Sociology

"The people who suffer genuinely in majoritarian dictatorships are "only" minorities. The plebiscitarian dictatorship always favors (or intends to favor) the majorities. If the herdist spirit is strong the minorities will be automatically disliked for the mere fact that they dare to be "different." The hatred of the democratic masses for the minorities is the driving force and the cement for these "democratic" dictatorships under popular leaders. Such minorities are the members of royal families, capitalists, priests, Jews, aristocrats, intellectuals, artists, highbrows, cripples, nuns, criminals, and lunatics. The persecution of the middle classes in Russia was only possible because this class was small. In Germany this class is strong. It may be educated to hate all "irregular" people without pity."

"True, since the Minority is necessarily weaker (physically, that is to say quantitatively) than the Majority, its power can only derive from its Authority (minority regimes are necessarily 'authoritarian'). But this Authority never derives from the fact that the Minority is a Minority. The 'justification' ('propaganda') is always of the kind: "even though we are only a minority, we . . ." The Authority that is endorsed by a Minority 'justifies' itself or explains itself by 'quality' and not by quantity. (Even the 'snob' claims to belong to the elite and not to the minority.)"

"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion … while Truth again reverts to a new minority."

"Experience tells us that sometimes, when minorities insist on their rights, they ultimately prevail."

"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."

"The principle of brotherhood expounded by the agitator of Nazareth preserved the germ of life, of truth and justice, so long as it was the beacon light of the few."

"Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and , emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed."

"I come more and more to the conclusion that one must take the side of the minority which is always the more intelligent one."

"When people and especially political leaders tell [unconscionable] jokes about ethnic or other minorities, [Kazan Tatar political commentator] Ruslan Aysin says, that is part and parcel of a xenophobic campaign and opens the way to the oppression of these groups -- however much those who tell such jokes try to insist that their critics lack a sense of humor."

"In the United States, minority populations were never an indigestible mass—with the major exceptions of the one ethnic group that did not come here voluntarily (African Americans) and those who were here when Europeans arrived (American Indians). The rest all came, clustered and dispersed, and added new cultural layers to the general society. This has always been the strength of the United States."

"A more functional interpretation is that ethnic groups can provide valuable networks of trust in nascent markets. The obvious cost of such networks is, of course, that their very success may arouse the antagonism of other ethnic groups. Some 'market-dominant minorities' are especially vulnerable to discrimination and even expropriation; their tightly knit communities are economically strong but politically weak. While this may be true of the Chinese diaspora in parts of Asia today, it also has applicability to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War or the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second. However, because exceptions suggest themselves (the Scots were unquestionably a 'market-dominant minority' throughout the British Empire, but aroused minimal hostility), two qualifications need to be added. The first is that the economic dominance of a vulnerable minority may matter less than its political lack of dominance. It is not only wealthy minorities that are persecuted; by no means all the European Jews were rich, and the Sinti and Roma were among Europe's poorest people when the Nazis condemned them to annihilation. The crucial factor may have been their lack of formal and informal political representation. The second qualification is that, if an ethnic group is to be deprived of its rights, property or existence, it cannot be too well armed. Where there are two ethnic groups, both of which have weapons, civil war is more likely than genocide."

"Why, if minorities face such risks by not assimilating, do ethnic identities persist, even in cases where no biological distinction exists? There are, to be sure, fewer ethnic groups in the world today than there were a century ago; witness the decline in the number of living languages. Yet despite the best efforts of the global market and the nation state to impose cultural uniformity, many minority cultures have proved remarkably resilient. Indeed, persecution has sometimes tended to strengthen the self-consciousness of the persecuted. Passing on an inherited culture may simply be gratifying in its own right; we enjoy hearing our children singing the songs our parents taught us."

"'Two peoples never meet,' the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits once wrote, 'but they mingle their blood.' Mingling, however, is only one of a range of options when two diverse human populations meet. The minority group may remain distinct for breeding purposes but become integrated into the majority group in all or some other respects (language, religious belief, dress, lifestyle). Alternatively, interbreeding can go on, at least for a time, but one or both of the two groups may nevertheless preserve or even adopt distinct cultural or ethnic identities. Here is an important distinction. Whereas 'race' is a matter of inherited physical characteristics, transmitted from parents to children in DNA, 'ethnicity' is a combination of language, custom and ritual, inculcated in the home, the school and the temple. It is perfectly possible for a genetically intermixed population to split into two or more biologically indistinguishable but culturally differentiated ethnic groups. The process may be voluntary, but it may also be based on coercion - notably where major changes of religious belief are concerned. One or both groups may even opt for residential and other forms of segregation; the majority may insist that the minority lives in a clearly delineated space, or the minority may choose to do so for its own reasons. The two groups may cordially ignore one another, or there may be friction, perhaps leading to civil strife or one-sided massacres. The groups may fight one another or one group may submit to expulsion by the other. Genocide is the extreme case, in which one group attempts to annihilate the other."

"It is impossible that bodies of men should always be brought to think alike: there is often a degree of coercion, and the majority is governed by the minority, and vice versa, according to the strength of opinions, tempers, prejudices, and even interests."

"Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely."

"The so-called minorities are majorities but since less is more the more should feel that they are less... Less is more is a fabrication of the rich to make the poor think that by having less goodies they can have more babies. But less food for those babies. That is what they mean when they say less is more. Less for you and more for me."

"A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."

"[Popular government] rests in the common sense, and the self-restraint of the American people. It rests in the knowledge of the majority that it must keep within the checks of the law and the Constitution if the Government is to be preserved. And it must rest in the view that the minority that it is much more important that the government should be sustained than that the minority should have for the time being control of or a voice in the government. It rests in the knowledge of the majority that the rights of the minority and in the individuals of that minority are exactly as sacred as the rights in the individuals of the majority."

"The moment a mere numerical superiority by either states or voters in this country proceeds to ignore the needs and desires of the minority, and for their own selfish purpose or advancement, hamper or oppress that minority, or debar them in any way from equal privileges and equal rights—that moment will mark the failure of our constitutional system."

"Without promoting fraternity, our democracy cannot survive. And the dangerous demonisation of minorities has to be countered, as it is this hate which gets transformed into intense violence."

"What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil."

"In republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority."

"In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority."

"Unions break down political divides, bringing workers of all political persuasions together to fight a common oligarchic and corporate foe. Once workers begin to exert power and extract demands from the ruling class, the struggle educates communities about the real configurations of power and mitigates the feelings of powerlessness that have driven many into the arms of the neofascists."

"The class warfare is global. Not until workers in sweatshops in China, Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh are lifted out of poverty will the American working class be lifted out of poverty. This class war is the real fight, which corporate-owned media platforms and bankrupt liberals refuse to discuss."

"Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown. The corporate have now seized all institutional systems of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, along with nearly all forms of communication, are in corporate hands. Our democracy, with faux debates between two corporate parties, is meaningless political theater. There is no way within the system to defy the demands of , the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is revolt."

"We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy. We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40, 50 per cent."

"Just as class inequality leads to class struggle within societies, such international inequality leads to struggle between them. If the content of class struggles is the distribution of surplus, income and control over social production, that of international struggle is the international division of labour and the position of various nations in its hierarchy. The more advanced capitalist nations seek to maintain and extend the uneven distribution of productivity and productive power, and the resulting control over the sources of surplus profit, that privilege them and permit them to impose the costs of their capitalism's contradictions on other societies."

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

"The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally."

"There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

"When questions of “class” interests are eliminated from public controversy a victory is thereby gained for the possessing, conservative class, whose only hope of security lies in such elimination."

"The state's fear of its citizenry is rooted in a deeper knowledge of systemic fissures in our country; fissures produced by the disgraceful treatment of an — including women, children, dissenters, religious minorities, labour, prisoners, and more — often by state institutions themselves."

"Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why."

"Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural, especially its blood, superiority. Under conditions of stable distribution of power and, consequently, of status order, that myth is accepted by the negatively privileged strata. Such a situation exists as long as the masses continue in that natural state of theirs in which thought about the order of domination remains but little developed, which means, as long as no urgent needs render the state of affairs “problematical.” But in times in which the class situation has become unambiguously and openly visible to everyone as the factor determining every man’s individual fate, that very myth of the highly privileged about everyone having deserved his particular lot has often become one of the most passionately hated objects of attack."

"Once class struggle, for changing the system in its present form, acquires momentum, its outcome would depend on praxis and may not necessarily remain bounded within the system itself."

"It is real-life class struggle, informed no doubt by ideas, that ultimately determines which way the world will move."

"Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all."

"War is a class conflict, too. The rich and powerful who open war escape the consequences of their decisions. It’s not their children sent into the jaws of violence. It is often the vulnerable, the poor, & working people -who had little to no say in conflict - who pay the price."

"Anything that can tear up the side of a mountain should definitely be effective against a high society party attended by royalty or capitalist exploiters (monopolists)."

"The revolution of the proletariat - the war of the poor against the rich, is the only way from oppression to deliverance."

"This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world."

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening."

"The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes."

"To paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk, the first rule of American class warfare is this: It is always waged upward, never downward. That's because it's an all-purpose rhetorical cudgel favored among conservatives any time public debate threatens to oscillate outside the approved range of questions such as "Tax Cuts: Super Awesome, or Merely Awesome?""

"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you."

"Empire has manufactured a discontinuity in popular struggle, while maintaining continuity in its own growth and consolidation. One of the empire’s principal tools and weapons has been its prisons."

"Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor."

"Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe?"

"Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against their class enemy. The aura of magic, glamour, luster and splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective layer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shield and conceal the dilapidation of the old bourgeois reign of terror."