Thomas Jefferson Quotes

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

Labour is held to be a mere “commodity,” and if the labourer cannot sell it, he has no “right” but to starve—himself, his wife, and his children... Such are the doctrines of the free-trade school …

When huge factories were established there could no longer be a close tie between the master and his men; the workman hated his employer, and the employer looked on his workmen simply as hands.

Capitalism in and of itself is based on the monetising of human labour, and the first evidence of that is slavery. And that has never changed. We are all participating in that.

Capitalism denies the right to live. You have only the right to remain on the labour market.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.

It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell - 'voluntarily' sell - himself every day and hour to the 'beast of property.'

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

For reforms ameliorate the situation of the working class, they lighten the weight of the chains labour is burdened with by capitalism, but they are not sufficient to crush capitalism and to emancipate the workers from their tyranny.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.

Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value.

It is bad to have a servant, but worse to have a master.

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

Why does the great body of workingmen still permit itself to be ruled and exploited by the capitalists? Why are they not in a position to drive the minority of exploiters from power? Because they are an unorganized, undisciplined, individualistic and ignorant mass. The majority is impotent because it consists of a divided crowd of individuals each one of whom wishes to act according to his own impulse, regard his own interests.

Governments' thirst for investment is compounded by the insatiable appetite of employers for new markets and a 'competitive' labor force, by which they mean cheap and endlessly exploitable.

Nor can one class appropriate the produce of the labour of another class, as the capitalists now appropriate and enjoy the wealth which the powers of the working man daily call into existence. It is inequality of exchanges which enables one class to live in luxury and idleness, and dooms another to incessant toil

The wealth which the capitalist appears to give in exchange for the workman's labour was generated neither by the labour nor the riches of the capitalist, but it was originally obtained by the labour of the workman

Capitalists personally are often the mildest-mannered men that ever shattered a family or drained a workingman of his marrow.

Every capitalist is your enemy. Every working man is your friend.