Rosa Luxemburg Quotes

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

If change is to come, it must come from the working class. That's why telling their story is important. That's why knowing our history is important.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.

I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.

We need writers who will joyfully impose upon themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon working-class-theory.

People think that we're engaged with identity politics. The truth is that we're doing what the labor movement has always done - organizing people who are at the bottom.

There is no alternative to class struggle.

We are with you in this work. Workingmen must form a party of their own, take charge of the government, dispose gilded fraud, and put honest toil in power.

The masses of the working-people of Scotland have read history, and are no revolutionary levelers.

Any member of the party who … advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation, shall be expelled from membership of the party.

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 class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.

There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital.

That's the Rebel Girl, That's the Rebel Girl. To the working class she's a precious pearl. She brings courage, pride and joy To the fighting Rebel Boy We've had girls before, but we need some more In the Industrial Workers of the World For it's great to fight for freedom With a Rebel Girl

No one has a copyright on working-class struggles.

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles...Social democracy...is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.

Each reform, therefore, improving the economical and political situation of the workers proves to be an arm that increases the energy with which the proletarian struggle of classes is fought.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins.

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.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

We are not making this demand for the sake of a principle, but in the interests of the proletarian class.

Out of the agony and travail of economic America the Committee for Industrial Organization was born.