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Wage Labour Quotes

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Wage Labour Quotes

“To say that "the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital", means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.”

Capitalism Capitalist Capital Karl Marx Wage Slavery Wage Labor Wage Labour Friedrich Engels

Book:Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

Source: Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“Making an economy more productive (sensibly interpreted) in a sustainable fashion is not best served by obsessively activating people and locking them up in jobs that they hate doing and from which they learn nothing.”

Freedom Alienation Fulfilment Social Democracy Captialism Wage Labour Basic Income

Book:Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy

Source: Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy

“This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.”

Hops Labour Working Class Trade Unions Servility Wage Labour

Book:The Road to Wigan Pier

Source: The Road to Wigan Pier

“Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing's mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer.”

Money Wage Labour

Book:The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

Source: The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

“Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all that it could produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which represents wagedom as the best incentive to productive work. If industry nowadays brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our grandfathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences towards the end of the last century; not to the capitalist organization of wagedom, but in spite of that organization.”

Book:The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

Source: The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings