Paul Lafargue Quotes

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

The vote, however legal it may be, is revolutionary when on the basis of class candidatures it organizes France of labor against France of capital.

The contest will be between the capitalists and operatives; for into these two classes it must ultimately divide society.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

The system has for its object an increase of persons that are to intervene between the producer and the consumer, living on the product of the land and labour of others, diminishing the power of the first, and increasing the number of the last.

For reforms ameliorate the situation of the working class, they lighten the weight of the chains labour is burdened with by capitalism, but they are not sufficient to crush capitalism and to emancipate the workers from their tyranny.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption.

Every capitalist who suffers from the competition of still greater capitalists denounces those above him and cries out for help on behalf of the middle class

Under all circumstances the main task of the working class is the overthrow of the capitalists in its own country.

The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, “culture.” It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie.

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

Between the working class and the capitalist class, there is an irrepressible conflict, a class struggle for life. No glib-tongued politician can vault over it, no capitalist professor or official statistician can argue it away; no capitalist parson can veil it; no labor faker can straddle it; no “reform” architect can bridge it over. It crops up in all manner of ways

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

To fulfill his double social function of non-producer and over-consumer, the capitalist was not only obliged to violate his modest taste, to lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and to give himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles and syphilitic debauches, but also to withdraw from productive labor an enormous mass of men in order to enlist them as his assistants.

The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums …

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food