John MacLean Quotes

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

In the class-struggle the conflict must always concern itself with immediate, practical objects

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don't come from a wealthy background.

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.

I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

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.

And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat.

We can't afford as a nation - not because of money but because of our social fabric - to have large numbers of people who are not working.

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

Starting that union was something I believed in very strongly.

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

The only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union.

What shall the workers do? Sit idly by and see the vast resources of nature and the human mind be utilized and monopolized for the benefit of the comparative few? No. The laborers must learn to think and act, and soon, too, that only by the power of organization, and common concert of action, can either their manhood be maintained, their rights to life (work to sustain it) be recognized, and liberty and rights secured.

The courts may have their finest hours, but they'll not break us. We will not settle for one penny less than our objectives. The judge can drop dead in his black robes. I don't care if I rot in jail. I will not call off the strike.

In Russia the workers are powerless, kept in spiritual as well as physical bondage. The American workers are free to take up the fight, free to act, to read, to publish, to discuss, to instruct themselves, to combine in unions, to assemble in meeting, to strike. Hence it is only here [America] that the fight for peace can begin…. The [solution] consists in mass-actions of American workers against capitalist power. If they should proceed to wrench the decision on policy from big capital, the most essential step to deter the threat of atomic war would be made

You cannot appeal from the classes to the masses. What the employer thinks, his workmen think. Of course I do not include questions specially relating to labour, in which there may be a direct conflict of interest.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

The strike is the weapon of the oppressed, of men capable of appreciating justice and having the courage to resist wrong and contend for principle. The nation had for its cornerstone a strike.

It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.

Labor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.

The worker retains no respect for the property “rights” of the profit-takers … He knows that the present laws of property were made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them.

Go to the streets and ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they don’t give you bread, then take it.

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 competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.