursues active industrial and trade policies; the few countries in the world in which almost no one is poor today are those in which the state has been engaged in massive social welfare and labor market policies.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Source: Journal of Democracy. Vol. 3, Nr. 3 (1992), p. 46

Children, People, World, Democracy

“In one sense, this is a healthy response because it recognizes that race matters and racism matter, and and create different experiences for people in this country. But there is also something important to be said for solidarity…. It's important to say that solidarity is not charity. Historically, solidarity has meant the recognition that all our struggles are connected. In the socialist movement and the labor movement, there's the old saying that "." The point is to understand that when the majority of people are divided and standing up for one another, the chances of losing are much greater--but when we stand together, we have a better chance of winning.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1950) American academic and author

The fight against racism doesn't stop here (2013)

People, Understanding, Sense, Chance

“True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

Part 2, Ch. 4.
Household Papers and Stories (1864)

Love, Life, Home

“Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Pt. I, sec. 2, ch. 1
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

“Within the world of total work, the "festival" is either "a break from work" (and thus only there for the sake of work), or it is a more intensive celebration of the principles of work itself (as in the "Labor Days," and thus belongs, again, to the working world). There will naturally be "games" — like the Roman circences — but who would dignify the amusements for the masses with the name of "festival"?”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 53

World, Game, Nature

“If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, "Why don't the women leave!" Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself, the politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live; when, through this precious monopoly, already the market of labor is so overstocked that workmen and workwomen are cutting each others' throats for the dear privilege of serving their lords; when girls are shipped from Boston to the south and north, shipped in carloads, like cattle, to fill the dives of New Orleans or the lumber-camp hells of my own state…”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Sex Slavery (1890)

Women, Stupidity, Girl, Hell

“While we are mindful of the shocking fact that less than one-half of all non-white workers are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, we do not speak for Negro workers only. A living wage should be the right of all working Americans, and this is what we wish to urge upon our Congressmen and Senators as they now prepare to deal with this legislation.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Statement on minimum wage legislation (18 March 1966)], as quoted in Now Is the Time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Labor in the South: The Case for a Coalition (January 1986)
1960s

““That is the principal thing,” thought Nekhludoff. “We all live in the silly belief that we ourselves are the lords of our world, that this world has been given us for our enjoyment. But this is evidently untrue. Somebody must have sent us here for some reason. And for this reason it is plain that we will suffer like those laborers suffer who do not fulfill the wishes of their Master. The will of the Lord is expressed in the teachings of Christ. Let man obey Him, and the Kingdom of the Lord will come on earth, and man will derive the greatest possible good.
“Seek the truth and the Kingdom of God, and the rest will come of itself. We seek that which is to come, and do not find it, and not only do we not build the Kingdom of God, but we destroy it.
“So this will henceforth be the task of my life!”
And indeed, from that night a new life began for Nekhludoff; not so much because he had risen into a new stage of existence, but because all that had happened to him till then assumed for him an altogether new meaning.”

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection (1899), Ch. 92

Life, God, Truth, World

“No amount of force will break an egg-shell if exerted on one side alone. So capital could not squeeze labor as long as labor was free to natural opportunities, and in a world where these natural materials and opportunities were as free to all as is the air to us, there could be no difficulty in finding employment, no willing hands conjoined with hungry stomachs, no tendency of wages toward the minimum on which the worker could barely live. In such a world we would no more think of thanking anybody for furnishing us employment than we here think of thanking anybody for furnishing us with appetites.
That the Creator might have put us in the kind of world I have sought to imagine, as readily as in this kind of a world, I have no doubt. Why he has not done so may, however, I think, be seen. That kind of a world would be best for fools. This is the best for men who will use the intelligence with which they have been gifted. Of this, however, I shall speak hereafter. What I am now trying to do by asking my readers to endeavor to imagine a world in which natural opportunities were "as free as air," is to show that the barrier which prevents labor from freely using land is the nether millstone against which labor is ground, the true cause of the difficulties which are apparent through the whole industrial organization.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Source: Social Problems (1883), Ch. 13 : Unemployed Labor

Men, World, Fools, Imagination

“The Government as Substitute Husband did for women what labor unions still have not accomplished for men. And men pay dues for labor unions; the taxpayer pays the dues for feminism. Feminism and government soon become taxpayer-supported women’s unions.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 344.

Women, Men, Support

“…organized labor…rushes to support the party without demanding a turn away from corporatism toward workers’ needs. This is the logic of the lesser of two evils. It tethers labor to a relentless slide deeper into the corporate power pits year after year.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

Green Party presidential candidacy speech (2000), Crashing the Party (2002)

Support, Evil

“I do not overlook the important contributions to economic theory in the past whether orthodox or heterodox I correlate them with institutional economics. The classical and communistic economists used as their measure of value the man hour of labor. This is evidently since the incoming of scientific management the engineering economics of efficiency. The Austrian and hedonistic economists deriving from Bentham used as the measure of value the diminishing marginal utility of consumption goods. This is evidently the home economics recently introduced in the college curriculum.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: "Institutional economics," 1936, p. 242

Home, Past

“Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Time, Dependency

“When Taylor began his efforts at the Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s, several members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers were likewise interested in labor management. Industrial capitalism was running up against renewed resistance from the growing ranks of labor, still committed to a sense of work integrity and craftsmanship. Task management, or scientific management as it came to be called, began to take shape in the eighties as the way to break the worker's threatening resistance. The heart of this approach is the systematic reduction of work into discrete, routinized tasks, totally separated from any policy decisions about the job. … For capitalism to be firmly in control, it must monopolize information and techniques as surely as it controls the rest of the means of production. The worker must be permitted only to perform certain specific narrow tasks as planned by management.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Source: Elements of Refusal (1988), p. 165

Way, Decision, Sense, Effort

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”

Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa

Teaching a “Racist and Outdated Text”: A Journey into my own Heart of Darkness, Wong, Melody, Western Washington University, 2008-09-20 http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v003n001/a025.shtml, [Britten, Sarah, The Art of the South African Insult, 30° South Publishers, 2006, 167, 9781920143053] Disputed

Time

“The only assurance that I can now give of the future is reference to the past. The course which I have taken in the past in connection with this rebellion must be regarded as a guaranty of the future. My past public life, which has been long and laborious, has been founded, as I in good conscience believe, upon a great principle of right, which lies at the basis of all things. The best energies of my life have been spent in endeavoring to establish and perpetuate the principles of free government, and I believe that the Government in passing through its present perils will settle down upon principles consonant with popular rights more permanent and enduring than heretofore. I must be permitted to say, if I understand the feelings of my own heart, that I have long labored to ameliorate and elevate the condition of the great mass of the American people. Toil and an honest advocacy of the great principles of free government have been my lot. Duties have been mine; consequences are God's. This has been the foundation of my political creed, and I feel that in the end the Government will triumph and that these great principles will be permanently established.”

Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) American politician, 17th president of the United States (in office from 1865 to 1869)

Quote, First Presidential address (1865)

Life, God, People, Feeling

“Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success. To the extent that the concept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old time did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-control, which does not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around. When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline. … There is a difference between expressing one’s self in form and producing quantity for a market with an eye to speculation. Péguy wished to know what had become of the honor of work. It has succumbed to the same forces as have all other expressions of honor.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 73-74.

Age, Way, Effort, Time

“Another of my wishes is to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Edmund Randolph (26 July 1785) https://books.google.com/books?id=zkRKqnxjbAoC&pg=PA199&dq=%22liberate+and+make+soldiers+at+once+of%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC4Q6AEwA2oVChMIyeyr5cPRxwIVDDU-Ch2IxQjN#v=onepage&q=%22liberate%20and%20make%20soldiers%20at%20once%20of%22&f=false 1780s

Dependency

“You gentlemen may laugh, but that is true, all right; it sounds ridiculous, I know, but it is fact. Now if the problem were put up to any of you man to develop science of shoveling as it was put up to us, that is, to a group of men who had deliberately set out to develop the science of all kinds of all laboring work, where do you think you would begin? When you started to study the science of shoveling I make the assertion that you would be within two days – just as we were in two days –well on the way toward development of the science of shoveling. At least you would outlined in your minds those elements which required careful, scientific study in order to understand science of shoveling. I do not want to go into all of the details of shoveling, but I will give you some of the elements, one or two of the most important elements of the science of shoveling; that is, the elements that reach further and have more serious consequences than any other. Probably the most important element in the science of shoveling is this: There must be some shovel load at which a first-class shoveler will do his biggest day’s work. What is that load? To illustrate: when we went to the Bethlehem Steel Works and observed the shoveler in the yard of that company, we found that each of the good shovelers in that yard owned his own shovel; they preferred to buy their own shovels rather than to have the company furnish them. There was a larger tonnage of ore shoveled in that woks than of any other material and rice coal came next in tonnage. We would see a first-class shoveler go from shoveling rice coal with a load of 3.5 ponds to the shovel to handling ore from the Massaba Range, with 38 pounds to the shove Now, is 3.5 pounds the proper shovel load or is the 38 pounds the proper load? They cannot both be right. Under scientific management the answer to this question is not a matter of anyone’s opinion; it is a question for accurate, careful, scientific investigation.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Testimony of Frederick W. Taylor... 1912, p. 111.

Men, Way, Understanding, Question

“Labor’s message then is this: we believe in a strong economy; we believe also in a fair go for all, not just for some.”

Kevin Rudd (1957) Australian politician, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

Rudd's first speech as Labor leader
2006

Strong

“Religion is immediate self-consciousness. It liberates the individual from the determinative forces of society. … It is effective only in individuals, where "in-dividuals" means whose who are undivided, that is, who are liberated from the psychological, social, and logical consequences of the division of labor in society and who actually live concretely and historically, unfettered by abstract norms.”

Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt (1928–2002) German theologian

"Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth"

Religion

“In principle, should the laborers have the produce of their labor? I do not hesitate to say: No! although I know that a multitude of workers will cry out. Look, proletarians, cry out, shout as much as you like, but then listen to me: No, it is not the product of their labors to which the workers have a right. It is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of those needs. To have the possession of the product of our labor is not to have possession of that which is proper to us, it is to have property in a product made by our hands, and which could be proper to others and not to us. And isn’t all property theft?”

Joseph Déjacque (1821–1864) French writer

Le Libertaire, No. 6, September 21, 1858 ( French http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/libertaire/n06/lib01.htm; English http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2011/12/joseph-dejacque-on-exchange.html)

Nature, Cry

“Global poverty is an "input" on the supply side; the global economic system feeds on cheap labor.”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 5, The Global Cheap-Labor Economy, p. 69 (See also: Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx)

“Men having capital, the product of labor to invest, form themselves into companies or associations and consolidate their capital that they may reap a greater profit from their investments … The men who labor, taking this action of the men of capital as a criterion to go by, have formed themselves into companies or associations that they reap a greater profit from the investment of their capital, which is labor. That capital of the former is the creation of man; that latter as the creation of God, and of the two is entitled to the most consideration, since no capital could exist unless labor created it.”

Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924) American mayor

"The Organization of Labor," http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=nora;cc=nora;g=moagrp;xc=1;q1=The%20Organization%20of%20Labor;rgn=full%20text;cite1=Powderly;cite1restrict=author;view=image;seq=0122;idno=nora0135-2;node=nora0135-2%3A2 North American Review, vol. 135, no. 2, whole no. 309 (Aug. 1882), pp. 118–9.

Men, God

“The President of the United States of necessity owes his election to office to the suffrage and zealous labors of a political party, the members of which cherish with ardor and regard as of essential importance the principles of their party organization; but he should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves the country best.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Inaugural Address (5 March 1877)

Country

“How does artificial intelligence refer to social relationships – for example, the functioning of one or another political system? Well, the evolution of the world is not a closed and completed process. For sure, we are awaiting a change in social relations due to moving of the labor market, especially as a result of transferring the burden of performing various activities on the devices. The invention of machines during the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in mass strikes and revolts, because many workers were afraid that they would be replaced by the machines. The societies has somehow coped with it. Will they defend themselves in the situation of the next step towards the automation of everything? It's an open matter.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Polish Press Agency (July 17, 2018): Polish Scientist warns against cyborgization perils https://polandinenglish.info/38094623/polish-scientist-warns-against-cyborgization-perils.

World, Intelligence, Change

“If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labor per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.”

Masanobu Fukuoka book The One-Straw Revolution

Source: The One-Straw Revolution (1975), Chapter 3, pp. 103-104

People, Food, Support, Winter

“I was also not willing to accept the orders of the leaders regarding my personal life or the personal lives of the other members. I had refused to allow the government to tell me how to live, so why should I allow the leadership of Progressive Labor to reorient my life?… Open criticism of the leadership dictums did not sit well with them, and they immediately began to accuse me of ‘trying to create a splinter group.’… The leaders became so paranoid over the issue of their ‘public image’ that they told members to shave their mustaches, wear coats and ties, forget the cowboy boots, be careful whom they are seen with, stay away from people who take dope, date only certain girls, attend classes regularly, and watch their language in public. Strange concerns, indeed, for Communists who at times attempted to pose as libertarians!”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 44

Life, People, Girl, Time

“It seems to me that entitlement is the key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred. The man who flayed the cat presumably felt that his employers were entitled to the cat's skin. Europeans felt that they were (and are) entitled to the land of North and South America. Slave owners clearly felt they were entitled to the labor (and the lives) of their slaves, not only in partial payment for protecting slaves from their own idleness, but also simply as a return on their capital investment. Owners of nonhuman capital today feel they, too, are entitled to the "surplus return on labor," as economists put it, as part of their reward for furnishing jobs, and to provide a return on their investment in capital. Rapists act on the belief that they are entitled to their victims' bodies, and entitled to inflict cruelty upon them. Americans act as though we are entitled to consume the majority of the world's resources, and the change the world's climate. All industrialized humans act like they're entitled to anything they want on this planet.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 105-6

World, Feeling, Cats, Change

“Deny it as may the cunning capitalists who are clear-sighted enough to perceive it, or ignore it as may the torpid workers who are too blind and unthinking to see it, the struggle in which we are engaged today is a class struggle, and as the toiling millions come to see and understand it and rally to the political standard of their class, they will drive all capitalist parties of whatever name into the same party, and the class struggle will then be so clearly revealed that the hosts of labor will find their true place in the conflict and strike the united and decisive blow that will destroy slavery and achieve their full and final emancipation.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

Understanding, Decision

“[A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.”

C. Wright Mills book White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Source: White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), P. 65.

People

“Excessive toil occurred only where the masters or overseers were feeble witted as well as brutal. A persistent rumor among abolitionists was that sugar planters followed a policy of working slaves to death in seven years as a matter of economy. The persons spreading such reports were as ignorant of Negro nature as they were of conditions in the sugar mills. Furthermore, they overrated the ability of the masters to know how to kill a slave in the given time instead of leaving him a broken-down burden to the plantation. When they set out to prove the accusation they returned with no evidence, but convinced that the practice existed in some obscure region which they had not succeeded in ferreting out. Harriet Martineau, after watching slaves go through the motions of work without tiring themselves, considered the planters as models of patience and observed that new slave owners from Europe or the North were prone to be the most severe. Numerous observers, of various shades of opinion on slavery, agreed that brutality was no more common in the black belt than among free labor elsewhere, and that the slave owners were the worst victims of the system.”

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

The Making of America (1986)

Death, Nature, Time, Personality

“I think the place to start is to recognize the individual's quality of incompleteness, of being an unfinished product. The vestiges of the past are brought into the present in one's consciousness, and a continual labor is necessary to eradicate them.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Thinking, Past

“The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

147
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Communication

“Somehow, white South Africans believed that black labor was like a lawn mower: you could have it around, and when you didn’t need it, you could hide it in its little shed where it would be good and quiet-until you needed it again.”

Arthur Kemp (1962) British writer

The Lie of Apartheid

“Organization design is conceived to be a decision process to bring about a coherence between the goals or purposes for which the organization exists, the patterns of division of labor and interunit coordination and the people who will do the work.”

Jay R. Galbraith (1939–2014) American business theorist

Jay R. Galbraith (1977). Organization design. p. 5

People, Decision

“En route to Tokyo in 1945 to embark on the occupation of Japan, U. S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur laid out his goals for Japan to his aide, Maj. Gen. Courtney Whitney: "First destroy the military power, then build up representative government, enfranchise women, free political prisoners, liberate farmers, establish free labor, destroy monopolies, abolish police repression, liberate the press, liberalize education, and decentralize political power."”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

The transformation of North Korea will require nothing less.
https://foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/16/life_after_kim
Life After Kim
February 16, 2010
Foreign Policy
March 1, 2013
https://www.webcitation.org/6EyqdXfyA?url=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/16/life_after_kim?page=full
March 9, 2013
no

Women, Education

““Paid off? Do you mean bribery?”
“That is, umm, not an entirely pleasant word for it.” Dreschler’s doughy face took on a pained expression. “It is more in the nature of an advance payment to ensure the labor force will be satisfied with the negotiated wage schedules.””

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 15, “The Abortion” (p. 265)

Pain, Nature

“On Marx’s view an individual is flourishing when … he labors freely, meaning that work is an end-in-itself, and not merely a means to “earn a living.””

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

“Morality Critics”

“The last few decades have witnessed a growing integration of the world system of production on the basis of a new relationship between less developed and highly industrialized countries. The effect is a geographical dispersion of the various production stages in the manufacturing process as the large corporations of industrialized "First World" countries are attracted by low labor costs, taxes, and relaxed production restrictions available in developing countries.
This collection of papers focuses on inequalities among different sectors of the labor force, particularly those related to gender, and how these are affected by the changing international division of labor.”

June Nash (1927–2019) American anthropologist

Book summary
Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, 1983

World, Change, Country

“I am glad to be able to fortify my position on this point by the great name and ability of Theophilus Parsons, of the Harvard Law School. In discussing the necessity of negro suffrage at a recent public meeting in Boston, he says: "Some of the Southern States have among their statutes a law prohibiting the education of a colored man under a heavy penalty. The whole world calls this most inhuman, most infamous. And shall we say to the whites of those States, 'We give you complete and exclusive power of legislating about the education of the blacks; but beware, for if you lift them by education from their present condition, you do it under the penalty of forfeiting and losing your supremacy?' Will not slavery, with nearly all its evils, and with none of its compensation, come back at once? Not under its own detested name; it will call itself apprenticeship; it will put on the disguise of laws to prevent pauperism, by providing that every colored man who does not work in some prescribed way shall be arrested, and placed at the disposal of the authorities; or it will do its work by means of laws regulating wages and labor. However it be done, one thing is certain: if we take from the slaves all the protection and defence they found in slavery, and withhold from them all power of self-protection and self-defence, the race must perish, and we shall be their destroyers."”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

World, Education, School, Law

“In 1950, I received my PhD in psychology. I was offered a fellowship to attend the Graduate School of Public Health at the that I had previously studied in clinical and abnormal psychology. Reflecting this disappointment, I entitled my Public Health Practice thesis Mental Health Is Not the Opposite of Mental Illness. After receiving my master’s degree in public health, I took a job as research director for Psychological Services of Pittsburgh. A local industrialist came to see me after a nasty labor relations disturbance and asked me plaintively, ‘What do people want from their jobs?’ I answered him in typical academic fashion, ‘Sir, I don’t know but if you give me enough money I will find out.’. I followed up on my School of Public Health thesis by designing a study to test the hypothesis that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction were separate concepts. The result was the book, The Motivation to Work, which led to a fundamentally different approach to the study of people’s affective states.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Frederick I. Herzberg in: "This Week’s Citation Classic," in: CC, Nr. 19, May 7, 1984; Re-published in: Neil J. Smelser (1987) Contemporary Classics in the Social and Behavioral Science. p. 199

Money, People, Health, Books

“Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass unemployment, machines get the blame anew. This fallacy is still the basis of many labor union practices. The public tolerates these practices because it either believes at bottom that the unions are right, or is too confused to see just why they are wrong. The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Curse of Machinery (ch. 7)

Effort, Time

“Socialism, when it attempts to predict or imagine the future (which Marx refused to do, since he conceived of a path, not a model), provides us merely with an improved form of labor”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

salaries and material conditions on the job
Henri Lefebvre (1970/2003) The Urban Revolution p. 110.
Variant:
Marx... conceived of a path, not a model.
As cited in: "Anti-Capitalist Meet Up: Henri Lefebvre looks out into space" at dailykos.com, 2012.04.29
Other quotes

Imagination, Future

“Unlike Arafat or Nasir, Sadat had been an avid admirer of Hitler… In assessing Sadat's enthusiasm for Hitler, however, it should be noted that unlike the many Zionist leaders (of both the Labor and Revisionist camps) who collaborated with the Nazis, some up to 1941 but others as late as 1944, Sadat only supported them from afar.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in "Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2000
On Alleged Zionist Collaboration with Nazi Germany

Support

“The finest achievement of the new woman has been personal liberty. This is the foundation of civilization; and as long as any one class is watched suspiciously, even fondly guarded, and protected, so long will that class not only be weak, and treacherous, individually, but parasitic, and a collective danger to the community. Who has not heard wives commended for wheedling their husbands out of money, or joked [about] because they are hopelessly extravagant? As long as caprice and scheming are considered feminine virtues, as long as man is the only wage-earner, doling out sums of money, or scattering lavishly, so long will women be degraded, even if they are perfectly contented, and men are willing to labor to keep them in idleness!

Although individual women from pre-historic times have accomplished much, as a class they have been set aside to minister to men's comfort. But when once the higher has been tried, civilization repudiates the lower. Men have come to see that no advance can be made with one half-humanity set apart merely for the functions of sex; that children are quite liable to inherit from the mother, and should have opportunities to inherit the accumulated ability and culture and character that is produced only by intellectual and civil activity. The world has tried to move with men for dynamos, and "clinging" women impeding every step of progress, in arts, science, industry, professions, they have been a thousand years behind men because forced into seclusion. They have been over-sexed. They have naturally not been impressed with their duties to society, in its myriad needs, or with their own value as individuals.

The new woman, in the sense of the best woman, the flower of all the womanhood of past ages, has come to stay — if civilization is to endure. The sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, maternity has deepened her, education is broadening her — and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works.”

Winnifred Harper Cooley (1874–1967) American author and lecturer

The New Womanhood (New York, 1904) 31f.

Women, Men, Money, Children

“Only empirical work - analysis based on observation and experience as opposed to theory - can answer the question of how labor force behavior is affected by changes in the tax system. Even intense armchair speculation on this matter must be regarded with considerable skepticism.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 2, Tools of Positive Analysis, p. 22

Behavior, Question, Change

“To Lincoln, slavery undercut the free labor outlook on the world because it denied advancement and self-improvement. For Lincoln, the great attraction of any economic regime was the degree to which it permitted accumulation and self-promotion. He once described the ideal system as being one where the penniless beginner starts out working for somebody else, accumulates capital on his own by dint of savings, goes into business for himself, and then eventually becomes so successful that he hires others, who in turn continue the cycle. And he spoke of that as being the order of things in a society of equals. For him, the very notion of equality is a matter of equality of openness, aspiration, and opportunity.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

World, Business, Success

“The other conclusion is that art is the complement of science. Science as I have said is concerned wholly with relations, not with individuals. Art, on the other hand, is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the artist but also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past. Some artists in their vision of what might be, but is not, have been conscious rebels. But conscious protest and revolt is not the form which the labor of the artist in creation of the future must necessarily take. Discontent with things as they are is normally the expression of the vision of what may be and is not, art in being the manifestation of individuality is this prophetic vision.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Art, Science, Past, Future

“The Soviet leaders accused Comrade Stalin of allegedly interfering in other parties, of imposing the views of the Bolshevik Party upon others. We can bear witness to the fact that at no time did comrade Stalin do such a thing towards us, towards the Albanian people and the Party of Labor of Albania, he always behaved as a great Marxist, as an outstanding internationalist, as a comrade, brother and sincere friend of the Albanian people. In 1945, when our people were threatened with starvation, comrade Stalin ordered the ships loaded with grain destined for the Soviet people, who also were in dire need of food at that time, and sent the grain at once to the Albanian people. Whereas, the present Soviet leaders permit themselves these ugly deeds.”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Speeches, Moscow Address

People, Food, Time, Sincerity

“If my serenade of song and story should serve as a pillow for some composer's head, as yet perhaps unborn, to dream and build on our fond melodies in his tomorrow, I have not labored in vain.”

W. C. Handy (1873–1958) American blues composer and musician

Profiles In Black http://www.theblackmarket.com/ProfilesInBlack/WCHandy.htm

Dreams

“The suburban housewife — she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife — freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother … had found true feminine fulfilment.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 1 "The Problem That Has No Name"

Women, World, Dreams, Science

“Be firm and do not fear war. For that peace which some are so urgently pressing upon us is not peace but war. And the war for which I am so insistent is peace, not war for I do not thirst for the blood of anyone, nor will I drink it even in case of tumult. This is the end I have in view - the enervation of the oligarchy. Unless this takes place neither the truth of the Gospel nor its ministers will be safe among us. I have in mind nothing cruel, but what I do is friendly and paternal. I desire to save some who are perishing through ignorance. I am laboring to preserve liberty. Fear nothing; for we shall so manage all things with the goodness and the alliance of God that you shall not be ashamed nor displeased because of us.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, 1529, ibid, p.301

God, War, Truth, Fear

“In faxt, the old Marxist distinctions between productive and unproductive labor, as well as that between productive and reproductive labor, which were always dubious, should now be completely thrown out.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

135
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“The only society in which it is remotely possible for people to design their lives in the manner Marx fantasizes is one that is incredibly rich and incredibly free. We are nowhere near there yet, but it’s worth pointing out that if you plucked any laborer from another era and toured him or her around America today, they’d think that we were remarkably close.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, A Free People Must Be Virtuous (2018)

People, Thinking

“Politics and strategy are one. Nations should live in an atmosphere of self-criticism because it is healthy, but always with one heart and one mind. Stoop to the unhappy, and lift them up in your arms! Thaw out frozen America with the fire of your hearts! Make the natural blood of the nations´ course vigorously through their veins! The new American are on their feet, saluting each other from nation to nation, the eyes of the laborers shining with joy. The natural statesman arises, schooled in the direct study of Nature. He reads to apply his knowledge, not to imitate.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Our America (1881)

School, Nature, Knowledge, Study

“Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general, is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of “justice,” or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the social and economic relationships for which it is designed. The right of suffrage worked out by the Soviet government is calculated for the transition period from the bourgeois-capitalist to the socialist form of society, that is, it is calculated for the period of the proletarian dictatorship. But, according to the interpretation of this dictatorship which Lenin and Trotsky represent, the right to vote is granted only to those who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Russian Revolution (1918), Chapter Five, "The Question of Suffrage"

Justice

“Come on, Amelia. We are not really British. We do not have to look down our noses at honest labor.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Fugitives of Chaos (2006), Chapter 18, “Festive Days on the Slopes of Vesuvius” (p. 285)

“Seven years Jacob served as a shepherd
for Laban, lovely Rachel's father,
laboring not for the father but
anxious only for her as his reward.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Sete anos de pastor Jacob servia
Labão, pai de Raquel, serrana bela;
Mas não servia o pai, servia a ela,
E a ela só por prémio pretendia.
tr. Landeg White
Lyric poetry, Não pode tirar-me as esperanças, Sete anos de pastor Jacob servia

Love

“Rothbard is surely right in thinking that what we now call free-market libertarianism was originally a left-wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing—feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business—were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals. … I like calling the free market a left-wing idea—in fact, I like calling libertarianism the proletarian revolution.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Rothbard's 'Left and Right': Forty Years Later," http://bastiat.mises.org/library/rothbards-left-and-right-forty-years-later Rothbard Memorial Lecture, Austrian Scholars Conference (2006).

Idea, Business, Thinking

“Our minds must have relaxation: rested, they will rise up better and keener. Just as we must not force fertile fields (for uninterrupted production will quickly exhaust them), so continual labor will break the power of our minds. They will recover their strength, however, after they have had a little freedom and relaxation.”

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

On Tranquility of the Mind

Freedom

“Consider that as a principle of love is the main principle in the heart of a real Christian, so the labor of love, is the main business of the Christian life.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 396.

Love, Life, Business, Heart

“In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been.
It is also to Europe's credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: 'Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit… Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.'
The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.”

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) economic historian

Wallerstein (1974) The Modern World-System, vol. I, p. 233.

People, World, Way, Imagination

“The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredicatble, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. … The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowes the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

130
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Time

“Inflation and Employment in capitalist countries, in my own view, the change is the other way around: the constraints on the pressure of demand tend to be excessive, with the result that unemployment is much greater than can be justified by the needs of resource-allocation, and the rate of economic growth is appreciably less than it could be.
The main reason for this is that the distribution of power and, ultimately, the distribution of incomes, changes in favor of labor the faster the economy grows and the nearer it is to full employment, and over a longer period it changes in favor of capital the greater the volume of unemployment. This is the real reason why the continuance of Keynesian policies after the war led to a recrudescence of long-discredited ideas that go by the name of “monetarism.” The main attraction of monetarism was not its intellectual simplicity— inflation is a matter of the money supply, period— but that it elevated the fear of inflation to the unique position which could not be justified by the experience of numerous countries who habitually suffer from it.”

Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986) British/Hungarian economist

Nicholas Kaldor, Economics without Equilibrium (1985), p.37-38

Money, War, Fear, Way

“Thanks to slavery, in the South capital and labor were combined in nearly four million sweating field hands picking cotton and planting rice.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 21

“Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

"An Ideal Labor Press," The Metal Worker (May 1904)

Age, World, Time, Sun

“In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an “untrue” and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the “natural” function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. … Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 127-128

Life, Truth, Way, Nature

“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Quoted in Time magazine December 8, 1930
Other

Thinking

“It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free, and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labor-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved.
It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…
That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 4 “Dependency Principle” section III (p. 122).

World, Way, Error, Intelligence

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

L. P. Jacks (1860–1955) British educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister

Misattributed to Chateaubriand on the internet and even some recently published books, this statement actually originated with L. P. Jacks in Education through Recreation (1932)
Misattributed

Education, Art, Appearance, Drawing

“He [Tolstoy] tried to persuade his wife to permit him to give away every penny of his possessions, to leave their large house, and to live in a peasant's cottage, where together they could share the manual labor of a small farm. The Countess was a most devoted wife but in this she could not follow her husband. …The Countess had to suffer all the trials which it is said the wife of every artist and genius must suffer and, in addition, some of those that must come to the wife of any man who tries to follow literally in modern society the teachings of Jesus. …He felt so keenly the opposition of his wife and children that he was led to believe what he said repeatedly—that the institution of the family was one of the greatest obstacles to a truly Christian life.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 38-41

Life, Children, Family, Suffering

Quotes about laborer page 9

Quotes about laborer
page 9