Wage Slavery Quotes

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

The real minimum wage is zero.

Whom do I hate most, among all the rabble of to-day?' The Socialist who undermines the workingman's instincts, who destroys his satisfaction with his insignificant existence, who makes him envious and teaches him revenge.”

Capital is dead labor, that vampire like, only lives by sucking living labor.

The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.

The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine -- the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

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.

No man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him.

One capitalist always kills many.

War between the proletariat and the capitalist for their respective shares in the produce; on one side, wages, on the other, profits; each side exerting itself to carry off a maximum. Man becomes a wolf for his fellow-man. It is a question of eating one’s brother or being eaten by him. War between workers and workers for the sharing of wages. War between capitalists and capitalists for the sharing of profits.

The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.

Allowing slavery will starve the poor white laborer.

Man is the only slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another. In our day, he is always some man's slave for wages, and does that man's work; and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who exclusively do their own work and provide their own living.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

Socialism is a new form of slavery.

I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

Wal-Mart has always paid low wages, or, as Sam Walton put it, 'as little as we could get by with at the time.'

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.

All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.