Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Davis

Davis is naming a double squeeze: labor gets weaker not because workers forgot how to organize, but because power has been systematically re-engineered to make organizing harder and less effective. “Assault” is the tell. It frames labor’s decline as political design, not economic weather: union-busting, hostile labor law, austerity, surveillance at work, and the cultural reframing of unions as special interests rather than democratic infrastructure.

Then she widens the frame to “the globalization of capital,” a phrase that turns what’s often sold as inevitable progress into a strategic advantage for employers. Capital moves; workers mostly can’t. Factories relocate, supply chains sprawl, subcontracting multiplies, and the threat of offshoring becomes a permanent bargaining chip. Even when a workplace wins a contract, the victory can feel provisional because the firm’s exit door is always open.

The subtext carries Davis’s broader politics: class struggle is inseparable from race, gender, policing, and prisons. A weakened labor movement doesn’t just lower wages; it erodes one of the few mass institutions capable of contesting corporate power and building cross-racial solidarity. In Davis’s lineage of Black radical and left analysis, “globalization” isn’t a neutral descriptor; it’s a map of domination that links deindustrialized cities, precarious service work, and the criminalization of surplus labor.

The intent is diagnostic and mobilizing: if labor’s decline is produced by coordinated attack and mobile capital, then rebuilding requires coordinated counter-power, likely beyond traditional workplace bargaining and into transnational alliances and broader social movements.