Top 98 Quotes About Class Struggle
#1. The theory of dependence will take the wrong path and lead to deception if the analysis is not put within the framework of the worldwide class struggle.
Gustavo Gutierrez
#2. Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.
Mao Zedong
#3. It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.
Pierre Clastres
#4. Rock, for all the power of its individual dreams, is still confined by its mass cultural form. Its history, like the history of America itself, is a history of class struggle--the struggle for fun.
Simon Frith
#5. Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
Amiri Baraka
#6. The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#7. In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They're instinctive Marxists.
Noam Chomsky
#8. As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.
C.L.R. James
#9. Every departure from class struggle has fatal results for the destiny of socialism.
Enver Hoxha
#10. In capitalist history, invasion and class struggle are not opposites, as the official legend would have us believe, but one is the means and the expression of the other.
Karl Liebknecht
#11. Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle.
Louis Althusser
#12. The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.
Monique Wittig
#13. The racial question, and thus class struggle, of course, I think they are processes which necessarily are intersecting all the time. I understand that there are moments they disassociate, but in the end they are things that go walking together practically all the time.
Bocafloja
#14. Women's propaganda must touch upon all those questions which are of great importance to the general proletarian movement. The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women's class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle.
Clara Zetkin
#15. The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people.
Peter Abrahams
#16. The race struggle is the primal one, and the class struggle secondary. The last dominating race is the German.
Moses Hess
#17. Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.
Eugene V. Debs
#18. Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle
Louis Althusser
#19. As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.
Diane Frolov
#20. There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.
Richard Hofstadter
#21. Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.
Joseph Stalin
#22. They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants' rooms because they didn't believe in laundry maids or cooks.
Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.
Barbara Kingsolver
#23. The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#25. We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.
Ernest Mandel
#26. The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.
Antonio Gramsci
#27. End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)
David Graeber
#28. Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?
Peter Abrahams
#29. Food was fuel for survival and socialist labor. Food was a weapon of class struggle.
Anya Von Bremzen
#30. Hollywood is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle." Or
Amor Towles
#31. The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.
Leon Trotsky
#32. I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.
Steven Pinker
#33. Class struggle: external peace, international solidarity, peace among peoples. This is the sacred slogan of international socialist democracy that liberates nations.
Karl Liebknecht
#34. Just as invasion is the true and tried weapon in the hands of capital against the class struggle, so on the other hand the fearless pursuit of the class struggle has always proven the most effective preventative of foreign invasions.
Karl Liebknecht
#35. Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
Louis Althusser
#36. People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth
Raoul Vaneigem
#37. I don't know how many parts I've lost because a lot of the politics in California are very conservative, and I'm fairly outspoken. I always tried to get as much politics in as I could, because I do believe in class struggle, and I think that's what's left out.
James Cromwell
#38. Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing.
Victor Hugo
#39. Just remember, Braithwaite. While you were learning to be a fool at Oxford I was learning to kill men. And I learned well.
Bernard Cornwell
#41. Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.
Nancy Isenberg
#42. Educational enterprises do not for any length of time remain immune from the struggle of interests for power which is the dominant feature of social life under a class system.
A.J. Muste
#43. I love my cross-sectioned, cross-cultural audience. Some of them are doing better than the average guy, but my audience has always been people who are struggling to stay in the middle class.
Tavis Smiley
#44. Lajwanti made the cardinal mistake of trying to cross the dividing line that separates the existence of the rich from that of the poor. She made the fatal error of dreaming beyond her means. The bigger the dream, the bigger the disappointment.
Vikas Swarup
#45. On the days that feel dark and endless, I make myself a simple promise: I'll get out of bed in the morning. Then I'll head up the hill to class. If I put one foot in front of the other, day by day, I'll move closer to the light at the end of all this struggle.
Regina Calcaterra
#46. To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.
Stendhal
#47. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Karl Marx
#48. I heard the distant whistle of a passing train, and I wished I could get on it and go far away, to a place without struggle meetings, without class status, without confessions.
Ji-li Jiang
#49. Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system!
William Dean Howells
#50. Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays - but he always pays - yes, above all, he pays.
William Graham Sumner
#51. Struggling to stay in the middle class, and I love that. That's me and my dad and my family.
Tavis Smiley
#52. Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
David Mitchell
#53. On the other hand, one factor helps us that no other liberation struggle in this region could count on - our liberation front is characterized by relatively highly developed class forces, tested in political struggles.
Joe Slovo
#54. History and the task of the future no longer signify the struggle of class against class or the conflict between one church dogma and another, but the settlement between blood and blood, race and race, Folk and Folk. And that means: the struggle of spiritual values against each other.
Alfred Rosenberg
#55. The whole struggle of our Party (and of the working class movement in Europe generally) must be directed against opportunism. The latter is not a current of opinion, not a tendency; it (opportunism) has now become the organised tool of the bourgeoisie within the working class movement.
Vladimir Lenin
#57. Just as you cannot see, at pleasure, with your ears and you cannot, at will, hear with your eyes so too you cannot make the state act in the interests of the working people. As an organ in the social body, its purpose is for the repression of self-determination.
Rudolf Rocker
#58. The Economic Problem ... the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.
John Maynard Keynes
#59. The enemy will not perish of himself. Neither will the Chinese reactionaries nor the aggressive forces of U.S. imperialism in China step down from the stage of history of their own accord.
Mao Zedong
#61. This being busied with thoughts of immortality is for the noble classes and especially for women with nothing to do. A solid person, though, someone who already intends to be something worthy here, and who therefore has to strive daily, has to struggle and work, gives the world to come a rest.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#62. I have known nothing the last thirty years save the struggle for human rights on this continent. If it had been a class of men whowere disfranchised and denied their legal rights, I believe I should have devoted my life precisely as I have done in behalf of my own sex.
Susan B. Anthony
#63. Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
#64. I take my favorite and most promising lads to the theater," said [Sherlock] Holmes. "I'd say that if they were born into better circumstances many would have grown up to be MP's, but in truth most are too smart and too honest for Parliament.
Dan Simmons
#65. You eat the wealthy, sir, and it will be your last meal.
J.S.B. Morse
#66. Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.
Jonathan Ames
#67. Our object is the economic freedom of the producing classes; this ultimate goal will be attained after a long and bitter struggle; therefore, our primary task is to organize the masses and lead them in the struggle for economic freedom.
M. N. Roy
#68. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
Vladimir Lenin
#69. Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.
Jennifer Donnelly
#70. Feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.
Kavita Ramdas
#71. I've always thought that was the lamest argument - that we need some people to be poor in order to remind the rest of us to be grateful. All that really means is that someone has to suffer poverty so other people can feel better about themselves. What a selfish way to look at the world.
Josephine Angelini
#72. The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
Christopher Hitchens
#73. Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world ... the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.
Friedrich Engels
#74. Particularly with middle-class people, self-absorption is a struggle.
Ben Lewin
#75. Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.
Nikki Giovanni
#76. In a political struggle of class against class, organization of trade unions is the most important weapon.
Friedrich Engels
#77. We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.
Jean Vanier
#78. There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.
Warren Buffett
#79. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live
Toni Morrison
#80. Do what you love allows us to valorize elite workers, those who choose to overwork, and ignore those who have to overwork.
Miya Tokumitsu
#81. While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.
Warren Buffett
#82. What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the organized workers' movement and the people is to be achieved again today in West Europe through the information society
Red Army Faction
#83. I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.
Dennis Lehane
#84. She wondered which would be worse -- to belong to the group assigned to lifelong drudgery, or to be on the other side, thinking you deserved everything the universe by sheer good luck had tossed in your lap, never realizing your whole life was based on lies.
Jo Victor
#85. My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me - when my family was working-class, and we were struggling.
Richard Rodriguez
#86. In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
Karl Marx
#88. The coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.
Lucy Parsons
#89. I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.
Angela Davis
#90. Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
George Orwell
#91. "Get Rich or Die Tryin". That's the universal struggle. When I say it it might seem a bit negative but if a working class person says it it means they're determined.
Curtis Jackson
#92. As man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes can obtain their own just rights only by struggling for the rights of others.
Henry George
#93. Ensconced, he (Roosevelt) lacked some of the neuroses of progressives-economic envy and race hatred especially.His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency.
Edmund Morris
#95. I've always believed that the things middle class families struggle with around their kitchen tables should define my work in Washington.
Gary Peters
#96. Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike
#97. Certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation.
Paulo Freire
#98. Thu luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.
Henry David Thoreau
