Simon Linguet: It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him…He is free, you say. Ah!…What does it mean? They have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence…They become the valets of anyone who has money…They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free? The ‘independence’ (of the wage-worker) is one of the most baneful scourges that the refinement of modern times has produced. It augments the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4728