Michael Walsh Quotes

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.

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

In some countries the laboring poor were called freemen and in others they were called slaves but that the difference of the state was imaginary only…. the condition of the laboring poor in most countries, that of the fishermen particularly in the Northern states, is as abject as that of slaves.

Increase of slaves in this colony is injurious to the poor and inconvenient

In all social systems there must be a class to do the mean duties... It constitutes the very mudsills of society...Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to the purpose...We use them for that purpose and call them slave.

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.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

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.

Dependency had long defined the South. Since the 1870s, impoverished sharecroppers and convict laborers, white as well as black, had clung to the bottom rung of the social order. It may be hard for us to fathom, but the convict population was no better off than southern slaves had been.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.

The slaves had food stamps, too. It was called 'scraps from Massa's table.'

The capitalist class shoots down mothers and children. It stops at nothing, no matter how monstrous, to prevent the organization of the workers.

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.

The unproductive tillage of human cattle takes that which of right belongs to free labor, and which is necessary for the support and happiness of our own race.

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.

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.

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

In the history of the world, slavery has been and still is the normal condition of most men; all the great accumulations of property have been the result of slavery, and civilization was the result of property…. art, literature, science, architecture, beautiful women, and gentlemen of leisure all depend upon the forced labor of masses of ignorant men whom to make free would be a social crime.

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.

Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves. Indeed, they have not a single right or a single liberty, unless it be the right or liberty to die.

Labor [is], capital in slave society

The Negro people, most exploited of the toilers, suffering from lynching and Jim Crowism, robbed of their constitutional rights, are being prepared to fight another war for 'democracy' in order to further enslave them.

Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it