Quotes About Proletariat

A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery.

The Russian revolution was to an unprecedented degree the cause of the proletariat of the whole world becoming more revolutionary.

The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.

If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.

She is a waitress at his lordships club. My God! The Proletariat! The lower middle classes, sir. Well, yes, by stretching it a bit, perhaps.

What does it mean with regard to tactics, this fact that the proletariat of Western Europe stands all alone: that it has no prospect of any help whatsoever from any other class?

Though Marx's proletariat may be somewhat better fed than it was a century ago, its individual members have made little if any progress toward that personal liberty and independence on which the dignity of man is founded.

Seventy-five percent of our soldiers were manual laborers. Many among them had been susceptible, once, to Soviet propaganda. They stood with their mouths agape when they saw in what conditions of decay and exhaustion the Russian proletariat existed. They shook their heads, having to look twice at the scene before believing it.

With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.

We may set it down as a historical law: fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where the conservative labor parties prevented the proletariat from utilizing the revolutionary situation and seizing power.

The Russian proletariat found its revolutionary audacity not only in itself. Its very position as minority of the nation suggests that it could not have given its struggle a sufficient scope—certainly not enough to take its place at the head of the state—if it had not found a mighty support in the thick of the people. Such a support was guaranteed to it by the agrarian problem.

Retribution is not slow in coming," I wrote in the Kornilov days. "Hounded, persecuted, slandered, our party never grew as rapidly as it is growing now. And this process will spread from the capitals to the provinces, from the towns to the country and the army . . . Without ceasing for a moment to be the class organization of the proletariat, our party will be transformed in the fire of persecution into a true leader of all the oppressed, downtrodden, deceived and hounded masses.

Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[…] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.

The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation.

Fascism is the punishment inflicted on the proletariat for not having continued the revolution begun in Russia.

In der Fabrik hing oben am Giebel, der am höchsten in den Himmel und am tiefsten in den Hof schaute, eine Losung: Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt euch. Und unten auf dem Boden gingen Schuhe, die das Land nur in der Flucht verlassen durften.

The tin-sheep and wooden-melon proletariat produced their papers and named their places of work. The madman with the white beard plucked at the sleeve of the policemen, opened up his folded handkerchief, and said: professor of philosophy.

The three great problems of this century the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is really the dictatorship over the proletariat by the party and even by individual persons.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. (CM 254)

The revolution in Russia was terrible for the proletariat in the long years of its development and it is terrible now, after the victory. But at the actual time of revolution it was easy, and this was due to the peasants.

Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale. N. Lenin July 6, 1920