Working Class Quotes

“Neoliberalism insists that if we work hard enough, we can earn as much money as anyone else. Of course, the concept of meritocracy is integral to neoliberalism and erases the reality of capital itself, that capitalism is not just material capital but also, importantly, social and cultural capital. Without these forms of capital, (p. 77) one cannot, in fact, “succeed” in a capitalist culture. One obvious example is the art world, where one can only have their work shown in a gallery if they have connections to that gallery (galleries do not, for the most part, accept unsolicited submissions). All the cash in the world can’t create the generations of social connections of a middle-class family, whose circle might include art collectors, gallerists, critics, and artists. It is also the values and unspoken rules of the ruling class that distinguish who is allowed in and who is not.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“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

“I am off to a life where I can exist in a room and not have to pretend I want to be there. I am off to hear people who have something to say. I don’t even have to agree with it— I just want to know what it’s like to listen to a real sentence. I long for a time where I don’t wish the day would be over. This means leaving the company. I can wonder, or I can wander—and it’s time for me to get lost. Reinvention is hard. To let it go? To admit you don’t love something anymore? That’s the stuff that kills you. But I must run before another workday asks for me again. Things are hard so that we can start. I feel like fate is blindfolding me. My arms reach out not knowing if I’ll impale myself or secure my foothold—but all great things come from motion. Nothing begets nothing. And I’m scared, but I have the movies with me. The things we love require us. I wonder what would happen if everyone in the world did what they loved. Would things fall into place and leave no empty spaces? Would there be harmony in the work field? Sustainable marriages? Children with parents? Dirty water? Would there be resignation letters?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“MCA: Middle Class Activist (The Sonnet)

I don't know the meaning of socialism,
But progress without society is insanity.
I don't know the meaning of capitalism,
But catering to luxury produces disparity.
I don't know the meaning of woke,
But no life is complete without community.
I don't know the meaning of philosophy,
But intellect is useless without amity.
I don't own many fancy gadgets,
Affording essentials I stand without greed.
I'll probably never set foot on MARS,
On earth I'll be serving the abandoned in need.
High and mighty tech won't make this world better,
Till we place humanity at our highest altar.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Solo Standing on Guard: Life Before Law

“To resist assimilation is to insist on our working-class origins, on carrying with us the lives and histories of our families, communities, histories, and culture. To give up pretending that one is not who one is, is to render one’s self marginalized. It is to refuse neoliberalism — which insists on homogeneity — with all of its ideologies of aspiration, optimism, progress, and the idea that power and money ought to reside in the hands of the ruling class. I don’t personally care if the middle class has money or material things or power. What I care about is that the working class and the poor lack material goods, jobs that could provide such goods, agency, and mastery over our lives and the lives of those in our communities.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“Dreams are our own. Our dreams stay with us till we realize them. We can never ignore our dreams. It is because of our dreams that we get inspired to keep on working and striving harder to achieve our life’s purpose. A life spent in achieving and realizing our dreams makes life meaningful!”
― Avijeet Das

“I used to scream, “Daddy!” and hug him when he came home,
Until one day I got scared hugging a father I didn’t know.
Who is daddy except for that one man in my house at night
To eat dinner, sleep, and go away again?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Authors like Shakespeare and Goethe have glorious monologues that flood the theater with words. This endless verbalizing is a lie. This perfect harmony between heart and tongue exists only on a stage. I wanted to use language realistically to dramatize the tension that arises when the correspondence between feelings and language breaks down. Even Brecht swindled when it comes to language. His peasants speak more intelligently and more beautifully than any university professor.
I wanted to smash this convention of stage language. I do not believe that people can heave their hearts into their mouths and speak their inner torments trippingly on the tongue. Language should not be the central element in drama. Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the inability to express oneself. Language should have the same function in the theater that it has in reality.”
― Franz Xaver Kroetz

“A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.”
― Grover Cleveland

“And this is the economic constitution of our entire modern society: the working class alone produces all values. For value is only another expression for labour, that expression, namely, by which is designated, in our capitalist society of today, the amount of socially necessary labour embodied in a particular commodity. But, these values produced by the workers do not belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and money, which enable them to buy the labour-power of the working class. Hence, the working class gets back only a part of the entire mass of products produced by it. And, as we have just seen, the other portion, which the capitalist class retains, and which it has to share, at most, only with the landlord class, is increasing with every new discovery and invention, while the share which falls to the working class (per capita) rises but little and very slowly, or not at all, and under certain conditions it may even fall.”
― Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital

“Look. I spend my life in space for my five-and-dime gadgets and my beer-and-pretzel kickback from the Combines. There's fat fellows back there,' his thumb jerked over his shoulder and back, 'that sit at home and collect my year's income every minute-out of skimmings from me and more like me. Suppose you run the Foundation. You'll still need us.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy

“The society I grew up in, ruled by the middle class, was and remains entirely middle-class. When I look in magazines or books, watch films or TV shows, when I talk to my colleagues and other writers and my students, there always seems to be the same handful of middle-class writers referenced. These books are referenced by the middle-class writer they read about in literary journals. And these middle-class writers write from a middle-class point of view, which is to say from a distance and, for the most part, this means not about the concrete, real world in which the majority of people live. This massive deployment of values and beliefs, aesthetics and desires, is a form of indoctrination, one we remain for the most part, unaware of. Rather than confronting the working class with their values and aesthetics, insisting we adhere to them, the middle class simply present their beliefs and aesthetics as natural, as the world.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“In order to write, let alone think, about social class, we need to have a language for it. And yet we don’t. Or rather, everyday working-class people don’t.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“an unbearably tense and disorienting paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment—on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving. One is relentlessly overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19

“Maria was waiting for the bus. Her body is cramped, like from the workday before and the workday tomorrow. Today during her shift, she stared so long at a toilet she cleaned that when she flushed it down with bleach, an irrecoverable part of her went with it. She shivers.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Organize their money on a chopping board. Sort out your worth.

$15,000 for outdated textbooks K-12.

$1,000 for a lifetime of flu vaccinations.

$8 an hour to help someone else make money.

$300 a year for food coupons.

$1,000 additional salary for any job that has a chance of expected death.

$600 co-pay on medication for an illness they cause you.

$2,000 for social security.

$15,000 for pension.

$150,000 for the average life insurance policy. $250,000 for a doctor’s fatal mistake.

$350,000 if the doctor made it in a different state.

2/5 of a soul lost in the workplace.

3/5 of a soul lost to fuck for food.

$4,000 to bury someone in the soil.

And there you have you. Easy to make. Affordable. Special.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“The Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation, and other bureaus reserve that a budget for a human life is worth anywhere from 4-10 million dollars. Like a sports car. Like a construction site. Or an airplane. As if the mysterious gift of consciousness could fit in the box of a W-2 form. To them, we are 4 inches of digital ink on a computer screen. Money: if we can’t get rid of it, we can at least admit it doesn’t deserve us.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“There is no chance of welfare in the society, unless the conditions of the working class are improved.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism

“Change is not when a billionaire becomes a trillionaire, real societal change is when a construction worker who never passed high school can send their child to college without depending on anyone.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism

“What keeps me in New York is neither the high culture of museums and concert halls nor the unrivaled opportunities for working, eating, and spending that New Yorkers revel in. Rather it is a sensibility that is distinctly working-class—generous; open-minded but skeptical; idealistic but deflating of pretension; bursting with energy and a commitment to doing.”
― Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II

“The lengths the Haves will go in order to deprive the Have Nots boggles the mind.”
― Stacey Lee, The Downstairs Girl

“It is important for us to draw literally all working people into the government of the state. It is a task of tremendous difficulty. But socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the Party. It can be implemented by tens of millions when they have learned to do it for themselves.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works Volume 27

“The lesson of the experience is that, whatever the immediate problems, of this or that situation, if a standing army has to be formed which operates outside the control of the organs of working class rule, this is not just undesirable but also a real obstacle to the process of building socialism. The Red Army may have won the civil war, but its victory turned out to be a Pyrrhic one which sounded the death-knell of the kind of society most Bolsheviks, and the majority of the working class, had envisaged in 1917.”
― Jock Dominie, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left

“Freud can help here. He reminds us that what the psyche cannot handle, the mind represses. In a world where one does not exist, being ignored and, at the same time, being the subject of daily acts of violence, is difficult if not impossible. The mind, or rather the psyche, represses the reality of what is happening in order to survive. Furthermore, one’s psyche may also repress the truth that one is working-class in order to survive. The working-class artist who trades in her past, her history, family, community, and self for a sleeker, more palatable version of herself, who tries to pass as middle-class (or upper-middle class in Anthony’s case), is only doing what culture and society tells her to do. Neoliberalism assures us that we are all born equal, each of us with the same access to material, cultural, and social capital — and that there are no social classes. To insist otherwise is to appear ungrateful, negative, depressing, and often mentally ill. Indeed, to blame one’s inability to “succeed” in neoliberal society (to blame systemic forces rather than one’s own personal failure) is to set one’s self outside the all-pervasive neoliberal system. Pointing out the unfairness of the system, is, in a sense, a form of giving up and dropping out of the game. The “boot-straps” trope is just that — a trope, a lie. And yet it’s what most people still believe. This splitting of the self speaks to the contradictory nature of this book and its subject.”
― Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

“the words on the paper im readin are blarin out at me loud an angrylike tellin me there's no end to the recession theres no jobs theres no peace theres no hope man an people wonder why i do what i do? an bums are bummin lights from me and babies are squintin up at me an my coffee is rupturing my gut bitterlike an i guess the world is kinda like the coffee sometimes – ill be suffering thru both tomorrow.”
― Scott C. Holstad

“If u want ppl 2 deliver u groceries & goods but don't want to hold the corporations they work for accountable for PPE, thriving wages, hazard pay, & taxes, you're exploiting cheap labor for your own safety. We won't survive on exploitation. We only survive through solidarity.

(4/1/2020 on Twitter)”
― Nikkita Oliver

“Organization is the only tool we have to defend ourselves against the present system. It is the only way to fight the injustices being committed against the workers, who produce everything

(From Ensayos Libertarios)”
― Luisa Capetillo

“Tyranny, like liberty, has no country; neither do exploiters nor workers”
― Luisa Capetillo

“While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“¡Obreros! Picad el miedo.
Vuestra es la tierra desnuda.
Saltad el hambre y la muerte
por sobre la honda laguna,
y uníos a los campesinos,
y a los que en caña se anudan.
¡Rómpanse un millón de puños
contra moral tan injusta!
¡Alzad, alzad vuestros brazos
como se alzaron en Rusia!

Workers! Slash the fear.
Yours is the naked earth.
Leap hunger and death
over the deep lagoon,
and join the peasants
and those knotted to the cane.
Break a million fists
against so unjust a morality!
Raise, raise your arms
like they were raised in Russia!

("Desde el Puente Martín Peña")”
― Julia de Burgos