Working Class Quotes

“All together, these powers and abilities combine to face an enemy that depends on you believing that it cannot be defeated. But we know that it can. Every person in this crowd is dedicated to stories about overcoming impossible odds and telling people that, in the depths of despair, there is always hope. And no matter what you are facing, when you face it together, you are unstoppable.”
― Brennan Lee Mulligan

“But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“Und doch ist jeder Beruf auf seine Art notwendig und ehrenvoll. Aber nur diejenigen, die keinen Beruf auszuüben brauchen, die sich ihr Geld nicht durch Arbeit verdienen müssen, sondern von ihrem Vermögen leben können, die auf dem Land ein geregeltes Leben führen, sich ihre zeit nach ihrem Belieben einteilen und sich ihren persönlichen Beschäftigungen hingeben können, nur diejenigen, sage ich, haben das Glück, sich ihre Gesundheit und ihr gutes Aussehen auch noch dann erhalten zu können, wenn sie nicht mehr ganz jung sind. Alle anderen büßen bald etwas von ihrer Schönheit ein.”
― Jane Austen, Die Liebe der Anne Elliot - Das Buch zu der Netflix Verfilmung "Überredung"!

“Women trailed around vendors, baskets on their arms, bartering for a low price, despite the fact their purses carried plenty of coin. I envied their warm coats and the ruffles on their long dresses. They were never cold, never dressed in threadbare clothes, and never went hungry. They also never worried about what would happen to them if they had an episode and passed out in a gutter. It was no use dwelling on what I didn’t have.”
― Angela J. Ford, A Sleet Storm's Seduction

“As their personal connections to a geographical community shrink, so people look to work to compensate; volunteer schemes organised through the workplace and corporate social responsibility programmes become a substitute. Putnam quotes one commentator's conclusion: 'As more Americans spend more of their time "at work", work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life.

It is the corporation which hands out advice on toddler pottytraining and childcare, offers parenthood classes and sets up a reading support programme in a local school - all of which exist in British corporations – rather than the social networks of family, friends and neighbours. This amounts to a form of corporate neopaternalism which binds the employee ever tighter into a suffocating embrace, underpinning the kind of invasive management techniques described in Chapter 4.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“[...] The revolution was left unfinished. The feminists of the sixties and seventies challenged the rigid division of labour between men and women; they wanted women to have access to the workplace, and men to rediscover their role at home. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach reflects on the thinking of the seventies: 'We wanted to challenge the whole distribution of work we wanted to put at the centre of everything the reproduction of daily life, but feminism got seduced by the work ethic. My generation wanted to change the values of the workplace so that it accepted family life.'

This radical agenda for the reorganisation of work and home was abandoned in Britain. Instead we took on the American model of feminism, influenced by the rise of neo-liberalism and individualism. Feminism acquired shoulderpads and an appetite for power; it celebrated individual achievement rather than working out how to transform the separation between work and family, and the social processes of how we care for dependants and raise children. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt remembers a turning point in the debate in the UK when she was at the National Council for Civil Liberties: 'The key moment was when we organised a major conference in the seventies with a lot of American speakers who were terrific feminists. When they arrived we were astonished that they were totally uninterested in an agenda around better maternity leave, etc. They argued that we couldn't claim special treatment in the workplace; women would simply prove they were equals. You couldn't make claims on the workplace. We thought it was appalling.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“The thought of Clara became a preoccupation, and with the love which at length he recongised there blended a sense of fate fulfilling itself. His enthusiasms, his purposes, never defined as education would have defined them, were dissipated into utter vagueness. He lost his guiding interests, and found himself returning to those of boyhood. The country once more attracted him; he took out of his old sketch-books, bought a new one, revived the regret that he could not be a painter of landscape. A visit to one or two picture-galleries, and then again profound discouragement, recognition of the fact that he was a mechanic and never could be anything else.
It was the end of his illusions. For him not even passionate love was to preserve the power od idealising its object. He loved Clara with all the desire of his being, but could no longer deceive himself in judging her character. The same sad clearness of vision affected his judgement of the world about him, of the activities in which he had once been zealous, of the conditions which enveloped his life and the lives of those dear to him. The spirit of revolt often enough stirred within him, but no longer found utterance in the speech which brings no relief; he did his best to dispel the mood, mocking at it as folly. Consciously he set himself that task of becoming a practical man, of learning to make the best of life as he found it, of shunning as the fatal error that habit of mind which kept John Hewett on the rack. Who was he that he should look for pleasant things in his course through the world? ‘We are the lower orders; we are the working classes,’ he said bitterly to his friend, and that seemed the final answer to all his aspirations.”
― George Gissing

“What I hoped was to raise up for the poor and the untaught a friend out of their own midst, some one who had gone through all that they suffer, who was accustomed to earn her own living by the work of her hands as they do, who had never thought herself their better, who saw the world as they see it and knew all their wants. A lady may do good, we know that; but she can’t be the friend of the poor as I understand it; there’s too great a distance between her world and theirs.”
― George Gissing

“The most important lesson [of the 2019 federal election loss] is the same one that parties of the centre left around the world are having to learn: our traditional support base cannot be taken for granted. Working-class voters have plenty of choice when it comes to their vote. (p.11)”
― Chris Bowen, On Charlatans

“La leçon naturelle, "le communisme est le salut de la classe ouvrière" a été remplacée par une leçon artificielle, "le parti communiste est le sauveur". Après avoir capté l'énergie des grévistes par ses discours révolutionnaires, le parti communiste a orienté ces formes vers ses propres objectifs.”
― Anton Pannekoek

“She made a decent salary, but most of that went to paying interest on her debts. Still, she was lucky to have a job at all. She had to keep reminding herself of that. She didn’t feel lucky.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“No one likes putting a cash value on their own freedom, selling their soul two weeks at a time. But every one of them had done just that, and they resented the company for it.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“Never mind the eighty percent of the population who fell below the poverty line. They couldn’t afford to complain and risk losing their dole.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, as the saying went. Unless it’s also holding the key to your cage. That might actually be worth it.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“Laila could picture the flow of traffic all around her. From above, she watched the cars move along in streams like all those ants on her kitchen floor. What had they been looking for anyway? A crumb here, a speck of sugar there? The vast stockpiles of food in the pantry and fridge remained untouched. For that matter, what kept all these cars returning to the city day after day? A little money, a little entertainment? Surface operations like Livetrac kept the ants fighting over crumbs while the obscene fortunes of a shadowy elite were counted not in dollars but in lives.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“A Moment of Joy"
The ruling global elites
are holding their breath in anticipation of
who may be the first to start a nuclear war!
The wealthy and the stock market traders
are fearfully watching the fluctuation in the stock prices…
Writers, media pundits, and academics
on the payroll of power and authority
are worried about a potential revolution
that may put an end to the powers in place,
and consequently to their existence!
Doctors, engineers, and other professionals
are all alarmed and watching the job market
in fear of losing their cushy jobs!
Only the waitress at the nearby restaurant
is experiencing a moment of joy
for the generous tip she just received
from the last customer tonight!

[Original poem published in Arabic on October 30,2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“When making the case for liberal education to low-income students and families, I often point out that there is a long tradition of steering working-class students toward an education in servitude, an education in obedience and docility, an education in not asking questions. The idea that liberal education is only for the already privileged, for the pampered elite, is a way of carrying on this odious tradition. It is a way of putting liberal education out of the reach of the people who would most benefit from it—precisely the people who have historically been denied the tools of political agency. I ask them to take a look at who sends their children to liberal arts colleges and at what liberal arts college graduates go on to do with their “useless” education.”
― Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

“What the poor as well as the rich require is not to be indoctrinated, is not to be taught other people’s opinions, but to be induced and enabled to think for themselves. It is not physical science that will do this, even if they could learn it much more thoroughly than they are able to do. After reading, writing, and arithmetic (the last a most important discipline in habits of accuracy and precision, in which they are extremely deficient), the desirable thing for them seems to be the most miscellaneous information, and the most varied exercise of their faculties. They cannot read too much. Quantity is of more importance than quality, especially all reading which relates to human life and the ways of mankind; geography, voyages and travels, manners and customs, and romances, which must tend to awaken their imagination and give them some of the meaning of self-devotion and heroism, in short, to unbrutalise them.”
― John Stuart Mill, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Vol 1

“A class that had never before existed in Russia, a working class, was suddenly created. While thousands of jobs were created, the necessary laws—limits on the workday, standard wage scales, child-labor laws, and safe conditions—did not exist. This resulted in worker unrest, and revolt quickly followed.”
― Greg King, The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina of Russia

“When I was a teenager I started to think about how dedicated Dad was to the struggle for working-class rights. He had devoted his life to the Labour cause fighting inequality and that’s fucking great. I was proud of him. But what about women? He was out fighting the cause, and my mother was at home running the house. Where do women stand in the revolution? I’d seen Paine’s Rights of Man on his bookshelf. I wondered to myself, what about the rights of women?”
― Bobby Gillespie, Tenement Kid

“Critical Criticism creates nothing, the worker creates everything”
― Karl Marx, The Holy Family

“Every class which struggles for its enfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete opposition with that of the ruling class.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“You’ve always been the underdog, the underclass, the underestimated, but to me, you were always gonna win.”
― Dr Jessica Taylor

“School, and it's shite attitudes towards whatever or whoever I was, was the source of my frustration. They shunted my classes a little as I found myself falling headfirst into the comprehensive school abyss, Joining the educational subnormal in staring at walls for hours on end whilst being babysat whatever lesson I had been removed from. Black and Asian capitalise that undo that people went from being my neighbours and classmates to parasitical leeches I could barely bring myself to acknowledge joining the educational subnormal in staring at walls for hours on end whilst being babysat through whatever lesson I had been removed from. Black and Asian people went from being my neighbours and classmates to parasitical leeches I could barely bring myself to acknowledge. they were not worth my time. I was beginning to understand what the stickers and I newspapers had meant. I was beginning to understand that deep sense of frustration that these people were sealing my history and by birthright. Why couldn't they just fuck off where they truly belong? And their 'protectors', the teachers and civil servants with their bleeding Hearts and cheap, shit, French cars were little more than university-educated scum from the middle classes sent to suppress my freedom.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“The people of the East End have a marvellous tradition of fighting facism, but facism still always manifests itself in the East End because poverty exists at its heart.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“We wanted a body race war, we felt it was inevitable and we would have to be the ones controllling the streets when it happened. We weren't the kind of blokes who could cry on each other's shoulders over loves gone-astray or bitter person dissatisfactions. All of these friendships were built solely on our hatred and distrust of others. The class system, or what little I knew of it, was quite obviously separate to race. There were two ways of looking at it: downtrodden and ignored because we were either white or because we were also working class.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“Blue Blood & Blue Collar (The Sonnet)

I have nothing against blue blood,
any more than I'm against blue collar.
But blue blood think honor is an heirloom,
while blue collar earn their rightful honor.

That's what I call true human character,
unreliant on some fictitious identity.
Every human must earn their admittance,
into the civilized realm of humanity.

I can still accept any blood, blue or otherwise,
if they have the decency to acknowledge atrocity.
Otherwise, all blue blood are canine incarnate,
unworthy of acknowledgment of their existentiality.

King and president, ceo and janitor,
all are equal, only behavior merits honor.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“to be able to study at a tertiary institution, when I compared myself to those farmers who actually grew our cash crops. They worked the hardest to supply most of our country’s foreign exchange, yet they didn’t harvest those benefits of education, healthcare or even running water and electricity”
― Adwoa Badoe, Aluta

“You go on and on about laboring with the common man. And at the very first instance of real work, you go and find cushy jobs doing nothing”
― Adwoa Badoe, Aluta

“How do you recognise a Glaswegian in English literature? He's the cut-out figure who wields a razor-blade, gets moroculous drunk and never has a single, solitary 'thought' in his entire life. He beats his wife and beats his kids and beats his next door neighbour. And another striking thing; everybody from a Glaswegian or working-class background, everybody in fact from any regional part of Britain -none of them knew how to talk! Unlike the nice, stalwart upper-class English hero whose words on the page were always absolutely splendidly proper and pure and pristinely accurate whether in dialogue or without. Most interesting of all, for myself as a writer, the narrative belonged to them and them alone. They owned it. The place where thought and spiritual life exists.”
― James Kelman, Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural & Political