Mark Fisher Quotes

As labor is the common burden of our race so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden on to the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race.

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

And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work.

I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.

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.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

Those who want to divide the workers have resorted to the foulest methods.

Property is theft.

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much...) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers.

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

When the businessmen of the country were demanding the right to organize themselves adequately to promote their legitimate interests; when the farmers were demanding legislation which would give them opportunities and incentives to organize themselves for a common advance, it was natural that the workers should seek and obtain a statutory declaration of their constitutional right to organize themselves for collective bargaining.

Labor organizations are like other organizations, like organizations of capitalists; sometimes they act very well and sometimes they act badly. We should consistently favor them when they act well, and as fearlessly oppose them when they act badly.

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.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

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.

I protest against the fitness and truth of the usually received definitions and applications of "slave labor" and "free labor"--and, in contradiction thereto, maintain that, in proportion to the respective populations, there are many more slaves in England, and in very much more suffering and painful conditions, than in all the negro slaveholding States of this Confederation.

The socialist labor party of Germany endeavors by every lawful means to bring about a free state and a socialistic society, to effect the destruction of the iron law of wages by doing away with the system of wage labor, to abolish exploitation of every kind, and to extinguish all social and political inequality.

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all laborers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

“A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,” is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing; yet in what corner of this planet was that ever realized?

I do not admit the comparison between your slaves and even the lowest class of European free laborers, for the former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they enjoy in common with the brutes that perish.

Who is looking out for the working class? The answer is, Nobody!

We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.