John C. Calhoun Quotes

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

Every capitalist is your enemy. Every working man is your friend.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

For the laboring class there cannot exist a peace of compromise on the basis of a capitalist regime

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The masses have never believed in sophisms taught by economists, uttered more to confirm exploiters in their rights than to convert the exploited!

The “natural laws of economics” are in fact tools in the hands of the avaricious and the greedy for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

These interests of the workers, as the exploited and oppressed, class of society, are the same in all countries.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

Nor can one class appropriate the produce of the labour of another class, as the capitalists now appropriate and enjoy the wealth which the powers of the working man daily call into existence. It is inequality of exchanges which enables one class to live in luxury and idleness, and dooms another to incessant toil

Capitalists personally are often the mildest-mannered men that ever shattered a family or drained a workingman of his marrow.

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people, and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life.

The whole contention lies between those that labor for a living and those that do not.

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.