Proletariat Inc Quotes & Sayings

I've grown fonder for Hillary Clinton since she ran for the presidency. I think that it's emblematic of the Rolling Stones song, you can't always get what you want, i.e., the grail. Sometimes you get what you need. And whatever she's gotten over the last couple of years, being humbled or be it being humbled and see the proletariat come to bat for her, getting outside of the bubble, getting out of this man's shadow, not quite getting the job she wants but a great wonk job. — Dennis Miller

China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable. — Sun Yat-sen

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

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

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

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

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

When the proletariat declares the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order, it merely declares the secret of its own existence, since it is in fact the dissolution of this order. When it demands the negation of private property, it is only laying down as a principle for society what society has laid down as a principle for the proletariat, what has already been incorporated in itself without its consent as the negative result of society. — Karl Marx

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

Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized. — Dario Fo

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he's not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he's being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology. — Raoul Vaneigem

With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it. — Leon Trotsky

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

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

The Russian revolution was to an unprecedented degree the cause of the proletariat of the whole world becoming more revolutionary. — Karl Liebknecht

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

A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery. — Vladimir Lenin

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

I believe that the rising of the proletariat, if it ever comes in this country, will end in a colossal victory for capitalism - that capitalism, as at present and in the past, will play off one mob against another, and pick the pockets of both. — Franklin Foer

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

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

Where are the heroes and the saints, who keep a clear vision of man's greatest gift, his freedom, to oppose not only the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family, and of the indigent, and claims our young for war? — Dorothy Day

The
historical mission and the justification of capitalism are, in his eyes, to prepare the conditions for a
superior mode of production. This mode of production is not in itself revolutionary; it will only be the
consummation of the revolution. Only the fundamental principles of bourgeois production are
revolutionary. When Marx affirms that humanity only sets itself problems it can solve, he is
simultaneously demonstrating that the germ of the solution of the revolutionary problem is to be found in
the capitalist system itself. Therefore he recommends tolerating the bourgeois State, and even helping to
build it, rather than returning to a less industrialized form of production. The proletariat can and must
accept the bourgeois revolution as a condition of the working-class revolution. — Albert Camus

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

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

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

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. — Karl Marx

Fascism is the punishment inflicted on the proletariat for not having continued the revolution begun in Russia. — Clara Zetkin

For Sorel, the fact that Marx's prediction that contemporary society would increasingly divide itself into two, and no more than two, mutually hostile classes was falsified by time, could be offset by the readiness of the proletariat to remain intransigent, opposing its nonproletarian opponents with absolute determination. — A. James Gregor

The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were "a sort of military-religious order." When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him "a devout knight of the proletariat." Stalin's "order of sword-bearers" resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages - and the Middle East. They — Simon Sebag Montefiore