Labor Exchange Quotes

Money is the great tool through whose means labor and skill become universally co-operative.

There can be no freedom of trade where there is no freedom of man, for the first of all commodities to be exchanged is labour, and the freedom of man consists only in the exercise of the right to determine for himself in what manner his labour shall be employed, and how he will dispose of its products....

We would surrender once and for all this chimerical notion of one day of universal rest, and institute three days a week, or if necessary more, as; days of partial rest; i.e., on which the different sections of he community would be freed from labor in turn. In this way each section would be able rely to profit, physically and mentally, by their leisure, inasmuch as they would have the advantage of the labor of the rest of the world just as another day the rest of the world would have the advantage of their labor.

Work is the way we contribute to society, part of a reciprocal social contract - the giving of our effort and our taking when in need - that holds our society together. We work, we build our society, and we share in its prosperity.

To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer.

If the land was divided among all the inhabitants of a country, so that each of them possessed precisely the quantity necessary for his support, and nothing more; it is evident that all of them being equal, no one would work for another. Neither would any of them possess wherewith to pay another for his labor, for each person having only such a quantity of land as was necessary to produce a subsistence, would consume all he should gather, and would not have anything to give in exchange for the labor of others.

… the woman whose husband makes twelve hundred dollars a year may have a couple of hours a day which she could sell in return for some service which she wishes to buy. There ought to be a reciprocity exchange in every town of any size where these exchanges could be arranged for. Nothing more than an extension of the old community way of living when everybody got together for barn raisings, and husking bees and each individual's special talent was called upon and everyone earned in one way or another what they got.

All that money can do is buy us some one else's work in exchange for our own.

If anyone harness a yoke of oxen, his wages are one-half peck of barley. If a smith make a copper box, his wages are one hundred pecks of barley. He who makes a copper dish of two-pound weight, his wages are one peck of emmer.

The rich men, in free society, may, if they please, lounge about town, visit clubs, attend the theatre, and have no other trouble than that of collecting rents, interest and dividends of stock. In a well constituted slave society, there should be no idlers. But we cannot divine how the capitalists in free society are to put to work. The master labors for the slave, they exchange industrial value. But the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his subjects. He lives by mere exploitations.