"Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread."

Part of a speech by Emma Goldman when she was invited to a strike at Union Square, New York. Her speech quoted this declaration fromĀ Cardinal Henry Edward Manning:

"Necessity knows no law, and the starving man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor's bread."

The laws of man are much easier to break than the laws of survival. If your society isn't providing enough legal ways to make a decent living, then more and more people will resort to illegal ways.

This isn't to say I'm encouraging everyone to take bread or engage in armed robbery on the high seas, because while I think it's justified for those who need to do it to survive, I don't believe (for obvious reasons) that it's a good economic strategy.

I would instead encourage the taking of the actual means of production (land, raw materials, equipment, etc) - like what the MST of Brazil did or what the rest of the Latin American recovered factory movements are doing.


More information: http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_eg_an0_biographic_sketch.htm

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