Forced labor

“ An attempt to introduce some new system of forced labor, not, perhaps, exactly slavery in its old form, but something similar to it, would probably draw consequences after it of the most serious nature. Such is at present the disposition of a large majority of the whites. ”

“ The liquidation of forced labor and the granting to the laborers a real right to free labor which creates their material well-being, the confirmation of a wage for all types of labor in an amount that can support an appropriate standard of living. ”

“ The proletariat has arisen; and wherever the struggle of the laborers has taken definite form, the bourgeois codes have been convicted of falsehood. Written judgment has shown itself powerless to save the wage-workers from the oscillations of the market, to guarantee women and children against the oppressive hours of the factories, or to find an expedient to solve the problem of forced idleness. The partial limitation of the hours of labor has, itself alone, been the subject and the occasion of a gigantic struggle. ”

“ The Socialist Movement, or the Third American Revolution, has for its accomplishment the overthrow of private property in social wealth, machinery and land, and the abolition of the Wage System, a form of general slavery whereby men profit and grow fat out of the hunger-enforced labor, and hence out of the lives of others. ”

“ In periods of commercial revulsion and distress, like the present, the distress, in countries of free labor, falls principally on the laborers. In those of slave labor, it falls almost exclusively on the employer. ”

“ No longer may they claim the right to run their own business, to beat down the laborer's standard of living for the sake of increased profits, to dictate terms of employment to individual workers, to wax righteously indignant when organized labor takes a hand in their business. ”

“ Everywhere you hear the laborer, the artisan, the clerk complain of his position and his occupation, while they long for the time when they can retire from work imposed upon them by necessity. To be repugnant, to have for its motive and pivot nothing but the fear of starvation, is the great, the fatal, characteristic of civilised labor. The civilised workman is condemned to penal servitude. So long as productive labor is so organized that instead of being associated with pleasure it is associated with pain, weariness and dislike, it will always happen that all will avoid it who are able. ”

“ That the economic subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence ”

“ The whole force of the organized power of the government is thrown against the workers, whom the so-called better class denominates a mob. Now, when the workers of America refuse to starve according to law and order, and when they begin to think and act, why, the street drill begins. The enslavers of labor see the coming storm. They are determined, cost what it may, to drill these people and make them their slaves by holding in their possession the means of life as their property, and thus enslave the producers. Workingmen—we mean women, too,—arise! ”

“ Civilization has done little for labor except to modify the forms of its exploitation.
Labor has always been the mudsill of the social fabric—is so now and will be until the class struggle ends in class extinction and free society.
Society has always been and is now built upon exploitation—the exploitation of a class—the working class, whether slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and the exploited working class in subjection have always been, instinctively or consciously, in revolt against their oppressors. ”

“ Yes, certainly, it is an evil; but in the same sense only in which servitude or hired labor is an evil. To gain one's bread by the sweat of one's brow, is a curse. But it is a curse attended with a blessing. It is an evil that shuts out a greater evil. Labor for wages, labor for subsistence, and subjection to the authority of employer or master, are the conditions on which alone the laboring masses, white or black, can live with advantage to themselves and to society."—De Bow's Review, Jan. ”

“ In varying degrees, now in outright abuse and again in sneering and ridicule, the working class was held up as an ignorant, discontented, violent aggregation, led by dangerous agitators, and arrogantly seeking to upset all business by seeking to dictate to employers what wages and hours of labor should be.
And, after all, little it mattered to the capitalists what the workers thought or said, so long as the machinery of government was not in their hands. ”

“ But when you make of the laborer a slave, degrade his work to a mere fight for bread, harass him by continual debt, put him in a vile tenement house that smothers all holy ambition, labor has no longer dignity, it smells rather of the dungeon and the pit. ”

“ There is no silver lining to the clouds of darkness and despair settling down upon the world of labor.
This system offers only a perpetual struggle for slight relief from wage slavery. It is blind to the possibility of establishing an industrial democracy, wherein there shall be no wage slavery, but where the workers will own the tools which they operate, and the product of which they alone should enjoy. ”

“ What has labor conquered up to date in the United States? The inquiry is fruitful of thought. What is the testimony of the labor press of the country, corroborated by statistics which defy contradiction? It is this, that the land is cursed with wage slavery—with the condition that labor, which, according to the proverb, “conquers everything,” is itself conquered and lies prostrate and manacled beneath the iron hoofs of a despotism as cruel as ever cursed the world. ”

“ It is almost ridiculous to hope much from present society when we consider that workingmen, wage slaves themselves, object to convict labor. I shall not go into the cruelty of this objection, but merely consider the impracticability of it. To begin with, the opposition so far raised by organized labor has been directed against windmills. Prisoners have always worked; only the State has been their exploiter, even as the individual employer has been the robber of organized labor. ”

“ I am of those who believe that an organization of workingmen, to be efficient, to meet the demands of this hour, must be organized upon a revolutionary basis; must have for its definite object not only the betterment of the condition of workingmen in the wage system, but the absolute overthrow of wage slavery that the workingman may be emancipated and stand forth clothed with the dignity and all other attributes of true manhood. ”

“ Truth, before it can speak, is strangled by power. YET the big fact looms up, like a mountain above the morning mists; organized wealth has conspired to enslave Labor, and—in enforcing its will—it stops at nothing, not even midnight murders and wholesale slaughter. ”

“ The handicraftsmen thronged the factories and under the new "divine" (?) right of contract, sold their labor-power at whatever price the Capitalists chose to pay for it. Property in the lands and tools of production still continued. The Wages System was, in essence, another form of servitude, and fiercely aggravated by the fact that the payment of the stipulated wage cancelled all the obligations between the man and his master. The freedom so loudly proclaimed was, for the workers merely a freedom to change from a bad master to a worse one, or at the worst to starve. ”

“ With eyes that have been opened, Labor abroad is conscious of its revolutionary mission, and it is striving constantly, despite a thousand timidities and mistakes, towards the only way to solve the labor problem, towards the abolition of the capitalist system and the establishment of a proletarian regime. ”

“ The degradation of the idea of labor, which results inevitably from enslaving the working class, operates to a great extent in preventing respectable working men of the middling classes from settling or remaining in slave states. ”

“ But I re-assert that there are some things which are worse than strikes, and among them I include a degraded, a debased, or a demoralized manhood.
Labor insists upon and will never surrender the right to free locomotion, the right to move at will, the right to go from Philadelphia to Camden or California, or vice versa, at will. To achieve that right it has cost centuries of struggles and sacrifices and burdens. Laborers, moreover, will insist upon the right freely to change their employment, a right which they have secured through centuries of travail and sacrifices. ”

“ He must be fought [239] and destroyed. There is no form of mediation or conciliation possible between the worker and his employer. Conditions must, therefore, be made intolerable for the capitalist. Work must be done badly. ”

“ There is nothing strange in the fact that, in spite of the enormous increase in productive power which this century has witnessed, and which is still going on, the wages of labor in the lower and wider strata of industry should everywhere tend to the wages of slavery—just enough to keep the laborer in working condition. ”

“ This then is another source of antagonism between slave and free institutions.
3d. A third point, not only of difference, but also of antagonism between slave society and free, consists in the permanent contraction or limitation of the field of labor in the former, and its perpetual expansion and multiplication of the branches of industry in the latter. Not only does the slave perform as little work as he can with safety, but besides this, the sphere in which slave [Pg 639] labor can be profitably employed is a limited one. ”

“ Then the workers will be the sovereign-citizens, the rulers of this earth. They will build houses and live therein; they will plant vineyards and eat the fruit thereof. The labor question will have been settled, and the working class, emancipated from the fetters of wage-slavery, will begin the real work of civilizing and humanizing the human race. ”

“ The workers [336] crave its protection, seek its guidance, and possess a sense of security only when supported by its solidarity. Only something as intuitively impelling as the desire for life could have called forth the labor and love and sacrifice that have been lavishly expended in the disheartening and incredibly tedious work of labor organization. The upbuilding of the labor movement has seemed at times like constructing a house of cards: often it was hardly begun before some ill wind cast it down. It has cost many of its creators exile, imprisonment, starvation, and death. ”

“ It is the principle of personal liberty again. To English notions, and to English courts, indefinite labor continued for an indefinite time, or applied to an indefinite number of services, is indistinguishable from slavery; and compulsory labor even under a definite labor contract, such as to work for a week or a month or a year, or in limited directions, as, for instance, to work at making shoes or weaving cloth, when enforced by the strong arm of the law, smacked too much of slavery to be tolerable by our ancestors. ”

“ Our capitalists, some of the slave-owning blood, and all inheriting its attitude, feel less equality: they see labor still as their slaves. Ultimately this will help awaken our people; but now——"
"That's the hell of it; we ain't got the public with us. What with petty union squabbles, and all—it's a job to make a dent in a saint's patience."
"Any chance of a sympathetic strike?"
"What can you do with Bowden and these yellow pups?"
The enthusiasm of the workers, dragged down physically by the hard rigors, slipped lower and lower. ”

“ There were plenty of them indeed who had heard the defendant say that in his opinion the wage system was all wrong, that wealth obtained from the product of labor should be fairly divided between the capitalist and the workman, and that his sympathies in the present industrial conflict were entirely with the men, all of whom should be permitted to resume their old places on their own terms. ”

“ In all other important countries, particularly in Europe, Organized Labor has awakened to the revolutionary character of the working class movement. It has come to acquire a revolutionary point of view regarding private property, the State, the wage system, the class struggle, and capitalist society generally. It knows that the wrestlings between the workers and the capitalists are but so many incidents of a revolutionary struggle in which either side seizes from the other all that it has the power and intelligence to take. ”

“ The laborers who place themselves under the control of some organized Union are in fact its slaves, the victims of designing theorists and cunning managers, who are themselves drones in the human hive. The ordinary workman does not think for himself; he does not realize that the less he gives for his day's wages the dearer must become those articles that [Pg 204] are dependent upon labor. ”

“ They gather presumably to "discuss and help to solve the labor problems" but in fact to partake of the flesh pots they have stripped from labor, to pull the wool over the eyes of the wage workers so that the chains of wage labor may be linked ever more secure on the limbs of our class, that our hopes and ideals may be dragged in the mire and capitalists given assurance of a long day more of safe and contented slavery on the part of the wealth producers. ”