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Sections (Content) :
• 1
...this inevitable concentration of ownership into an ever smaller number of hands -- the ineluctable consequences of which would be to partition society once and for all into a tiny, overweaningly opulent, educated, ruling minority and a vast majority of impoverished, ignorant, enslaved proletarians.
• 2
Slavery can change its form and its name -- its basis remains the same. This basis is expressed by the words: being a slave is being forced to work for other people -- as being a master is to live on the labor of other people.
• 3
Are you aware that the workers -- who create all wealth, who have made civilization and fought for liberty -- are doomed to live in misery, ignorance, and slavery? Do you understand that the main root of all the evils that the workers experience, is poverty? And that poverty -- which is the common lot of the worker -- in all parts of the world -- is a consequence of the present economic organization of society, and especially of the enslavement of labor -- i.e. the proletariat -- under the yoke of capitalism -- i.e the bourgeoisie?
• 4
Slavery may change its form or its name -- its essence remains the same. Its essence may be expressed in these words: to be a slave is to be forced to work for someone else, just as to be a master is to live on someone else's work. In antiquity, just as in Asia and in Africa today, as well as even in a part of America, slaves were, in all honesty, called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of serfs: nowadays they are called wage earners. The position of this latter group has a great deal more dignity attached to it, and it is less hard than that of slaves, but they are nonetheless forced, by hunger as well as by political and social institutions, to maintain other people in complete or relative idleness, through their own exceedingly hard labor. Consequently they are slaves. And in general, no state, ancient or modern, has ever managed or will ever manage to get along without the forced labor of the masses, either wage earners or slaves, as a principal and absolutely necessary foundation for the leisure, the liberty, and the civilization of the political class: the citizens. On this point, not even the United States of North America can as yet be an exception.
• 5
...the economic issues between the oligarchy and the people were of the classical sort -- abuse of privilege on the one side, and rather unconstructive resentment on the other.
• 6
...the Peasants are little better then Slaves, because they can possess nothing but at the will of others.
• 7
Through the unprophesied and unprophesiable operation of institutions which no individual of us created, but found in existence when he came here, these workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal -- to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.
• 8
If the worker is not entitled to all he produces, then what share is anybody else entitled to?
• 9
Then he says; If I am born into the earth, where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.
'Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,' cry all the gentlemen of this world; 'but you may come and work in ours, for us, and we will give you a piece of bread.'
• 10
We live in societies, where men must be rich, in order to be great; where pleasure itself is often pursued from vanity; where the desire of a supposed happiness serves to inflame the worst of passions, and is itself the foundation of misery; where public justice, like fetters applied to the body, may, without inspiring the sentiments of candor and equity, prevent the actual commission of crimes.
Mankind come under this description the moment they are seized with their passions for riches and power. But their description in every instance is mixed: in the best there is an alloy of evil; in the worst a mixture of good.
• 11
...[let's] deny that capital has any just claim to the large share of the national produce now bestowed on it. This large share he has endeavored to show is the cause of the poverty of the laborer...
• 12
I cannot see how any man who does nothing -- who lives in idleness -- can insist that others should work ten or twelve hours a day. Neither can I see how a man who lives on the luxuries of life can find it in his heart, or in his stomach, to say that the poor ought to be satisfied with the crusts and crumbs they get.
• 13
Any man who wishes to force his brother to work -- to toil -- more than eight hours a day is not a civilized man.
• 14
As long as you endure it all with resignation, you will be fodder for the capitalists!
If you do not believe me, you will see for yourselves!
• 15
...social economy, which today is merely the sanctification of capitalist robbery...
• 16
...as long as dwelling-houses, fields, and factories belong to isolated owners, men will have to pay them, in one way or another, for being allowed to work in the fields or factories, or for living in the houses.
• 17
It grows evident that the appropriation by a few of all riches not consumed, and transmitted from one generation to another, is not in the general interest. We can state as a fact that owing to these methods the needs of three-quarters of society are not satisfied, and that the present waste of human strength is the more useless and the more criminal.
• 18
... capital goes wherever there are men poor enough to be exploited.
• 19
We preach the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but we practice an undemocratic, un-republican, unchristian, and inhuman luxury and monopoly created for us by the people at the cost of dehumanizing hardship and poverty for countless thousands.
• 20
The truth is the people of this country are being bled to death by the exactions they are forced to pay on their food, fuel, power, heat, light, telegrams, telephones, freights, travel, street-car rides, insurance, and hundreds of other things without which life in this modern world would be impossible.
• 21
...we can apply it [the Labor Theory of Value] to what the worker sells on the market -- his labor-power -- and find out that the worker is not and never will be paid "by results"; that is to say, by the total wealth or value-equivalent of what he produces. His wage is paid on "the cost of living", and his cost of living is far less than the wealth or the value he contributes to the world's stock.
• 22
Let there be as much class struggle as one wishes, if by class struggle one means the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters for the abolition of exploitation. That struggle is a way of moral and material elevation, and it is the main revolutionary force that can be relied on.
• 23
The landowner in the strict sense, who is neither a peasant nor a tenant farmer, has no share in production. Consumption on his part is, therefore, nothing but abuse.
• 24
All [workers to the Capitalists] are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
• 26
The existence of a class which possess nothing but the ability to work is a necessary presupposition of capital.
• 27
The spectacle of little children engaged in gainful occupations is one that should suggest an inherent imperfection in our social institutions. The normal mind perceives it with a shock, yet failing to carry the analysis of conditions to a logical conclusion men and women are content for the most part to follow the mere philanthropic impulses of the heart while ignoring the tremendous challenge which the spectacle presents to the intellect. For there is no more obvious and formidable indictment of our civilization than this.
• 28
...parasitic speculation...is such a pronounced feature of the system of fixed exchanges.
• 29
In one respect, at least, modern technology could hardly be more ingeniously fashioned than it is for depriving men of the exercise of their character as men. From the beginnings of the 'industrial revolution' men have become progressively more specialized in a narrow range of tasks whether they work in an office, factory or laboratory. Whatever the particular skill empolyed, all the other qualities fo man, important enough in earlier times -- qualities like courage, loyalty, perserverence, integrity, resourcefulness, attributes that once entered heavily into his future and into the esteem in which he was held -- have begun to lose their value in this unheroic push-button age. In the serious business of earning a living, the other parts of men count for very little. If he were born today, a Robin Hood, a Buffalo Bill, a Clive of India, a Lawrence of Arabia, would probably be a nonentity. There must be, living among us now, tens of thousands of men who in bygone ages would have been glad to venture forth across the oceans, to fight their way through forests, to push back frontiers and to found colonies and settlements, men who in the daily toil and hazard would discover comradeship and vindicate their manhood. Today they must perforce lead obscure and sedentary lives far removed from the restless force of nature, slumped in anonymity, imbibing synthetic visions from the meretricious flicker of a television screen.
• 30
There is a marked reluctance in financial and government circles to face the fact that price stability is apparently inconsistent with a 98 percent level of employment, at least in the absence of near-total controls.
• 31
Though to speak plainly my real sentiments, I must freely own that as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily: not justly, because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few (and even these are not in all respects happy), the rest being left to be absolutely miserable.
• 32
Economic exploitation -- the result of the monopolization of the land, raw materials and means of production by the capitalists and landlords -- is at the bottom of the present misery.
• 33
But the fact is that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is far worse than if they had been born before civilization begin, had been born among the Indians of North America at the present.
• 34
Capitalism means that the productive apparatus is in the hands of the capitalists. Because they are the masters of the means of production, and hence of the products, they can seize the surplus value and exploit the working class. Only when the working class itself is master of the means of production does exploitation cease. Then the workers control entirely their conditions of life.
• 35
Neither natural nor cultural barriers halt the spread of Capital, the transformation of people's daily activity into alienated labor, the transformation of their surplus labor into the "private property" of capitalists. However, Capital is not a natural force. It is a set of activities performed by people every day. It is a form of daily life. Its continued existence and expansion presuppose only one essential condition: the disposition of people to continue to alienate their working lives and thus reproduce the capitalist form of daily life.
• 36
What could he who lacks the necessities when he's working do when he loses his job? He has only to let himself die of hunger. Then they'll throw a few pious words on his corpse.
• 37
The terms of the social compact between these two estates of men may be summed up in a few words. "You have need of me, because I am rich and you are poor. We will therefore come to an agreement. I will permit you to have the honor of serving me, on condition that you bestow on me the little you have left, in return for the pains I shall take to command you."
• 38
A weak and exploitable humanity has perpetuated itself for the benefit of its Machiavellian masters.
• 39
...the instant wages cease to be a bargain -- the instant the laborer is paid, not according to his value, but his wants, he ceases to be a freeman.
• 40
Whenever he [the worker] bargained with a master-workman for the exchange of labor against subsistence, the condition he stood in was always disadvantageous, since his need of subsistence and his inability to procure it of himself, were far greater than the master's need of labor; and therefore he almost constantly narrowed his demand to bare necessaries, without which the stipulated labor could not have proceeded...
• 41
Yes, there is a fraud, committed for the sake of those accustomed to live on the sweat and blood of other men, and who therefore have perverted, and still pervert, Christ's teaching, given to man for his good, but which has now, in its perverted form, become a chief source of human misery.
• 42
It is not true that these factory women are free to contract. When one side can say to the other, "Work on these terms or lose your job," "Work or starve," the contract is not free.
• 43
...a carnage which continues for one reason, and one reason only, and that is because the people of this country don't realize what is involved, and they can't see the blood on the food that they eat, and on the things that they buy, and on the services they get.
• 44
...among them the knowledge is spreading, that they must not look for their enemy across the frontiers, or across the North Sea; no, their implacable foe is entrenched in the institutions of their own Fatherland. It is Capitalism, it is the power of the possessing classes to exploit and rule the laboring people. They know this monstrous power is the common enemy of the wage-earners, the laboring people in all countries.
Chronology :
April 11, 2020 : Exploitation -- Added.
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