Wage Labor Quotes

“As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.”
― Leon Trotsky

“And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“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.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“Take the example of our spinner. We have seen that, to daily reproduce his labouring power, he must daily reproduce a value of three shillings, which he will do by working six hours daily. But this does not disable him from working ten or twelve or more hours a day. But by paying the daily or weekly value of the spinner's labouring power the capitalist has acquired the right of using that labouring power during the whole day or week. He will, therefore, make him work say, daily, twelve hours. Over and above the six hours required to replace his wages, or the value of his labouring power, he will, therefore, have to work six other hours, which I shall call hours of surplus labour, which surplus labour will realize itself in a surplus value and a surplus produce. If our spinner, for example, by his daily labour of six hours, added three shillings' value to the cotton, a value forming an exact equivalent to his wages, he will, in twelce hours, add six shillings' worth to the cotton, and produce a proportional surplus of yarn. As he has sold his labouring power to the capitalist, the whole value of produce created by him belongs to the capitalist, the owner pro tem. of his labouring power. By advancing three shillings, the capitalist will, therefore, realize a value of six shillings, because, advancing a value in which six hours of labour are crystallized. By repeating this same process daily, the capitalist will daily advance three shillings and daily pocket six shillings, one half of which will go to pay wages anew, and the other half of which will form surplus value, for which the capitalist pays no equivalent. It is this sort of exchange between capital and labour upon which capitalistic production, or the wages system, is founded, and which must constantly result in reproducing the working man as a working man, and the capitalist as a capitalist.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“What does it mean to be a proletarian, really? [...] It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think, while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value to exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical. Indeed, where the product, as the object of labor, pays for labor itself, there the wage is but a necessary consequence of labor’s estrangement. Likewise, in the wage of labor, labor does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage...

An enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.

Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim.”
― Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice Opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly; Being a Plan for Meliorating the Condition of Man

“The cry for an equality of wages rests, therefore, upon a mistake is an inane wish never to be fulfilled. It is an offspring of that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premises and tries to evade conclusions. Upon the basis of the wages system the value of labouring power is settled like that of every other commodity; and as different kinds of labouring power have different values, or require different quantities of labour for their production, they must fetch different prices in the labour market. To clamour for equal or even equitable retribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production? After what has been said, it will be seen that the value of labouring power is determined by the value of the necessaries required to produce, develop, maintain, and perpetuate the labouring power.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“Think it over and see if it is not the law itself, the government which really creates crime by compelling people to live in conditions that make them bad. See how law and government uphold and protect the biggest crime of all, the mother of all crimes, the capitalistic wage system, and then proceeds to punish the poor criminal.”
― Alexander Berkman, Now & After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism

“That left Jeb to work for whatever the bosses offered under the National Right to Work Act--the minimum wage having been abolished--enough to keep them fed and the car gassed but not enough for a roof or to save much more than coins.”
― Karl Taro Greenfeld, The Subprimes

“They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work. But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? 'Without the whip the Negro will not work,' said the anti- abolitionist. 'Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated,' said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestor so, the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves them- selves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.”
― Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“It is indeed curious that engagement in paid work should represent such a powerful symbol of maturity and independence, given the realities of employment as a situation of profound dependency. I speak not only of the dependency inherent in the wage relation, but also of the dependency on commercial products and services, which become the only way to meet certain needs after work has drained our time and energy. [ch.six]”
― David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work

“Americans have clung to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re worth in the market, without examining changes in the legal and political institutions that define the market. This tautology is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim is meaningful only if the system’s legal and political institutions are morally just. It has lured us into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it. By this logic, the oligarchy is natural and inevitable.”
― Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

“The smooth coordination of cooperative labor requires managers to “command in the name of capitalists” Here we find a form of wage labor, but of a special kind”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“In point of fact, however, whether a man works three days of the week for himself on his own field and three days for nothing on the estate of his lord, or whether he works in the factory or the workshop six hours daily for himself and six for his employer, comes to the same, although in the latter case the paid and unpaid portions of labour are inseparably mixed up with each other, and the nature of the whole transaction is completely masked by the intervention of a contract and the pay received at the end of the week. The gratuitous labour appears to be voluntarily given in the one instance, and to be compulsory in the other. That makes all the difference.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“In the late 1970s, growth in Western economies began to slow down and returns on capital began to decline. Governments came under pressure to do something about it – to create a ‘fix’ for capital. So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“What is the beggar society? The beggar society is a society that rejoices by wagging its tail like a dog with a bone thrown in front of it, when a wage much less than the wage he deserves is given to him by the government!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan