Class Rule Quotes

The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat ... [is a] state that is democratic for the proletariat and the poor in general.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

[Jesus] organized a working class movement ... for no other purpose than to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. ~ Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Socialism will never substitute one class rule for another …. The aim of Socialism is to do away with rule and exploitation in every form, men becoming free and equal, no masters and servants, but comrades, bothers and sisters.

The Socialist Party of the United States is unilaterally opposed to the system of exploitation and class rule which is upheld and strengthened by military power.

The fight for the liberation of the working class from its present position, which is beneath a free people, is not a fight for new class privileges and prerogatives but for equal rights and equal obligations for all and for the abolition of class rule

The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy.

To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament-this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.

Yes: dictatorship ... But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not that of a leading minority in the name of the class; that is to say, it must, step by step, arise from the active participation of the class, remain under its direct influence, and be subordinated to the control of publicity and be the outcome of the political experience of the whole people

Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

The form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority, govern, and an oligarchy when the rich and the noble govern, they being at the same time few in number.