Working Class Quotes

“Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What’s strange, too, is that they’re the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:
"We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.”
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“your back had been mangled by the factory, mangled by the life you were forced to live, by the life that wasn’t yours, that wasn’t yours because you never got to live a life of your own, because you lived on the outskirts of your life — because of all that you stayed at home, and usually they were the ones who came over.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Macron, Hollande, Valls, El Khomri, Hirsch, Sarkozy, Bertrand, Chirac. The history of your suffering bears these names. Your life story is the history of one person after another beating you down. The history of your body is the history of these names, one after another, destroying you. The history of your body stands as an accusation against political history”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Where conflicts arise between workers and bosses, between the rights of one class and the interests of the other, the machinery of the law is typically used as a weapon against the workers. Even where the law is contrary to the demands of powerful corporations, the police often act not from principle or legal obligation, but according to the needs of the ruling class. This tendency shouldn’t surprise us, if we remember the lengths to which the cops have gone in the defense of White supremacy, even as laws and policies have changed. With class, as with race, it is the status quo that the police act to preserve and the interests of the powerful that they seek to defend, not the rule of law or public safety. The law, in fact, has been a rather weak guide for those who are meant to enforce it.”
― Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“In the name of "class struggle" and "the unified interest of the working class," the Left has always selected certain sectors of the working class as revolutionary subjects and condemned others to a merely supportive role in the struggles these sectors were waging.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Police activism, especially in the guise of union activity, remains somewhat perplexing. The historical development is clear enough, but politically it is troublesome—especially for the left. The whole issue presents a nest of paradoxes: the police have unionized and gone on strike—but continue in their role as strikebreakers. They have pitted themselves against their bosses and the government, but represent a threat to democracy rather than an expression of it. They have resisted authority for the sake of authoritarian aims, have broken laws in the name of law and order, and have demanded rights that they consistently deny to others. (...)

Police associations thus developed in relative isolation from the rest of the labor movement, while building close ties with the command hierarchy within the departments. This fact points to two related reasons why police unions are not legitimate labor unions. First, as is discussed above, the police are clearly part of the managerial machinery of capitalism. Their status as “workers” is therefore problematic. Second, the agendas of police unions mostly reflect the interests of the institution (the police department) rather than those of the working class.”
― Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“She wipes her forehead with her wrist
She's just back from a double shift
Esther's a carer
doing nights

Behind her
on the kitchen wall
is a black and white picture
of swallows in flight

Her eyes are sore
her muscles ache
she cracks a beer
and swigs it

She holds it
to her thirsty lips
and necks it
till it's finished.

It's 4:18 a.m. again.
Her brain is full
of all she's done that day
She knows
that she won't sleep a wink
before the sun
is on it's way.

She's worried about the world tonight.

She's worried all the time.
She don't know how
she's supposed
to put it

from her mind . . .

- Europe is Lost”
― Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos

“I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England

“The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husband’s, she would deplore even more having this property abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women: she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“September 2017 Emmanuel Macron condemns the “laziness” of those in France who, according to him, are blocking his reforms. You’ve always known that this word is reserved for people like you, people who can’t work because they live too far from large towns, who can’t find work because they were driven out of the educational system too soon, without a diploma, who can’t work anymore because life in the factory has mangled their back. We don’t use the word lazy to describe a boss who sits in an office all day ordering other people around. We’d never say that. When I was little, you were always saying, obsessively, I’m not lazy, because you knew this insult hung over you, like a specter you wished to exorcize.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "white working class". The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed tomake some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“She didn't realise that her family, her parents, her brothers and sisters, even her children, pretty much everyone in the village, had had the same problems, and what she called mistakes were, in fact, no more and no less than the perfect realisation of the normal course of things.”
― Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy

“Imagine living in a world where we judge each others intellect based on social statuses and class. Raw intelligence is not reserved for "upper classes" or those with a particular accent.”
― Torron-Lee Dewar, Creativity is Everything

“I know too much from personal observation from how the poor and working classes live to be satisfied with a system which makes their lives one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety.”
― Vida Goldstien, 1891

“Worrying about what ‘people are going to say’ and ‘what the neighbours might think’ is always in the minds of working people. They aren’t afraid of failure. They are afraid of success and how they would have to make excuses to their friends if it ever came their way.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Gigolo: Inside the Secret World of the Super Rich

“After all, poor people are only as good as their last service to the masters of the system, and it is based on that last service that they get to have one more paycheck for just one more month of uncertainty.”
― Louis Yako

“Many American people are becoming increasingly unable to afford dying, let alone living.”
― Louis Yako

“A working-class hero is something to be.”
― John Lennon

“Marginalised masculinities describes a group of men who are marginalised and excluded from all the benefits of male privilege because of race or class. For example, although working-class men may embody a kind of toughness and stoicism that is prized, they do not benefit as greatly from that privilege as those in the middle and upper classes do. ... 'working-class men are the male equivalent of the "dumb blond" - endowed with physical virtues but problematized by intellectual shortcomings'.”
― Michael Beattie, Counselling Skills for Working with Gender Diversity and Identity

“A commitment to expanding democracy is at the core of all good socialist thinking. Democracy is the principle that people ought to have a say over decisions that affect them, and that they should be in control of their own lives rather than being subjected to the wishes of powerful economic and political elites.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Do you know what strength is - forgetting sleep, romance, money I keep working without rest to unite the humans, that's my strength - a single mother working day and night so her child can have a bright future, that's her strength - a street vendor working hard since dawn for his family, that's his strength. Do you have such a strength of your own? Your ancestry, your family money, your material possessions - putting aside all these, what is your own true strength?”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ain't Enough to Look Human

“Fascist propaganda demonizes minorities, to brainwash the working class.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

“One of the reasons that the West continues to dance on the grave of the Soviet Union, and to downplay its achievements, is to make sure that, as the world-wide economy worsens, and as the suffering of working people around the world deepens, they don't get any notions in their heads to organize some new socialist revolution with such ideals.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“The two friends enjoyed wandering through this place. It was small. Only a city block. Unobtrusive. This was where some of the pioneer workers of Seattle were laid to rest. Laborers who worked in sawmills. Regular folk born when Seattle was a mill town. Regular working class, now buried under ground stones. These folk had to fight to simply survive. Remembered by their children and grandchildren, they worked for a better tomorrow for those they loved. These people had smiled, and danced, and hoped. They had lived.

Now buried, most had no fancy education to show for their troubles. They were not part of the elite, yet those who lay here were great. These souls were not the most renowned or powerful, but were, in truth, the best of the world. As Zin and Obia wandered through, they saw various headstones were flat, unobtrusive, and resting in the grass. Right in the ground, without any markers.”
― Ruth Ann Oskolkoff, Zin

“The boomers’ most consequential political legacy may be the biggest irony of all: for all their claims to be the most progressive generation ever, the main result of the boomers’ involvement in politics has been the destruction of the Left. In 1950, the Democratic party polled fifteen points better among those without college degrees, compared with those with them. By 2016, that advantage had flipped to a fifteen-point deficit. The Labour Party in the U.K. has undergone the same transformation, from the party of the working class to the party of the college-educated elite. But if a left-wing party is no longer the party of the working class, what good is it? What left is it?”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“they shower water cannons
but they do not know
you’re a seed buried in the soil
ready to geminate and penetrate
your head out in this turmoil.”
― Zufishan Rahman, Foxfire - A book of poems

“But the lesson of those years is that the ruling class can't be relied upon to redistribute wealth and power.”
― Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010

“Some jobs are not hard to get.
It is just that you do not have enough money or guts to pay for it, in cash or in kind.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Before You Doubt Yourself: Pep Talks and other Crucial Discussions

“We should've waged a war against poverty and not the impoverished.”
― J. Andrew Schrecker