Economic Oppression Quotes

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

You're a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of aliens makes your future less secure; each year you retreat a few steps more into the world of slavery.

Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.

Capital is dead labor, that vampire like, only lives by sucking living labor.

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your f**kin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

Today they say that we are free, only to be chained in poverty.

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

The bastards broke the People's back with their usury.... Let them die; the People will survive.

In Harlem, for instance, all of the stores are owned by white people, all of the buildings are owned by white people. The black people are just there - paying rent, buying the groceries; but they don't own the stores, clothing stores, food stores, any kind of stores; don't even own the homes that they live in. They are all owned by outsiders, and for these run-down apartment dwellings, the black man in Harlem pays more money than the man down in the rich Park Avenue section.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

Labor [is], capital in slave society

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.

I always feel that crime films are about capitalism.

If work were good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

The black man in North America was economically sick and that was evident in one simple fact: as a consumer, he got less than his share, and as a producer gave least. The black American today shows us the perfect parasite image - the black tick under the delusion that he is progressing because he rides on the udder of the fat, three-stomached cow that is white America.

Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[...] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.

Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy.

Another form of oppression is the denial of the right to economic initiative.