Joshua Mitchell Quotes

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

Occupy Wall Street was a disorganized movement without a clear focus and power base - essential in any successful revolution - but the message was clear: the divisions between those who are fortunate enough to enjoy city living as opposed to those who find it unbearable are too wide.

Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

The knowing minority had to impose its will on the majority, even by brute force. The great mass, the workers, are in economic slavery. They cannot accomplish their own liberation. Their minds are formed by their masters; they are incapable of understanding their true interests. It is left to the knowing minority to free the mass from the tutelage of its present masters. Only after this is done will the mass understand.

Human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it … that alone determines revolutionary mental forms

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.

The real cause of this, as all real popular movements, not stimulated by the aristocracy, … was an apprehension on the part of the people, that their civil rights were invaded.

An elite has prospered with our kinds of institutions, but the same cannot be said of the masses.

The governing class has become a privileged aristocracy, acting at its own discretion. It has little in common with the Communist workman who remains at his bench. The latter cannot escape the influence of his surroundings; he breathes the same air as the striker and the unemployed. In consequence a powerful protest has arisen from below. The Communist work-men demand actual participation in the government; they wish equality within the party; they wish freedom of discussion and a free press.

Global elites need to recognize that the masses that they spit on, as they try to change their worlds, are immune to their consultations

I used to have a phrase: Liberalism is spreading misery equally. And now the ruling class throughout Washington seems to have adopted this.

The class struggle, to which Marx has specially drawn attention, is a real factor, the tokens of which are to be found on every page of history. But the struggle is not confined only to two classes: the proletariat and the capitalist; it occurs between an infinite number of groups with different interests, and above all between the elites contending for power. The existence of these groups may vary in duration, they may be based on permanent or more or less temporary characteristics. In the most savage peoples, and perhaps in all, sex determines two of these groups.

For the first time in the life of the great republic, there was a political organization which grappled directly and fundamentally with the growing injustice which marked the dealings between Exploiters and the Exploited

There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.

History is written by the rich so the poor get blamed for everything.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

The world has grown rich and refined, but chiefly by the efforts of those who themselves continue poor and ignorant.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

I have strong hopes that the conservative portion of that people (the North), unless dead to the feelings of liberty, will rise and depose the party now in power.

A true socialist never hates people. He knows, that they are products of the great economical laws, which in the present society divides man into two nations of poor and rich… We socialists never hate specific individuals. But we hate the system - capitalism, militarism, reaction – and that system we scorn with a healthy, burning, eternal hatred.

You have a political elite that has been in power since 1979. Typically what happens with this elite, and it has happened in Iran, is that they get more and more out of touch with the realities of the ordinary citizens.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.