Exploiter

“ Government and exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards. Those who refuse to stand in with them are persecuted and occasionally executed when they give any trouble to the exploiters. They fall into poverty when they lack lucrative specific talents. ”

“ Our next division represents those who do work of a kind—‘mental’ work if you like to call it so—work that benefits themselves and harms other people. Employers—or rather Exploiters of Labour; Thieves, Swindlers, Pickpockets; profit seeking share-holders; burglars; Bishops; Financiers; Capitalists, and those persons humorously called ‘Ministers’ of religion. ”

“ Why should the sense of justice be lower among the masses who have risen against their age-long exploiters, and who are being educated and hardened by this desperate struggle, than among the handful of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and lawyers brought up in bourgeois prejudices? ”

“ There is, in fact, but one crime in the universe and all varieties of impropriety whatsoever are aspects or phases of this crime. It is the crime of exploitation—the suppression of the interests, lives, or welfares of some beings for the whim or convenience of others—the neglect to recognize the equal or the approximately equal rights of all to life, consideration and happiness—the crime of doing to others as you would that others would not do to you. ”

“ It seems a long way from my dainty music-bench to the iron range, or the stove-factory. One has to feel exploitation perhaps before one understands it. I console myself with the thought that power is itself mystic, and that my friend will have to get hit with some invisible threat of classforce, as some of his frightened friends are now getting hit, before he will analyze any deeper that industrial system of which he is so efficient and loyal an officer. ”

“ MY western friend who runs a prosperous stove-factory has been finding fault with my insistent use of the word " exploitation." My outlook on life is not sufficiently cheerful, and I am inclined to see malevolence where everything is, as they say at college, healthy, hearty and happy. ”

“ Capitalist industry, in which his father played a growing part, was symbolized by the employer's fingers, like a legitimatized sneak-thief's, perpetually in the laborer's pocket-book. It was all the worse that accepted morality, law, even the church, pronounced it righteous. ”

“ But if something now has a legal right to us, and can enforce its proprietorship, they've been warned off. It's the way of all exploitation. I should say that we're now under cultivation: that we're conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our own nobler and higher instincts. ”

“ These include those who profit off the place—the landlord, agent, janitor, amusement dealer, brewer, and furniture dealer; those who profit off the act—the keeper, procurer, druggist, physician, midwife, police officer, and politician; those who profit off the children—employers, procurers, and public service corporations; those who deal in the futures of vice—publishers, manufacturers, and vendors of vicious pictures and articles; those who exploit the unemployed—the employment agent and employers; a group of no less than nineteen middlemen, who are profit-sharers in vice. ”

“ That is why I can never make him understand what I mean by "exploitation." He thinks of it as something personally brutal. He does not see it inherent in a system, for which no one is "specifically to blame" only because all are equally guilty of short vision and flimsy analysis. ”

“ Would slave masters keep slaves, if they could not sell the products of their labor? Certainly not.
Who create and support this demand? The consumers of slave produce.
What then are slave masters? Merely mercenaries, who when tempted or hired by the consumer, conduct or do the dreadful work, which must be done, before the consumer, the tempter, can be gratified. ”

“ As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable, noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit, and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are unworthy, debasing, ignoble. ”

“ The theory of exploitation, or robbery, as explaining the employer's profits, is very commonly held in a more or less vague way by workmen. With a body of intelligent and thoroughly honest workmen, keenly alive to the truth, the dangers, and the risks of the enterprise, coöperation would be possible in many industries where now it is not. ”

“ The means of production thus came into the hands of an ever decreasing number, while the actual producers, through the introduction of machinery, deprived of the opportunity to toil, and being at the same time disinherited of the bounties of nature, were consigned to pauperism, vagabondage—the so-called crime and prostitution—all these evils which you gentlemen would like to exorcise with your little prayer book. ”

“ The earnings of the prisoner were handed over by the gaols to the Society, and the Society employed them for his advantage—always, in the case of an artisan, by supplying him with the needful implements of his trade. But relief in which the pauper has no productive share, of which he is but a mere consumer, is of no avail. ”

“ If it is my society only that you want, you have certainly taken very strange means to procure it. A thief could have set no neater trap, and if it is money you want, state your sum and let me go, for my time is valuable and my society likely to be unpleasant. ”

“ The more powerful, and the richer among them,—and a numerous class of little tradesmen are richer and more powerful than those who are employed by them, and the employer, in general, bears this relation to the employed,—regard their own wrongs as, in some degree, avenged, and their own rights secured by this punishment, inflicted as the penalty of whatever crime. ”

“ But wealth can be created only by laboring; wealth is nothing but the proceeds of labor.
Therefore,
To have comfort, in the lady and gentleman sense, in the sense in which our new luxury-mad upper class is determined to have it, means that one must “appropriate”—that is, steal—the proceeds of the labor of others.
First corollary: That the more “comfortable” the upper class becomes, the more of the proceeds of the labor of others it must be stealing. ”

“ Of all the unmerciful impositions that ever were laid upon bumb-labour, none ever so highly afflicted, or so insupportably oppress us, the retailers of copulation, as this intolerable society, who have brib’d those who were our pimps to forsake our interest; and have made those scoundrels who were our meanest servants, our implacable masters; who come in clusters like cowardly bailiffs to arrest a bully; distrain our commodities for want of money to pacify their greedy avarice ”

“ they exploit them. ”

“ MEN sold, bartered, leased, mortgaged, bequeathed, invoiced, shipped in cargoes, stored as goods, taken on executions, and knocked off at public outcry! Their rights another's conveniences, their interests, wares on sale, their happiness, a household utensil; their personal inalienable ownership, a serviceable article, or plaything, as best suits the humor of the hour; their deathless nature, conscience, social affections, sympathies, hopes, marketable commodities! ”

“ For direct exploitation the creditors of the Khedive have recourse either to hired labourers, or to agents and " middle- men," who arrange with the village headmen for the hands required to till the land. ”

“ If in the great fortunes of the stockjobbers, the railroad kings, the bankers, the great landlords, and the other moneyed lords who boasted that they had begun life with a shilling--if in these great fortunes of mushroom rapidity of growth there was anything that was properly the product of the efforts of any one but the owner, it was not his, and his possession of it condemned him as a thief. If he would be justified, he must not be more careful to obtain all that was his own product than to avoid taking anything that was not his product. ”

“ How easy for him to enter a shop with his polygonal front foremost, and to order goods to any extent from a confiding Tradesman! Let the advocates of a falsely called Philanthropy plead as they may for the abrogation of the Irregular Penal Laws, I for my part have never known an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to be—a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power—a perpetrator of all manner of mischief. ”

“ Wherever exploitation exists, whether in the new world or the old, it exists by means of a governmental organization which its beneficiaries control and use to protect their privileges against the expropriated and exploited masses. ”

“ The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material product—commonly some article of consumption. In the case of exploit it is similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible result that may serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or booty. At a later phase of the development it is customary to assume some badge of insignia of honour that will serve as a conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and which at the same time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of which it is the symbol. ”

“ They may, by stretching their understandings a little wider, comprehend, that all those who by undertaking large quantities of manufacture, and affording employment to many labourers, make themselves considered as benefactors to the publick, have only been robbing their workmen with one hand, and their customers with the other. ”

“ If the crime had been the taking an individual from another, then the term used would have been expressive of that relation, and most especially if it was the relation of property and proprietor!
The crime is stated in a three-fold form—man stealing, selling, and holding. All are put on a level, and whelmed under one penalty—DEATH. This somebody deprived of the ownership of a man, is the man himself, robbed of personal ownership. ”

“ The I. D. B. moving in society, probably now the manager of a digging company, or a licensed buyer, but nevertheless a rank hypocrite who has worked his way through all grades of rascality to a certain position, wishes by associating with men of acknowledged social status to avoid suspicion, and therefore, as a matter of tact, he rails against the illicit trade and preaches morality ad nauseam. ”

“ The laborer who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property-owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, "wading in straw and rubbish to his knees." ”

“ For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the Power ”

“ But, whatever such circumstances may be in origin, the effects of them are generally the same; the worker who is incapable of adjusting himself to his new industrial surroundings has few alternatives before him. These alternatives, unless he is supported by his family or relations, resolve themselves into the Union, beggary, or theft. ”

“ Are not much grosser Exorbitancies to be feared on the other Side, when the lowest Artificers, Husbandmen, and Labourers, are made Judges in their own Cause; and when it is left to their own Discretion, to exact what Price they please for their Labour, of the poor Farmer or Clothier; of whom if they cannot exact an extravagant Price, they will fly to that Alternative which Idleness often prefers, of Begging or Stealing? ”

“ Because, by a series of robberies which, though sometimes legal, are none the less real, the productive forces, as fast as they have come into play, have been appropriated by privileged persons who, thanks to this instrumentum regni, control labor and exploit laborers. ”

“ Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The performance of productive work, or employment in personal service, falls under the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction in this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other hand. Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity imputed to it. ”

“ Thus the cellular system bears hard upon the honest classes, both by its enormous cost, under the form of taxation, and by competition with free and honest labour. The competition is moral in the first place, for the criminal is always assured of daily work, lodgings, and food, whilst the honest workman is assured of neither. ”

“ It cannot be wondered at, that this general inquest into abuses should arise in the bosom of society, when one considers the practical impediments that stand in the way of virtuous young men. The young man, on entering life, finds the way to lucrative employments blocked with abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. ”

“ Theft, however, like any other act of appropriation, sets up union between the person appropriating, and the article appropriated. Ownership, by the process of thought I have endeavoured already to trace, is in fact union; and injury inflicted upon a man’s property is in a literal sense inflicted on himself. ”

“ Fifthly, the wholesale robbery of the labor of another, and of all its fruits,—forgetful, that, by the same original law under which every man has a title to himself, he has also a title to the fruits of his own labor, amounting in itself to a sacred property, which no person, howsoever called, whether despot or master, can righteously appropriate. ”