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No gods, no masters is an anarchist and labor slogan. Its English origin comes from a pamphlet handed out by the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike. The phrase is derived from the French slogan “Ni dieu ni maître!“ (literally ’Neither God nor master’) coined by the socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880. In Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, first published in 1907, the anarchist character The Professor says: “My device is: No God! No master.“ he French phrase appears twice in Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil. It appears first in Section 22, in a critique of the notion that nature dictates a morality of equality before the law. It is also the inspiration behind English poet A.E Houseman’s “The laws of God, the laws of man“, which was published in 1922 in his final collection, Last Poems. The slogan was rephrased as No Gods, No Managers, as an album title by American crust punk band Choking Victim.
