Quotes & Sayings About Social Class Division

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

The economic class struggle is a struggle against inessanlty intensified exploitation: not only against the brutal material form of exploitation, capitalism's tendency to reduce wages, and against the class 'techniques' for increasing productivity ... but also around the question of the technical-social division of labor that prevails om enterprises, and against bourgeois ideology and repression. — Louis Althusser

The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation-th at is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning and exploiting class and a property-less dependent class - that is, for a criminal purpose. — Albert J. Nock

There must be no division by class hatred, whether this hatred be that of creed against creed, nationality against nationality, section against section, or men of one social or industrial condition against men of another social and industrial condition. We must ever judge each individual on his own conduct and merits, and not on his membership in any class, whether that class be based on theological, social, or industrial considerations. — Theodore Roosevelt

Many philosophers, economists and social scientists saw the middle classes, as the tool to end all class division, with an end of days revolution — Owen H. Lewis

In a traditional classroom, the spread between the fastest and slowest students grows over time, [and so] putting them all in one class cohort eventually makes it exceedingly difficult to avoid either completely boring the fast students or completely losing the slow ones. Most school systems address this by ... putting the "fastest" students in "advanced" or "gifted" class ... and the slowest students into "remedial" classes. It seems logical ... except for the fact that it creates a somewhat permanent intellectual and social division between students. — Salman Khan

They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor. — Joseph O'Connor

In fact the system of collective contribution, levy of a tenth, and redistribution to the participants, is the schema of the sacrificial rite (one provides the victim; the god, the temple, the priests levy a tenth, then redistribution takes place: redistribution that imparts a new strength and power to those who benefit from it, deriving from the sacrifice itself).

The game - sacrifice, division, levy, redistribution - is a religious form of individual and group invigoration which has been transposed into a social practice involving the resolution of a class conflict. — Michel Foucault

Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes - one rich, one poor - both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division? — Ronald Reagan

It is through the contradictions in production and the resultant class struggle that the proletariat would one day also raise to the position of rulers, but unlike all previous social revolutions the interests of labour would act as the vessel for all classes, their rule would end the division of labour and thus the class society it creates. — Anonymous