Working Class Quotes

“People often say that football and boxing are the ways out of the working class and they are your ticket out of that kind of life, if you happen to want to leave it. But, for me, the library is the key. That is where the escape tunnel is. All of the knowledge in the world is there. The great brains of the world are at your fingertips.”
― Billy Connolly, Coming Home: My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country

“Where is history? The history they taught at school was not your own. We were learning world history, and you were left out.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Lies Sleeping

“The roots of modern religion are deeply embedded in the social oppression of the working masses.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a greater number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy”
― Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917-1932

“We are just peasants with money.”
― A.H. Septimius

“O.K., so I’m not so smart. I’m working class. But it’s the working class that keeps the world running, and it’s the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can’t understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I’d like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody’s really being exploited, we’ve got to put a stop to it. That’s what I believe, and that’s why I ask questions. Am I right, or what?”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I don't mind being a team player. I'm just tired of being the soccer ball.”
― Quentin R. Bufogle, Horse Latitudes

“Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are some-times told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class–a sort of 'bread and circuses' business–to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, buy by an un-conscious process–the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer's need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Ex-slaves, in large part, shared a different economic vision. They were "always on the move," searching for family, denying their labor to "dishonest or oppressive employers," and asserting their independence through their mobility. Rather than staying in place, working as much as possible for a high a wage as possible, and thus possibly accumulating a greater array of material good, a large number of freedpeople sought not to maximize income but to minimize the amount of "time spent at work on other people's behalf.”
― Elsa Barkley Brown

“Family members provided a variety of support--physical, economic, emotional, and psychological... Parents opened bank accounts for their children, even those who were adult, away from home, married, and employed. And children who left Richmond to search for work elsewhere provided for the money in their savings accounts to be used by other relatives, if needed, during their absence. In all these ways African American women and men testified to the notion of family members as having a mutual and continuing responsibility to help each other and to prepare for hard times.”
― Elsa Barkley Brown

“America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Un conto ancora aperto

“I think the worst sort of time travel is how the clock speeds up when I'm on my break.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Being an elite is not a mere possession or something "within" an actor (skills, talents, and human capital); it is an embodied performative act enabled by by both possessions and the inscriptions that accompany experiences within elite institutions (schools, clubs, families, networks, etc.). Our bodily tastes, dispositions, and tendencies are not simply something we're born with; they are things that are produced through our experiences in the world. Not only do they occur in our minds, but they are things we enact repeatedly so that soon these performances look less and less like an artificial role we're playing- a role that might advantage us- and instead look more and more like just who we naturally are.”
― Shamus Rahman Khan, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School

“As negroes moved from unionism toward political action, white labor in the North not only moved in the opposite direction from political action to union organization, but also evolved the American Blindspot for the Negro and his problems. It lost interest and vital touch with Southern labor and acted as though the millions of laborers in the South did not exist.

Thus labor went into the great war of 1877 against Northern capitalists unsupported by the black man, and the black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor. Suppose for a moment that Northern labor had stopped the bargain of 1876 and maintained the power of the labor vote in the South; and suppose that the Negro with new and dawning consciousness of the demands of labor as differentiated from the demands of capitalists, had used his vote more specifically for the benefit of white labor, South and North?”
― W E B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

“Increasing prosperity for the capitalists has everywhere brought with it increasing prosperity for the proletariat, instead of the increasing misery which Marx foretold. The most advanced capitalist countries are also those where the working class has the highest standard of life.”
― A.J.P. Taylor, The Communist Manifesto

“Theoretically it is, indeed, asserted that the relation between employer and employee is based upon a contract for the accomplishment of a definite purpose. The purpose in this case is social production. But a contract has meaning only when both parties participate equally in the purpose. In reality, however, the worker has today no voice in determining production, for this is given over completely to the employer. The consequence is that the worker is debased by doing a thousand things which constantly serve only to injure the whole community for the advantage of the employer.”
― Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice

“African American women actively contested white constructions of black female labor.”
― LeShawn Harris

“Historians have generally described the coming of industrialization in terms of changes in paid work. The transformation has been framed as one from a community of comparatively independent producers to a class of wage workers.”
― Jeanne Boydston

“Sometimes the gap between what you are and what you want to be is a little piece of paper called your college degree. So jump.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“On the contrary, all experience shows that revolutionaries come from those who are economically independent, not from factory workers. Very few revolutionary leaders have done manual work, and those who did soon abandoned it for political activities. The factory worker wants higher wages and better conditions, not a revolution. It is the man on his own who wants to remake society, and moreover he can happily defy those in power without economic risk.”
― A.J.P. Taylor, The Communist Manifesto

“Go home now. Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You going to need it. [Someone shouted] 'What will we need it for, Mother?' For guns [I said].”
― Mother Jones

“dad had to...
...work three jobs he had to
give his time off to sleep
instead of knowing me”
― Vivek Shraya, Even This Page Is White

“When a man wants to rob a bank he hides behind a mask, but when a banker wants to rob a man, he hides behind a corporation.”
― V.O. Diedlaff, We Can Fix It: Reclaiming the American Dream

“If you’re working class, they try to walk all over you. If you escape that and become a celebrity, they put you on walks of fame and name streets after you, so people can walk all over you in perpetuity.”
― Stewart Stafford

“E sapevo anche un’altra cosa. Che se non fossi andato per il mondo, non avrei capito niente della mia storia, della storia della mia parte. E se non si capisce nulla, a cosa servono le mani fini dei privilegiati? Cosa racconti, cosa scrivi con quelle mani se gli occhi non vedono, se il cuore non desidera e non spera, se lo stomaco non conosce la fame e il fegato la rabbia? Come puoi fare il morso del ciuco alla realtà senza le castagne in tasca?”
― Prunetti Alberto

“He was stupid, yes; he had never had any schooling; he didn't know how to explain himself. Was he in jail because he doesn't know how to explain things right? What was wrong with his being stupid? He worked like a slave, day in and day out. [...] Was it his fault he was stupid? Who was to blame?”
― Graciliano Ramos, Vidas Secas

“Thou shalt have liberty, but no will. - A Corporate Commandment”
― Lamine Pearlheart

“Every union, every association of persons pursuing identical aims and aspirations, likewise furnishes numerous examples of such higher aims, which pursue not material but only moral rewards. The emulators are moved by the ambition to distinguish themselves, by the desire to serve the common cause. This type of ambition is a virtue, its pursuit promotes the general benefit, while also bringing the individual satisfaction. Ambition is harmful only if it is pursued to the detriment of the community or at the expense of others.”
― Wilhelm Liebknecht, On the Political Position of Social-Democracy