John Francis Bray Quotes

In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working classes which results from this is the cause of misery and of servitude in all its forms.

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 …

Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist … The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.

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

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

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

Pullman, who has grown so rich from the toil of his workingmen, that he can riot in luxury, while he heartlessly turns these very workmen out of their tenements into the streets and leave to the tender mercies of corporate greed.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The “natural laws of economics” are in fact tools in the hands of the avaricious and the greedy for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.

So long as millions of human beings in every country has to sell their labour-power to a small minority of owners, and to sink into the most wretched misery if they could find no buyers, the so called “equality before the law” remains a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can also be no talk of a “right over one's own person,” for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if he does not want to starve.

It’s no surprise that a global economy creates a global class conflict…. All markets create classes and class conflicts.

There can be no harmony between organized capitalists and organized labor. Our present wage system is slavery in its worst form.

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

The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its greatest danger.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term ...to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

“I make you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, “free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

The profit-grinding system is maintained by competition, or veiled war, not only between the conflicting classes, but also within the classes themselves: there is always war among the workers for bare subsistence, and among their masters, the employers and middle-men, for the share of the profit wrung out of the workers; lastly, there is competition always, and sometimes open war, among the nations of the civilised world for their share of the world-market.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

The contest will be between the capitalists and operatives; for into these two classes it must ultimately divide society.

We socialists live to some extent in symbiosis with capitalism.

Controlling capitalism has proved far more difficult than controlling anything else, because capitalism is based on the control of the many by the few—the reverse of the conventional definition of political democracy.

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Workers are baking the pie of prosperity, but they're not sharing in those dividends. That's unfair.