This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The categorical imperative holds up a “universal natural law,” the law of human society, as a standard of comparison to this [bourgeois] natural law of individuals. This would be meaningless if particular interests and the needs of the general public intersected not just haphazardly but of necessity. That this does not occur, however, is the inadequacy of the bourgeois economic form: there exists no rational connection between the free competition of individuals as what mediates and the existence of the entire society as what is mediated...This irrationality expresses itself in the suffering of the majority of human beings...This problem, which only society itself could rationally solve through the systematic incorporation of each member into a consciously directed labor process, manifests itself in the bourgeois epoch as a conflict in the inner life of its subjects.
Competition | Existence | Labor | Law | Life | Life | Majority | Public | Society | Suffering | Society |
Merce Cunningham, born Mercier Philip Cunningham
The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.
Devotion | Discipline | Labor |
Meridel Le Sueur, born Meridel Wharton
What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone.... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a future. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to "negotiate" between this hunger and this greed.
Body | Government | Hunger | Labor | Meaning | Organization | Government | Crisis |
Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
The person who has the will to undergo all labor may win any goal.
If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors. One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor -- backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
Dirty | Force | Government | Labor | Land | Little | Looks | Money | Prison | Public | Government | Child |
The conservative goal has been the "Third Worldization" of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations.
The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor or go out of business. Profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Conscience | Labor | Understanding |
Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones
I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.
Labor |
This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of ‘revolutionizing themselves and things,’ much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People’s Labor Party ‘revolutionaries’ is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of ‘proletarian morality’ replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little ‘Red Book’ and other sacred litanies.
Conservatism | Discipline | Dogma | Evidence | Labor | Little | Obedience | Sacred | Security | Society | Thought | Work | Society | Leader | Old | Thought |
In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and "charitable" acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.
Appetite | Attention | Conquest | Labor | Music | Rule | System | Time |
Child labor has become one of the biggest global concerns for many human rights activists. Approximately 218 million children world- wide are forced into labor. Unfortunately, 126 million of them work in hazardous conditions. Roughly 73 million of child labor populations are less than 10 years old. Most important, one of the most astonishing facts about child labor is that every year 22,000 children die in accidents that are work- related (FreetheChildren.com). The majority of the children subjected to child labor come from poorer countries of the world. As a result of increased poverty in these parts of the world, children are kept out of school and forced to work. Organizations that have been developed to fight child labor believe that by increasing education access and helping to end poverty are crucial in the fight to end senseless child labor.
Children | Education | Global | Labor | Majority | Poverty | Rights | Work | Child |
Nicholas D. Kristof, fully Nicholas Donabet Kristof
More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century. The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.
Death | Labor | Life | Life | Men | People | Risk | Time | Worth |
Patti Smith, fully Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith
The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
Balance | Labor | Mystical | Order | Responsibility | Sense | World |
Paul Samuelson, fully Paul Anthony Samuelson
By keeping labor supply down, immigration policy tends to keep wages high. Let us underline this basic principle: Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor relative to all other productive factors can be expected to raise its wage rate; and increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
In all developed countries, knowledge workers have already become the center of gravity of the labor force, even in numbers.