The Bourgeoisie Quotes

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

The bourgeoisie is having recourse to the vilest crimes, bribing society's lowest elements and supplying liquor to these outcasts with the purpose of bringing on pogroms. The partisans of the bourgeoisie, especially the higher officials, bank clerks, etc., are sabotaging and organizing strikes in order to block the government's efforts to reconstruct the state on a socialistic basis. Sabotage has spread even to the food-supply organizations and millions of people are threatened with famine. Special measures must be taken to fight counter-revolution and sabotage.

Our battle is against the bourgeoisie as the enemy of German Socialism and the saboteur of national freedom.

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar.

Only idiots think that the proletariat will win a majority right away. First we topple the bourgeoisie. Then we seize power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopeless and if it prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course, that even in small states socialism will not be achieved without civil war, and for that reason the only program of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals.

No government in the world fights Fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to Fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal Government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this Government who want to go easy on the rebels. You can never tell, you know, the present Government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers' movement ...

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

Inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro.

Lenin was a Russian bourgeois who cursed the weakness and ineptitude of the Russian bourgeoisie

If you turn your people into bourgeois, you also turn them into pacifists.

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism -- the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them…. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend -- but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.

The state is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies.

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 bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

The boycott, which the bourgeoisie regards with sentimental tenderness when directed against the trade of its commercial rival, it considers as a crime when employed by the workers in defense of their livelihood.

Many workers already realize that the rule of the Socialist or Communist party will be only the concealed form of the rule of the bourgeois class in which the exploitation and suppression of the working class remains.

In each electoral district the voters are divided into three classes according to the amount of their taxes; the first class is made up of the wealthiest, enough of them to pay the first third of taxes (sometimes one or two millionaires will suffice); the second is made up of the moderately wealthy, who pay the second third of the taxes; and the third is made up of all the other adult males, who together pay the last third. Each class chooses an elector, and the three electors from each district choose the representative of that district. Under these conditions the mass of the people, who, of course, are crowded together in the third class, can always be voted down by a comparatively small number voting in the other two classes.

The collectivizations and socializations in the economy count for nothing when State power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

Every capitalist who suffers from the competition of still greater capitalists denounces those above him and cries out for help on behalf of the middle class