Class Relations Quotes

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

You know the funny thing, I don't get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.

In fact, the capitalist class in the '50s was sort of part of a social contract. It was part of the tenor of the times.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

Under no circumstances can labor here afford to arouse the fears of the great middle class for the safety of private property as a basic institution. Labor needs the support of public opinion, meaning the middle class, both rural and urban...

We definitely experience racism in England and different levels of oppression as well. Anywhere affected by colonialism there's certain kinds of race relations and class relations going on.

The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

The starting-point in the brochure is not right. To my idea you are mistaken in your judgment regarding the analogy of the West-European revolution with the Russian one, regarding the conditions of the West-European revolution, that is to say the class-relations- and this leads you to mistake the cause, from which this Left Wing, the opposition, originates …. Therefore the brochure SEEMS to be right, as long as your starting-point is assumed. If, however (as it should be), your starting point is rejected, the entire brochure is wrong. As all your mistaken, and partly mistaken, judgments converge …

Budgets are not merely affairs of arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of prosperity of individuals, the relation of classes and the strength of kingdoms.

He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor.

The ideology of a ruling class is of little use unless it is accepted by those being ruled.

If you're a rich guy, the best thing you can do is demand tax increases on the rich. That way the poor guy will leave you alone. The middle class and the poor will leave you alone.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

I actually did trouble to read Marx first hand. I found it illuminating in so many ways; in particular, my perception of the relationship between people and the society in which they live was irreversibly altered.

Every socialist recognizes the dependence of the workingman on the capitalist.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

The most important thing in my life, its leitmotif, has been the constant and close contacts with working people, with workers and peasants.