Industrial Workers of the World Quotes

There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people, and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life.

The masses have never believed in sophisms taught by economists, uttered more to confirm exploiters in their rights than to convert the exploited!

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

Class warfare has never created a job.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

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

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

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.

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.

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

The working class who toil everyday to pay their rent and put food on their families' tables are tired of being lectured by the fat cats in Washington and Brussels who preach what we need and when we need it.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

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

The worker retains no respect for the property “rights” of the profit-takers … He knows that the present laws of property were made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

... wholly in the interest of the creditor classes, the banking fraternity, and the commercial world, without proper provision for the debtor classes and those who toil, produce and sustain the country.

It is impossible to place labor and capital in harmonious or friendly relations, except by the means of slavery

If anyone’s declared class warfare, it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street … They have declared it on average workers.