Daily Inspiration Quote by Harry Bridges

Bridges is doing something deceptively simple here: turning the everyday invisibility of labor into an accusation with a ticking clock. “Everything is produced by the workers” reads like a plain fact, almost a child’s description of how an economy works. Then he snaps the trap shut with “the minute,” a phrase that compresses the entire cycle of class conflict into a reflex. Not “eventually,” not “sometimes” - instantly. The speed is the point: opposition to unions isn’t framed as a reasoned disagreement but as an automatic defense mechanism.

The syntax also stages a moral confrontation. Workers “try to get something” - modest, even vague, the language of a person asking for a fair share rather than seizing power. Against that stands “all the opposition that can be mustered,” a militarized image of coordinated force. Bridges implies that what looks like “the market” pushing back is actually an organized campaign by people with names, institutions, lawyers, police, and newspapers.

Context matters: Bridges led the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on the West Coast, fought pitched battles over waterfront power, and spent decades under surveillance, red-baited and nearly deported in the Cold War’s obsession with “subversion.” That history sits underneath his phrasing. He’s not offering a theory seminar; he’s describing a pattern he watched in real time: when workers collectively bargain, elites rebrand their own self-interest as public order, and treat collective action as a kind of theft. The line’s intent is recruitment-by-clarity: if production is collective, he argues, bargaining has to be, too.