Proletariat Quotes

They see in the political apathy of the proletariat only the apathy, not the protest against a system that has nothing to offer them. ~ Red Army Faction

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. ~ Leon Trotsky

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. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. 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. ~ Mao Zedong

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848. ~ C.L.R. James

At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses. ~ Karl Liebknecht

In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. ~ Vladimir Lenin

The Communist Manifesto condemned the bourgeoisie not only for pauperizing, dehumanizing, and enslaving the toiling masses, but also for robbing the intellectual of his elevated status. "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe." Though the movement was initiated by intellectuals and powered by their talents and hungers, it yet held up the proletariat as the chosen people - the only carrier of the revolutionary idea, and the chief beneficiary of the revolution to come. The intellectuals, particularly those who had "raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole," were to act as guides - as a composite Moses - during the long wanderings in the desert. Like Moses, the intellectuals would have no more to do once the promised land was in sight. "The role of the intelligentsia," said Lenin, "is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary. ~ Eric Hoffer

The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist. ~ Friedrich Engels

Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of "brotherhood."
And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women's movement. ~ Joan Didion

What I did that was new was to prove that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production; that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; and that dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. ~ Karl Marx

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat. ~ Gene Kelly

But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order. ~ Gustavo Gutierrez

The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic. ~ Vladimir Lenin

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse. ~ Theodor Herzl

Marxism, like all other totalitarian movements in our century, must be seen as kind of secular pattern of redemption , designed to bring hope and fulfillment to those who have come to feel alienated , frustrated, and excluded from what they regard as their rightful place in a community. In its promise of unity and belonging lies much of the magic of totalitarian mistery, miracle, and authority. Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalismo hell; Trotsky the devil; and the communist commonwealth kingdom come. ~ Robert A. Nisbet

What the proletariat needs is a bath of blood. ~ Benito Mussolini

In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape. ~ J.G. Ballard

The exaggeration of the definiteness and importance of the dividing line between the capitalist class in that sense and the proletariat was surpassed only by the exaggeration of the antagonism between them. To any mind not warped by the habit of fingering the Marxian rosary it should be obvious that their relation is, in normal times, primarily one of cooperation and that any theory to the contrary must draw largely on pathological cases for verification. In social life, antagonism and synagogism are of course both ubiquitous and in fact inseparable except in the rarest of cases. But I am almost tempted to say that there was, if anything, less of absolute nonsense in the old harmonistic view - full of nonsense though that was too - than in the Marxian construction of the impassable gulf between tool owners and tool users. Again, however, he had no choice, not because he wanted to arrive at revolutionary results - these he could have derived just as well from dozens of other possible schemata - but because of the requirements of his own analysis. If class struggle was the subject matter of history and also the means of bringing about the socialist dawn, and if there had to be just those two classes, then their relation had to be antagonistic on principle or else the force in his system of social dynamics would have been lost. ~ Joseph Schumpeter

Zombies are the proletariat. Long live the workers! ~ Justine Larbalestier

Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself. ~ Ba Jin

History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat. ~ Rosa Luxemburg

By Revolution, we mean the ultimate establishment of an order of society which may not be threatened by such breakdown, and in which the sovereignty of the proletariat should be recognized and a world federation should redeem humanity from the bondage of capitalism and misery of imperial wars. ~ Bhagat Singh

Marxist writers are generally either indifferent or mildly hostile to the anti-capitalist movement, which they see as no good substitute for the great projects of communism and social democracy. Now, in one sense this is quite justified[…] However, there seems very little reason to believe that a return to the tactics of the twentieth-century labour movement is going to achieve anything in the future… [W]hat is wrong with commodification is not commodification per se… Marxist tradition goes much further than simply recommending that the excessive power of capital be challenged and curbed. Historically, this tradition tends to assert that such a challenge can only be made by virtue of a direct challenge to the existing relations of production, conceived of as the basis for a social totality, and, crucially, that it can only be made by the proletariat, politically mobilizes as a 'Class of Itself'. In concrete terms, this means that only the labour movement, being organized and mobilized on the basis of its class identity and demanding the socialization of the means of production, can mount such a challenge… This is where I, and the anti-capitalist movement, part company with classical Marxism… [A]nti-capitalist movement is characterized by a certain pluralism, an unwillingness to impose any one model of social organization, and a refusal of neoliberal hegemony not on the basis of a single class identity or even a single universal human identity, but precisely n the basis of a d ~ Jeremy Gilbert

You're gonna have to keep on saying that - I am the proletariat, I am the people. I am not the pig. You've got to make a distinction. ~ Fred Hampton

Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community. ~ Hilaire Belloc

Yet internally, poverty, the proletariat, wages, education, ~ Victor Hugo

There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. This strength we cannot be stripped of. It is the primitive strength, it is the strength that is to life germane, it is the strength that is stronger than wealth, and that wealth cannot take away. "But your strength is detachable. It can be taken away from you. Even now the Plutocracy is taking it away from you. In the end it will take it all away from you. And then you will cease to be the middle class. You will descend to us. You will become proletarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity. "You ~ Jack London

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat. ~ Karl Marx

Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils. The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor; a demand which threatens the very existence of PROFIT (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes). The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production. ~ Hilaire Belloc

Among other members of our cell I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Founder and Director of the Sex-Pol. (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called 'The Function of the Orgasm,' in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds. ~ Arthur Koestler

My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established, since the masses are backing me. ~ Bela Kun

If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois. ~ Bertrand Russell

The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known. ~ C.L.R. James

The main form of struggle is war; the main form of organization is the army ... Without armed struggle there would be no place for the proletariat, there will be no place for the people, there will be no place for the Communist Party, and there will be no victory in revolution. ~ Mao Zedong

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. ~ Adrian McKinty

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that those who see hints of a new class ideology developing around information technology are not necessarily wild-eyed. "Bit-twiddlers" are neither exactly proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They may not own the means of production in the sense that Marx argued, but they certainly do have significantly control over those means, in a more profound way than the term "symbols analysts" or "knowledge workers" captures. As a rough generalization, they value science and technological problem-solving elegance equally at least with profit. ~ Steven Weber

God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy. ~ Karl Marx

The faceless, sexless, raceless proletariat. The faceless, raceless, classless category of "all women". Both creations of white Western self-centeredness. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location. ~ Adrienne Rich

How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? ~ John Maynard Keynes

I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists. I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table manners. Yet after all why not? Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting. ~ George Orwell

Socialism does not mean getting together in a parliament and passing laws, socialism means for us overthrowing the ruling classes with all the brutality [loud laughter] that the proletariat is capable of deploying in its struggle. ~ Rosa Luxemburg

Karl Marx predicted the eventual withering away of the state and the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' when the people would rule, which was sheer fantasy because it was sheer fantasy because it was based on grossly erroneous assumptions about human nature, as history would repeatedly demonstrate. ~ David Limbaugh

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow
the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago ~ Miguel Syjuco

We must grapple with [the] national ideology [of fascism] explicitly. We still hold to the words "the proletarian has no fatherland," because everything that could make a fatherland into a fatherland is extracted by capitalist exploitation, up to and including the very light of the sun. In spite of this, the proletariat is connected to the material and cultural wealth which is the product of many generations, and which it alone can transfer to coming generations. That is why the proletariat will create its fatherland through its own efforts, by constructing its government and constituting itself as a nation. ~ Clara Zetkin

The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation. ~ Clara Zetkin

These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. ~ Karl Marx

Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.5 It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men - fathers or husbands - more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

It's not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls "reverse dominance hierarchies" in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It's uncannily similar to Marx's dream of the "dictatorship of the proletariat.")34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It's a great example of how "innate" refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it's a mistake to look at today's hunter-gatherers and say, "See, that's what human nature really looks like! ~ Jonathan Haidt

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age. ~ Bertrand Russell

And yet I don't suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat live correctly. ~ Oscar Wilde

No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing. ~ Louis Aragon

Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work. ~ Bohumil Hrabal

Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side. ~ Stephen R. Prothero

The task of the proletariat is to create a still more powerful fatherland with a far greater power of resistance, the Republican United States of Europe, as the foundation of the United States of the World. ~ Leon Trotsky

Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their G's and saying things in a folksy sort of way that's meant to capture the hearts of people. And it's all fraud; it's all stagecraft. And people are falling for a great deal of elite behavior in this country packaged as if it's proletariat behavior. ~ Eugene Jarecki

The defeats, failures of the European proletariat in the mediocre positivism with which timid union bureaucrats and bland parliamentary teams cultivates a... lazy spirit in the masses. A proletariat without more of an ideal of than the reduction of work hours and a salary raise of the few cents will never be capable of grand historic entreprise. ~ José Carlos Mariátegui

Look- what I'm getting at is no matter who or what you're dealing with, people build up meaning between themselves and the things around them. The important thing is whether this comes about naturally or not. Being bright has nothing to do with it. What matters is that you see things with your own eyes... There's always going to be a connection between you, Mr. Nakata, and the things you deal with. Just like there's a connection between eel and rice bowls. And as the web of these connections spreads out, a relationship between you, Mr. Nakata, and capitalists and the proletariat naturally develops.
~page 189 ~ Haruki Murakami

As a schoolboy I liked to draw the leaders of the world proletariat - especially Marx. Just start smearing an ordinary splotch of ink around and you've already got a resemblance ... ~ Sergei Dovlatov

The Italian proletariat needs a blood bath for it force to be renewed. ~ Benito Mussolini

But the symbolism of the miners' strike was extraordinary. The miners embodied the vanguard of the proletariat, a bastion of Bolshevism in the old days. To look out at the great crown of them in Lenin Square was to see a kind of poster for what had once been called "the masses." And now the masses were walking off the job and declaring that socialism had not delivered anything - not even a bar of soap. ~ David Remnick

The tin-sheep and wooden-melon proletariat produced their papers and named their places of work. The madman with the white beard plucked at the sleeve of the policemen, opened up his folded handkerchief, and said: professor of philosophy. ~ Herta Muller

...a "proletarian" world, with no variety, no "quality", nothing noble, ancient, memorial in it, but in theory simply a gigantic sty of evenly-fed swine, in practice a den of fratricidal and cannibalic monsters. ~ George Saintsbury

Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws. ~ Vladimir Lenin

But Smithy," said Stephanopoulis. "I don't believe in respectable businessmen. I've been a copper for more than five minutes. And the constable here doesn't think you're respectable either, because it happens he is a card-carrying member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party and so regards all forms of property as a crime against the proletariat." That one caught me by surprise and the best I could manage was "Power to the people. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Arnold's notion of the intellectual as disinterested critic distinguished him from both Marx and Hegel. For Marx, the proper function of the intellectual was to be a partisan on behalf of the proletariat, criticizing bourgeois society for its fundamental, structural oppression. For Hegel, the role of the intellectual was to stand above particular group interests, and to bring to consciousness the ethical basis of modern, capitalist society, in the process creating standards by which to guide politics and culture. Arnold's conception of "aliens" has obvious affinities with this Hegelian image of the intellectual. But "disinterestedness" for Arnold had a rather different meaning. It implied the ability to free oneself from partisanship, to take a distanced enough view to be able to criticize the side of the issue to which one had been committed, as circumstances required. "Living by ideas" he wrote, means that "when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all around you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other--still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question..." The role of the intellectual, then, was to embody and encourage that quality of mind that allowed individuals to get some distance from their social, political, and economic milieu; to reflect critically, ~ Jerry Z. Muller

While through the working of laws and customs there continues to exist a condition of social condemnation which artificially creates a human hell within civilization, and complicates with human fatality and destiny that is divin; while the three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness, continue unresolved; while in some regions social asphyxia remains possible; in other words, and in still wider terms, while ignorance and povery persist on earth, books such as this cannot fail to be of value.

Hauteville House, I January 1862 ~ Victor Hugo

World dictatorship can be established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in certain countries or groups of countries ... [and] when these federation of republics have finally grown into a world union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the international proletariat organized as a state. ~ Joseph Stalin

If I can't have the proletariat as my chosen people any longer, at least capitalism remains my Satan. ~ T.J. Clark

There is no escaping economics. Everything reverts to spectacle and exploitation. In this gigantic spectacle, the bourgeoisie directs the spectacle of the proletariat, but it is the proletariat who produces the bourgeoisie and its particularisms. ~ Guy Hocquenghem

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don't really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don't care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them.
Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that 'something bigger'. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied "that it stands on the back of a large turtle. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: 'Don't bother about it. From there onwards it's turtles all the way down. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations. ~ C.L.R. James

She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war. ~ James Robertson

In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same. ~ A. N. Wilson

Times like this, I don't wish for ignorance. I look around and I see the bloated ignorance of the lumpen proletariat: roly-poly, sausage-fingered, ginger-topped fathers of at least two illegitimate children trying to massage the asses of waiflike, peroxide-scarred students who are themselves trying to navigate adulthood with their new-found freedom from outdated parenting. ~ Ayize Jama-Everett

I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Nature as a means of reproduction is important for these intellectual workers because the specialisation and one-sidedness of their work generates psychological instability and requires periods of complete relaxation without jarring sensorial stimuli (noise, media, social contacts). Nature is the most efficient compensation for intellectual stress since it represents the unity of body and mind against the capitalist division of labour. Extensive consumption of nature has traditionally been an element of the re-production of intellectual workers. (It started with Rousseau, then came the Romantics, Thoreau, the early tourists, Tolstoi, artists' colonies in the Alps, etc). The ecological movement responds directly to the class interests of the intellectual sector of the proletariat and the struggle against nuclear power plants is a mere extension of this struggle. ~ Anonymous

Precisely because Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole future of mankind, he wanted to create for that cause not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth. ~ Ernest Mandel

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat. ~ Vladimir Lenin

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. ~ Ivan Illich

Spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins. What else are they? One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators. And don't forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy. But ~ Jack London

The modern individual family is founded on the open or
concealed slavery of the wife…Within the family he is
the bourgeois and his wife represents the proletariat. ~ Friedrich Engels

We thought that the proletariat would eventually run the world. But it is the Americans who have assumed that position ... The American people have changed. ~ Mengistu Haile Mariam

Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy. ~ Mao Zedong

The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast. ~ Hilaire Belloc

It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara

It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing 'art' to defend their collapsing culture. ~ George Grosz

In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor ... ~ Friedrich Engels

In Russia the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people. ~ Rudolf Rocker

The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. ~ Karl Marx

The anarchists, on behalf of the proletariat, therefore consider it necessary to show the proletariat that it will have to win a gigantic battle before it realizes its goals. ~ Johann Most

Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of 'Das Kapital' (which was found unread after his death). ~ Steve Jones

What civilization has done to women's bodies is no different than what it's done to the earth, to children, to the sick, to the proletariat; in short, to everything that isn't supposed to "talk," and in general to whatever the knowledge-powers of government and management don't want to hear, which is thus relegated to exclusion from all recognized activity, relegated to the role of a witness. ~ Tiqqun

The problem with Marxism is the proletariat isn't going to rise up against capitalism and consumerism. The only time they'll rise up is during a commercial break to either go to the bathroom or grab more beer. ~ Jarod Kintz

[..] neoproletariat caste, the future cybercattle of neurocracy, joyous sophisticate of the always-incomplete chain of predation, primed by silos of soya, stocks of onions, pork bellies…and completed by the global apotheosis of the Great Futures Market of neurolivestock, more volatile (and more profitable) than all the livestock of the Great Plains. Neurolivestock certainly enjoy an existence more comfortable than serfs or millworkers, but they do not easily escape their destiny as the self-regulating raw material of a market as predictable and as homogeneous as a perfect gas, a matter counted in atoms of distress, stripped of all powers of negotiation, renting out their mental space, brain by brain. ~ Gilles Châtelet

From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.*

What began to happen in the seventies, and paved the way for what we see today, was a kind of strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy - away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually, towards the financial structure as a whole.
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*Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that 'Obamacare' is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often both at the same time. ~ David Graeber

In the family, he is the bourgeois, the woman represents the proletariat. ~ Friedrich Engels

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. ~ Friedrich Engels

We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his "courage to be" from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance. ~ Ernest Becker