Pauper labor

“ We now approach a yet more thorny subject than the organisation of the workers. What should be the remuneration of labor—what the share of the product taken respectively by the individual, the municipality, and the State?
The answer depends on the answer to a previous question. Is the organisation of the unemployed to be undertaken in order to transform them into self-supporting, self-respecting citizens; or is it to be carried on as a form of exploitation, utilising pauper labor for the production of profit for non-paupers? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are insulted and embittered and degraded by being forced to accept as paupers what they would gladly earn as workers. What they ask is not charity, but the opportunity to use their own labor in satisfying their own wants. ”

“ A dim consciousness of this pervades—or, rather, is beginning to pervade—the masses, and constitutes one of the grave political difficulties that are closing in around the American republic. Those who have nothing but their labor, and especially the proletarians of the cities—a growing class—care little about the prodigality of government, and in many cases are disposed to look upon it as a good thing—“furnishing employment,” or “putting money in circulation.” ”

“ Can it be that the gifts of the Creator may be thus misappropriated with impunity? Is it a light thing that labor should be robbed of its earnings while greed rolls in wealth—that the many should want while the few are surfeited? ”

“ Such selfish, absorbing, and destructive agitations could evidently find no place under institutions, which, instead of offering dazzling prizes to the few, should, on the contrary, secure to each individual, without discrimination, the full enjoyment of his right to labor, to hire capital on which to labor, and to hold all the legitimate fruits of his labor. ”

“ In a country where the wages of labor are high beyond all parallel, and where lands are cheap, and the means of living low, they would teach the laborer that he is but an oppressed slave. Sir, what can such men want? What do they mean? They can want nothing, Sir, but to enjoy the fruits of other men's labor. They can mean nothing but disturbance and disorder, the diffusion of corrupt principles, and the destruction of the moral sentiments and moral habits of society. A licentiousness of feeling and of action is sometimes produced by prosperity itself. ”

“ Question—Is it right to speak of wage-slavery, for instance, in cases where the hours of labor are so prolonged as to leave no time for higher interests, or where the relations of the laborer to his employer are such as to impair his moral independence? ”

“ Well I the unquestionable result of all the facts collected, unseen, shunned, covered by the economists with their silence, is that pauperism is constitutional and chronic in society as long as the antagonism between labor and capital continues, and that this antagonism can end only by the absolute negation of political economy. ”

“ Come with me and I will show you where men and women work from morning till night, from week to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of their powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor—aye, destitute—have for their wages a crust of bread and rags. I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using the strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep at night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted, and fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, and the broken drudges filter through the poor-house or the prison to a felon’s or a pauper’s grave! ”

“ He was dealing with men as ignorant and hard as the timber it was their life to cut, and he painted the picture in all the crude, lurid colors most effective to their dull senses. The blessings of liberal employment, of ample wages, the kindly efforts made to add to their happiness and improve their lives were ignored, even rigorously shut out of his argument, or so twisted as to appear definite sins against the legions of labor. For such is the method of those who live upon the hard-earned wages of the unthinking worker. ”

“ 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 ”

“ And until the working class becomes conscious of itself as the only class that has a right to be, until the worker understands that he is exploited and bound by the power which his own unpaid labor places in the hands that exploit and bind him ... ”

“ There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society against it because of these patent faults, and closes the hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the Gradgrinds—"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."
Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults. These faults spring largely out of the defective social conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed. ”

“ This question, so legitimate while it concerns those precautions which each ought to take to assure his subsistence by his labor, becomes pernicious as soon as it passes its limits and dominates the whole life. This is so true that it vitiates even the toil which gains our daily bread. I furnish paid labor; nothing could be better: but if to inspire me in this labor I have only the desire to get the pay, nothing could be worse. A man whose only motive for action is his wages, does a bad piece of work: what interests him is not the doing, it's the gold. ”

“ It has been calculated that only two per cent in every community succeed in reaching the pauper class. The tendency is for all the labors of the working-class to be ultimately turned upon the unfortunate wealthy class. ”

“ And here I shall use his own words: "The laboring class compose the bulk of the people; the great body of the people; the vast majority of the people—these are the terms by which English writers and speakers usually describe those whose only property is their labor."
"Of comprehensive words, the two most frequently used in English politics, are distress and pauperism. After these, of expressions applied to the state of the poor, the most common are vice and misery, wretchedness, sufferings, ignorance, degradation, discontent, depravity, drunkenness, and the increase of crime ”

“ Instead of these fraternal relations, we have had pride, jealousy, and perjury; the employer, like the vampire of the fable, exploiting the degraded wage-worker, and the wage-worker conspiring against the employer; the idler devouring the substance of the laborer, and the serf, squatting in filth, having no strength left but for hatred.
Called on to furnish for the work of production, these tools, those labor, capitalists and laborers are today in a struggle: why? Because absolutism presides over all their relations ”

“ Why not give them at once the wages of their labor? Is it to be supposed that a man will work more for fear of the lash than he will for the sake of an adequate reward? As a matter of policy, and to escape personal violence, or the destruction of one's property, it were well not to urge them—ignorant, savage, and slavish, as they are—into rebellion. ”

“ Why are all the laborers to be petted and coddled, and the capitalists held up to execration? Good Lord, isn't there any pity for the rich man without his drop of water, in the Bible or out? Are all creation born with blinders on, and can they only see before their noses?”
“What are you talking about, Robert?” said Risley, laughing a little.
“I say why should all the sympathy go to the workmen who are acting like the pig-headed idiots they are, and none for the head of the factory, who has the sharp-edged, red-hot brunt of it all to bear?” ”

“ And, on the other hand, I saw thousands of people who do not work, who produce nothing and live on the labor of others; who spend every day thousands of francs for their amusement; who debauch the daughters of the workers ”

“ The Labor Problem is with us quite as acutely as it was with the Romans when long ago the plebeians left the city and camped on the hillsides, leaving the patricians to do their own manual toil. Whether the employer gives too little or the employee asks too much in any given struggle, the demon of greed plays his part again. ”

“ I am going to demonstrate the necessity of this decree; after which, if the parcellaire laborer still retains a glimmer of intelligence, he will console himself with the thought that he dies according to the rules of political economy.
Labor, which ought to give scope to the conscience and render it more and more worthy of happiness, leading through parcellaire division to prostration of mind, dwarfs man in his noblest part, minorat capitis, and throws him back into animality. Thenceforth the fallen man labors as a brute, and consequently must be treated as a brute. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Great Problem of how to provide with suitable occupations those who, though perfectly willing to labor, were by unjust social conditions precluded from earning bread for themselves and those dependent on them, had reached the acute phase where the proverbial worm is said to turn—and it had turned with a vengeance! ”

“ The many are plundered to enrich the few. Vast combinations depress the price of labor and increase the cost of the necessaries of existence. The rich, as a rule, despise the poor; and the poor are coming to hate the rich. The face of labor grows sullen ”

“ And thus robbed of all the benefits of the increase in productive power, labor is exposed to certain effects of advancing civilization which, without the advantages that naturally accompany them, are positive evils, and of themselves tend to reduce the free laborer to the helpless and degraded condition of the slave. ”

“ Again, through the perversion of democracy to the ends of plutocracy, labor is robbed of the wealth which it alone produces, is denied the means of self-employment, and, by compulsory idleness in wage slavery, is even deprived of the necessaries of life. ”

“ Privilege, Exception, Monopoly, Feudality, springing up from Labor itself: a false and dangerous situation, which, making Labor a blinded and chained Cyclops, in the mine, at the forge, in the workshop, at the loom, in the field, over poisonous fumes, in miasmatic cells, in unventilated factories, founds public power upon private misery, and plants the greatness of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a greatness ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters. ”

“ But it is evident also that labor never can be exactly valued, and I had to write a very large volume to expose the manifold forms of labor, in which time is wasted, to corrupt and ruin human society. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sum and essence of every wrong and injustice that can hedge about the worker is found at this point, and remains a problem to every worker among the poor, the solving of which will mean the solution of the whole labor question. ”

“ They feared, of course, that if they were exposed to its effects—perhaps at the bargaining table with representatives of organized labor—their ability to exploit the workers for fantastic profits would be at an end. ”

“ Soon the millowners discovered that in the new methods with the new cheap labour there was a mine of wealth and, their greed growing by what it fed on, they sought for even 6cheaper labour than that of the poorly paid wage-slave women and children. This cheaper labour they found in the thousands of pauper children under the care of the supervisors of the poor. ”

“ Though no longer a slave, he is in a thralldom grievous and intolerable, compelled to work for whatever his employer is pleased to pay him, swindled out of his hard earnings by money orders redeemed in stores, compelled to pay the price of an acre of ground for its use during a single year, to pay four times more than a fair price for a pound of bacon and to be kept upon the narrowest margin between life and starvation. ”

“ And the poor man loved the great’— In that day professional labor agitators will lose their vocations, the workingman who never works will be without influence among his fellows, and the brotherhoods of beer and brawling which infest the purlieus of our larger cities, and clamor for bread or blood—meaning always somebody else’s bread or somebody else’s blood—will find occasion to disband. ”