Charles Bukowski Quotes

In the 19th century, the chains [of slavery] were metal. Today, the chains are debt—the worker has to repay his transportation, his tools, his food.

The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages.

It seems to be that more and more people are asking you to work for nothing on films, and that's unfortunate because you have to make a living. On the other hand, I don't do a better job because I get paid a lot of money. I'm never like, 'I'm not going to work as hard because I'm not getting paid as much.'

This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work - they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

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?

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.

The only difference between the Negro slave of the South, and the white wage slave of the North is, that the one has a master without asking for him, and the other has to beg for the privilege of becoming a slave.... The one is the slave of an individual; the other is the slave of an inexorable class.

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.

The Southern States have enacted Black Codes with the aim of keeping former slaves subservient to the white race and compelled to labor for low wages.

In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.

Allowing slavery will starve the poor white laborer.

Ten cents a day is adequate pay for a workingman.

Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.

The pay in the minor leagues, I think it's terrible, it's disgusting, it's exploitative.

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

A [typical] worker is a part-time slave.

But what makes wage slaves? Wages!

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.

Throughout all of human history slaves have been expensive capital purchase items. And today they're disposal inputs like styrofoam cups to an economic process.

A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave.

We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.

How many people worldwide are victims of this type of slavery, in which the person is at the service of his or her work, while work should offer a service to people so they may have dignity. I ask my brothers and sisters in faith and all men and women of good will for a decisive choice to combat trafficking in persons, which includes "slave labor."

Think they work you too hard? Think of poor Ali Sard. He has to mow grass in his uncle's backyard and its quick growing grass and it grows as he mows it the faster he mows it the faster he grows it. And all that his stingy old uncle will pay for his shoving mower around the hay is piffulous pay of two dooklas a day. And Ali can't live on such piffulous pay!