E. J. Dionne Jr. Quotes

The class war is over.

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.

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

A populist is someone who sees politics from an economic perspective rather than an ideological perspective. I’m a populist. The only thing that really matters is who is gets screwed and who is doing the screwing.

Since Mill, in 1848, wrote his chapter on the future of the working classes, the question of the distribution of wealth has be-come of still greater importance. We cannot look round on the political phenomena of to-day without seeing that this question is at the root of them. We see the perplexity in which men stand, and the divisions springing up in our great political parties, because of the uncertainty of politicians how to grapple with it.

There is a world-wide conflict between capital and labour, and the poor envy the rich.

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

The left is back, and it's the only path we have to get out of the spot to which the right has sunken us. Socialism builds and capitalism destroys.

If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

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

The whole contention lies between those that labor for a living and those that do not.

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.

For the laboring class there cannot exist a peace of compromise on the basis of a capitalist regime

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

Class warfare has never created a job.

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Hillary Clinton bothers me a lot. I realized the other day that her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists.

While there's capitalism, there'll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.

'Das Kapital,' I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential.

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.

Now that the day of reckoning has arrived, they cry socialism!