Quotes About Working class

You study any pretty democracy, from the ancient Greeks forward, and you'll see that the only way each system functions is with a working class of slaves. Peons to haul the garbage so the upper crust can campaign and vote.

Kramer's unadorned prose is evocative of the best Jewish-American writing: of Singer, Malamud, Bellow, Ozick, Roth, Kunitz, Paley. This is the speech of the newly arrived, the immigrant, the oppositionist, the pariah; it is underclass, or working class, or even middle-class.

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle rich; and there are busy poor and busy rich.... in a large view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There is a working class — strong and happy — among both rich and poor; there is an idle class — weak, wicked, and miserable — among both rich and poor.

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

The fruits of the economy and all the advantages of technology and globalization have gone far more to the investor class and the professional class and not as much to the working class. Partly because of the loss of labor unions, partly because of things like a lack of antitrust enforcement, policies that have privileged shareholder returns.

The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer... form the great body of the people of the United States, they are the bone and sinew of the country men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws.

The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.

in 1942 in an essay in which he meditated on some "visions of a totalitarian future." In it, he explained why he thought the working class would be most resistant to an intrusive right-wing state:

The swaggering personal habits of the bitter self-made men only confirmed my adolescent understanding of the social order. Riding a BMW motorcycle without a helmet, taking no shit from the police, drinking Wild Turkey at all hours of the day, carrying a .45 automatic tucked into their waistband—if that wasn't working class, what was?

When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people—when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people—issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.

the threat to democracy now in America and elsewhere comes from the working and middle classes—the people among whom I was born and raised—whose rage comes overwhelmingly from cultural insecurity, inflated expectations, tribal partisan alliances, obsessions about ethnicity and identity, blunted ambition, and a childlike understanding of the limits of government.

My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.

Of course no on planned to give them pleasure — the poor were put into the world to work, not to have a nice time or look at pretty pictures. That kind of thing was for the rich.

What figure does the man of letters cut in a country where his employer is the proletariat ?

If autonomous workers' power forces reorganization and changes in capital that develop it, then capital cannot be understood as an outside force independent of the working class. It must be understood as the class relation itself. [...] In other words, capital seeks to incorporate the working class within itself as simply labor-power, whereas the working class affirms itself as an independent class-for-itself only through struggles which rupture capital's self-reproduction.

The reproduction of the working class involves not only work in the factory but also work in the home and in the community of homes. [...] Accumulation means accumulation of the reserve army as well as the active army, of those who worked at reproducing the class as well as those who produced other commodities (besides labor-power). The "factory" where the working class worked was the society as a whole, a social factory. The working class had to be redefined to include nonfactory workers.

When we say "the state," the state is We, it is we, it is the proletariat, it is the advanced guard of the working class.

Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others—many of them university students who were loudest against the war—stayed safely at home.92

poor families in this neighbourhood. She has a large acquaintance, of course professionally