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Now, as then, commerce unrestrained by social control ends up stripping economic relations of all moral content, while the drive toward fulfilling market demands at the lowest possible price creates widespread indifference to the conditions under which marketable goods are produced. Today’s Chinatown sweatshops and Third World child labor factories are the functional equivalents of colonial slavery in that the demands of the consumer and the profit drive of the entrepreneur overwhelm the rights of those whose labor actually produces the salable commodity.

— Eric Foner Plantation Profiteering (1997)

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Slavery

More quotes by Eric Foner

History, however, is not a linear narrative of progress. Rights may be won and taken away; gains are never complete or uncontested, and popular movements generate their own countervailing pressures.

The Century: A Nation's-Eye View (2002)

The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became.

The South's Inner Civil War (1989)

Essentially what Lincoln said is slavery is a form of theft, the theft of labor, one person stealing another person's labor without that person’s permission.

The vast majority of white southerners, supported vociferously by the Democratic Party of the north, were deeply opposed to any equality for the former slaves.

If Lincoln Hadn't Died (2009)

The Confederate government increasingly molded its policies in the interest of the planter class.

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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?

Abraham Lincoln

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly

The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

Abraham Lincoln

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Eric Foner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.