The danger is that a class identity founded on collective labor is replaced by an identity founded on resentment, further destabilizing our politics.
Or, as W.E.B. du Bois wrote nearly a century ago, "modern commerce and industry was founded" on the labor of people who came from what some nowadays blithely refer to as trash countries.
Published in the 1800s it theorized that capitalism was founded on exploiting unpaid labor, critiqued the concept of private property, and laid the intellectual foundations for modern communism and the Communist states and nations of the 20th century.
"The rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; his labor is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest," Crèvecoeur wrote in "Letters From an American Farmer".
This view is founded on years of forced labor, killings and other abuses by the Burmese military in connection to gas pipelines in the country, and to the billions of dollars the sector has generated for the unpopular ruling junta.
So does the mixture of pride and shame at being an intellectual in a society that worshiped farmers, a writer in a culture founded on a dream of physical labor, a lover of Eastern European Jewish life in a nation hell-bent on casting the past aside.
More and more there are people in service, professional or clerical occupations," says Cody-Valdez, a part-time organizer for the University Professional and Technical Employees at UCSB. "But the needs that organized labor was founded on still exist.
— MARCI A. HAMILTON, professor at Cardozo School of Law The United States is a nation founded on, and constantly rejuvenated by, the labor, creativity and diversity of its immigrant communities.
Begun in the late 1990s and seemingly moribund for some time, the party, closely linked to labor and community activism, was founded on the idea that economic humanism and greater equality were essential to a functioning society.
The previous reform programme, which our partners are so adamant should not be "rolled back" by our government, was founded on internal devaluation, wage and pension cuts, loss of labor protections, and price-maximising privatisation of public assets.
