Quotes from Joshua B. Freeman

Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry," wrote Karl Marx—an overstatement, but one with much truth.

What keeps me in New York is neither the high culture of museums and concert halls nor the unrivaled opportunities for working, eating, and spending that New Yorkers revel in. Rather it is a sensibility that is distinctly working-class—generous; open-minded but skeptical; idealistic but deflating of pretension; bursting with energy and a commitment to doing.

The large factory became an incandescent symbol of human ambition and achievement, but also of suffering. Time and again, it served as a measuring rod for attitudes toward work, consumption, and power, a physical embodiment of dreams and nightmares about the future.

The creation of the factory required exceptional ingenuity, obsession, and misery. We have inherited its miraculous productive power and long history of exploitation without giving it much thought.