Most Significant, Still Outcasts
The Sculptors of Society
This International Workers Day,
let’s illuminate the story of a diligent worker who strives tirelessly, yet often faces resistance and criticism.
Income Inequality has existed since time immemorial, which is a lucid representation of the dichotomy between the labouring masses and the elite few.
Unfortunately, this dynamic often results in the suppression of the former by the latter.
Even in the modern era, the plight of workers and the working class remains distressing. Many continue to be deprived of their fundamental rights and basic amenities in their workplaces.
Often unaware of the privileges they are entitled to.
It is evident that change is inevitable, and regulations must evolve accordingly. Yet, every day, countless workers still endure subjugation by their superiors;
fearing reprisal if they speak out.
Population size exacerbates this issue, adding further strain to an already fraught situation.
Evidently, radical reform is essential in addressing these systemic injustices.
Now, let’s delve into the viewpoints of some of history’s most prominent personalities regarding the lives and rights of laborers.
Story of a Labour-
Producers or labourers in spite of being the most necessary element of society, are robbed by their exploiters of the fruits of their labour and deprived of their elementary rights.
The peasant who grows corn for all, starves with his family,
the weaver who supplies the world market with textile fabrics does not have enough to cover his own and his children’s bodies,
masons, smiths, and carpenters who raise magnificent palaces, live like pariahs in the slums.
The capitalists and exploiters, the parasites of society, squander millions on their whims. These terrible inequalities and forced disparity of chances are bound to lead to chaos.
Unless this thing is done and the exploitation of man by man and of nations by nations is brought to an end, sufferings and carnage with which humanity is threatened today cannot be prevented.
All talk of ending war and ushering in an era of universal peace is undisguised hypocrisy.
If, however, it goes unheeded and the present system of Governments continues to be an impediment in the way of the natural forces that are swelling up, a grim struggle will ensure the overthrow of all obstacles, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat to pave the way for the consummation of the ideal of revolution.
— Bhagat Singh
Right of Labour-
“Whoever produces anything by weary labour does not need revelation from heaven to teach them that he has a right to the thing produced.”
— Rober G. Ingersoll
“We consider it horrible that people should have their heads cut off, but we have not been taught to see the horror of lifelong death which is inflicted upon a whole population by poverty and tyranny.” — Mark Twain
The Old Labour-
“He ( the old labour out of employment ) was struggling against age, against nature, against circumstances;
the entire weight of society, law and order passed upon him to lose his self-respect and liberty…
He knocked at the doors of the farmers and found one good man only-
not in law and order,
but in individual man alone.’
— Richard Jefferies
Poor Labourers-
“…And we, the men who braved this task, were outcasts of the world. A blind fate, a vast merciless mechanism, cut and shaped the fabric of our existence. We were men despised when we were most useful, rejected when we were not needed, and forgotten when our troubles weighed upon us heavily. We were the men sent out to fight the spirit of the wastes, rob it of all its primeval horrors and batter down the barriers of its world-old defences. Where we were working, a new town would spring up some day; it was already springing up, and then, if one of us walked there, ‘a man with no fixed address’, he would be taken up and tried as a loiterer and vagrant.”
— by Patrick Macgill. C. J., from Children of the Dead End
Life of a Labour-
In a capitalist society, spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole lifetime of the masses into labour-time.
— Karl Marx
Let’s persevere in our pursuit of labor rights, recognizing it as the collective duty of global citizens and those who understand it, to reconstruct society based on socialist principles and wholeheartedly embrace equality.
