Growing up in a particular neighbourhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger. Gary Oldman
My working-class Italian-American parents didn’t go to school, there were no books in the house. Martin Scorsese
I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself – the working-class tradition of self-education. Ken Livingstone
In America the policeman is a working-class hero. In England the policeman is a working-class traitor. Martin Amis
The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid – and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they’re an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer. Peter Mullan
I keep my house tidy, because then I can think clearly. I feel the same about myself. Presenting yourself well is a working-class thing – my dad was a printer, but he wore a tie most days. The ungroomed look belongs more to the middle classes. Gary Kemp
I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. Bobby Sands
I’m not working class: I come from the criminal classes. Peter O’Toole
As to the ‘Left’ I’ll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our ‘national security’ calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favour of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of ‘Left’ intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush’s legitimacy. So I don’t even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction. Christopher Hitchens
She believed that, in an ideal world, the working class would rule the country, but she had no particular desire to ask any of them to tea. John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed
The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they’re not going to succeed, saying: ‘There is a life, but it’s not for you.’ John Mortimer, cited Daily Mail 31st May 1988
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties. E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way. ibid.
Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the Earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. Eugene V Debs
Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-to-day struggles of working people. Paul Foot, Why You Should Be a Socialist
It certainly was no good just thinking about a new society, or trying to attract others to it by example. Exploiters who amassed their power and wealth by robbing workers were not sentimental or namby-pamby about it. They would hold on to their wealth and power, if they had to, by force. They would never surrender that power and wealth, however intellectually or morally unjustifiable it was. It was up to the exploited class – the working class – to seize the means of production in a revolution. No one could do it for them. Socialism could not be introduced by Utopians, dictators, benevolent or otherwise, or by reforming intellectuals and politicians. The first precondition for socialism was that the wealth of society had to be taken over by the workers ...
While reforms are carried out in the name of workers by someone from on high, the muck of ages sticks to them. The hierarchies created by exploitation encourage even the most degraded and exploited worker to seek someone else whom he can insult and bully as he himself is insulted and bullied. In such circumstances, workers will take pride in things of which there is nothing to be proud: the colour of their skin, their sex, nationality, birthplace or God. These are selected for them by custom, inheritance or superstition, and have nothing to do with their abilities or characters. They are the muck of ages. How are they to be shaken off? Is someone else to do it for the workers? Or should they do it themselves, by organising their producing power, their own strikes, demonstrations and protests? Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch1
For thousands of years there have been oppressors and oppressed; rich and poor; powerful and weak; and through all that time the first group have robbed the second. During all that time, too, people at the bottom have dreamt of a world where there would be no oppression but where people would live in peace without being robbed. Most of these Utopias were in heaven. The few that ever existed on earth were always in isolation from the real world.
In feudal times, there was less than enough to go round: nothing like enough, for instance, to feed everyone. If anyone was to progress at all from the lowest form of human life, they had to turn themselves into rulers, seize the land and steal a surplus from the people who tilled it. Obviously they could not do this as individuals. They had to band together into classes, to pool their resources with others so that they could more effectively rob the majority, or go to war with other rulers in other parts of the world. ibid.
How people behave depends very much on the kind of society they live in. If the society beckons forward the greedy and the selfish, if it offers them great riches and privileges in return for collaboration in exploiting others, if it criminalises solidarity (as the Tory trade union laws have done), then people will lose their confidence in one another, shrink into their shells and denounce their neighbours. If, on the other hand, society welcomes those who act and think as part of the community, people’s confidence in themselves and in one another will grow and the dark side of their natures will diminish. ibid.
These elements – the self-emancipation of the working class through their own struggle and the democratic society which follows such emancipation – are the heart of socialism. Without them, socialism is dead. All the other features of a socialist society – the planned economy, for instance – depend on a self-emancipated working class and a real democracy. A socialist economy cannot be planned for workers unless the workers are involved in that plan. ibid.
The theme of this book is that fire down below. If society is to change in a socialist direction and if capitalism is to be replaced by socialism, the source of that change must be the fight against the exploitative society by the exploited people themselves. To knuckle down to the notion that changes can only come from the top is to accept the most debilitating and arrogant of all capitalist arguments: namely that there is at all times in human history a God-given elite, a few who are equipped to rule, while most people are not capable of government or politics and should count themselves lucky to have the occasional chance to choose which section of the elite should govern them.
This assumption of the rights of the few and the ignorance and inefficiency of the many is the hallmark of class rule through all our history. The reformer who believes that an educated elite in a parliament can change things for the masses, can – in the words of the Labour Party’s famous Clause Four – ‘secure for the workers ... the full fruits of their industry’, is really playing the same game and making the same assumptions as the most bigoted class warrior. Both believe that whatever is right and wrong for most people can only be determined by the enlightened few. ibid. ch6
Revolution? Is that not a distant and even a ridiculous idea in the last decade of the 20th century? Is it not something which happened 200 years ago in France and 70 years ago in Russia, but is hardly even thinkable today?
The answer is that there have been as many revolutionary situations in the past twenty-five years as in any other quarter century in history. In France in 1968, for instance, there was a students’ revolt and a general strike which for an instant threatened one of the most powerful and complacent ruling classes in the world. In 1974 there was a revolution in Portugal. In 1979 there was a revolution in Iran. In 1981, as we have seen, the workers of Poland came within a whisker of bringing down the regime. In all these four cases, the whole structure of class power was in jeopardy. In each case, a new system of society, a socialist system, was made possible by the revolutionary actions of the masses.