Class interest

“ It ought to be so, because your good is not a class interest, but is the national interest." The fourth estate differs from the feudal interest, and differs from the bourgeoisie, not merely in that it is not a privileged class, but in that it cannot possibly become one. ”

“ One is that a leisured class—a class whose exertions have no commercial value, or no value commensurate with the cost of its maintenance—is essential to the development of culture, of knowledge, of art, and of mental civilisation generally. But this is an answer which we need not dwell on here; for, whatever its force, it is foreign to our present purpose. We will confine ourselves solely to the material interests that are involved, and consider solely how the plunder of a class [257] living on the interest of Capital would tend to affect the actual production of wealth. ”

“ The temporary overshadowing of the economic interests of classes by other special interests which have been thrust into special prominence, is not, however, evidence that these class interests do not prevail in normal times. ”

“ The laboring class gaining at one stroke the five thousand millions, or thereabouts, now taken in the form of interest from the ten thousand millions which it produces, plus five thousand millions which this same interest deprives it of by destroying the demand for labor, plus five thousand millions which the parasites, cut off from a living, would then be compelled to produce, the national production would be doubled and the welfare of the laborer increased fourfold. ”

“ In a particular branch of production the line may be clearly drawn between those who furnish labour and those who furnish capital, yet even in communities where there is the sharpest distinction between the general class labourers and the general class capitalists, these two classes shade off into each other by imperceptible gradations, and in the extremes where the two classes meet in the same persons, the interaction which restores equilibrium can go on without obstruction. ”

“ In this way they preserved their political and social privileges and have gradually so identified the interests of the well-to-do middle class with their interest that the two have become scarcely distinguishable. The aristocracy of privilege and the aristocracy of wealth are absolutely united in their devotion to the existing political organization and policy of the United Kingdom. ”

“ When the interest of this part of the community is pursued, the public good is pursued, because the body of every nation consists of this class, and because the interest of both the rich and the poor are involved in that of the middling class. No burden can be laid on the poor but what will sensibly affect the middling class. ”

“ All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it. ”

“ Practically all of the upper classes add to the incomes they earn by labor of hands or brain an "unearned" income derived from investment; i.e., from the willingness of others to pay for the use of their accumulated wealth or lands. A considerable class is thus enabled, if it chooses, to live without working. A great proportion of this wealth that draws interest was never itself earned by the possessors, in the stricter sense of the word "earned" ”

“ There may be a concentration of capital and a relative impoverishment of the general working mass of people, for example, and yet a general advance in the world’s prosperity and a growing sense of social duty in the owners of capital and land may do much to mask this antagonism of class interests and ameliorate its miseries. ”

“ No individual conflicts, no personal violence, but a Class Struggle. It is necessary to make the immense army of workers of all trades and of all professions conscious of these fundamental truths. It is necessary to show them that their class interests are in opposition to the interests of the class who possess the economic power, and that it is by class-conscious organization that they will conquer this economic power through the instrumentality of the other public powers that modern civilization has assured to free peoples. ”

“ They invariably used the term economic conditions, and the careful reader will not fail to perceive that although economic conditions produce interests which form the basis of class [Pg 170] divisions, it is not unusual for men to act contrary to their personal interests as a result of existing conditions. In general, class interests and personal interests coincide, but there are certainly occasions when they conflict. ”

“ The class-bias, fostering the belief that the question in each case is entirely one between employer and employed, between capital and labor, shuts out the truth that the interests of all consumers are involved, and that the immense majority of consumers belong to the working-classes themselves. If the consumers are named, such of them only are remembered as belong to the wealthier classes, who, it is thought, can well afford to pay higher prices. ”

“ It is quite true, for example, that the present distribution of wealth, with its startling inequalities of accumulation and want, is historically the effect, first, of class legislation and class administration of law; and second, of mere blind chance operating on a legal régime of private property and industrial freedom, and a state of the arts which gave the large scale of production decided technical advantages. ”

“ Besides, if private speculation has been to a great extent extinguished by the State monopoly of some form of enterprise, large fortunes will gradually be subdivided, and the privileged class, that spends lavishly and claims to exempt itself from the ordinary burdens, from the conscription or the obligation to work, will become very unimportant. ”

“ Another class owns the means of production, the land, the factories, the machines, the raw materials, and accumulated capital in the form of money: and naturally this capitalist and possessing class, taking advantage of its power, makes the working and non-owning class pay a large forfeit. ”

“ The present system of social production and private ownership is rapidly converting society into two antagonistic classes—i. e., the capitalist class and the propertyless class. The middle class, once the most powerful of this great nation, is disappearing in the mill of competition. ”

“ What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest—this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it.
90As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class. ”

“ Governments now see, what they have never been able to recognize before, that labor does not form the most important section of the three sections of society, the other two being capital and the purchasing power. You have made clear to them, Master Sparrow, that labor and capital are at the mercy of the third element,—the great middle class, the people who buy from capital, pay your wages and who can at any moment, by not buying, reduce both capital and labor to nothingness. ”

“ Instead of a number of classes in society, especially instead of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, there must be but one class, which works directly or indirectly for the state, and receives as wages what the state decides to give to them. ”

“ This, Sir, would be dividing society, by a precise, distinct, and well-defined line, into two classes; first, the small class, who have competent capital for trade, when credit is out of the question; and, secondly, the vastly numerous class of those whose living must become, in such a state of things, a mere manual occupation, without the use of capital or of any substitute for it. ”

“ Working on the combined theories of individualism controlled and regulated by competition, it has been one grand game of grab,—a process in which the whole tendency of our legislation, national or state, has during the last twenty years been, first, to create monopolies of capital and, later, to bring into existence a counter, but no less privileged, class, known as the "wage-earner." ”

“ They invest them productively; that is, expend them in employing labour. In other words, having a purchasing power belonging to them, more than they know what to do with, they make over the surplus of it for the general benefit of the labouring class. ”

“ It should, consequently, increase the amount of economic independence enjoyed by the average laborer, diminish his "class consciousness" by doing away with his class grievances, and intensify his importance to himself as an individual. ”

“ And how can we of the middle classes, we the capitalists and our hangers-on, help them? By renouncing our class, and on all occasions when antagonism rises up between the classes casting in our lot with the victims: with those who are condemned at the best to lack of education, refinement, leisure, pleasure and renown; and at the worst to a life lower than that of the most brutal of savages—in order that the system of competitive Commerce may endure. ”

“ Traders and manufacturers took their places somewhat noisily beside their fellow politicians of older standing, filling the whole land till it seems for a moment as if nothing counted any more in English life save its middle class—a busy, hard, prosperous, pugnacious middle-class. ”

“ But the accumulation of riches, and consequently of an excessive purchasing power, in the hands of a class, soon satiates that class with socially useful wealth, and sets them offering a price for luxuries. The moment a price is to be had for a luxury, it acquires exchange [19] value, and labor is employed to produce it. ”

“ Where the wages-receiving class feel themselves to be a special class, vis-a-vis of the purchasers of their labor, they have frequently endeavored, by the preconcerted suspension of labor upon a large scale, to force their masters to pay them higher wages, or grant them some other advantage. ”

“ Some more ordinary man would be more to the purpose,—would sum up better in himself, without disturbing influences, the general liberal force of the middle class, the force by which it has done its great works of free trade. ”

“ This, I hope, will recall to mind the principles deduced in the chapter above cited, where we made it appear, how the industrious classes, who furnish consumable commodities for the price of their overplus, must constantly have the balance of wealth turning in their favour: and when once they arrive at a certain degree of ease, proportional to their ambition, then they give over working, and become incorporated into the class of those who have enriched them. ”

“ No matter whether you have studied this economic question or not, you cannot have failed to observe that during the past half century society has been sharply divided into classes—into a [112] capitalist class upon the one hand, into a working class upon the other hand. I shall not take the time to trace this evolution. I shall simply call your attention to the fact that half a century ago all a man needed was a trade and having this he could supply himself with the simple tools then used, produce what he needed and enjoy the fruit of his labor. ”

“ For the question of the unemployed is but a more than usually acute phase of the great labor question -- a question of the distribution of wealth. Now, given any wrong, no matter what, that affects the distribution of wealth, and it follows that the leading class must be averse to any examination or question of it. For, since wealth is power, the leading class is necessarily dominated by those who profit or imagine they profit by injustice in the distribution of wealth. ”

“ Is it, then, here contended, many readers will ask, that if matters are determined by ideal justice, or anything like practical wisdom, the remuneration of labour in general ought henceforth to be lessened, or at all events precluded from any possibility of increase? Is it contended that the employing and directing class should attempt or even desire to take back from those directed by it every increment of wealth possessed by them which is not produced by themselves? ”

“ The one supreme necessity, in his view, was that all wage-earners should be led to act together as a class, until their predominance in an industrial age is recognized. When once wage-workers are known to be the most powerful as a class, then social institutions will change in accordance with their interests. ”

“ In our modern society there are two classes, a useful and a useless class; the useless class is called the upper, the useful the lower class. The useless or upper class, having the monopoly of all the means of the production of wealth save the power of labour, can and does compel the useful or lower class to work for its own disadvantage, and for the advantage of the upper class ”

“ In all the various social systems of the past, the wealth and power of the ruling class has depended upon the wealth producing capacity of the working class and the degree to which it could be exploited. ”

“ As the workers become in the estimation of a community and in their own estimation, responsible members of a society, their more rather than less abortive effort to develop class feeling in America, will disappear. Under those conditions concerted class action will be confined to the employers of labor and the profiteers, who will be placed in the position of proving their value and their place in the business of wealth creation. On this I believe we may count, that labor will drop its defensive program for a constructive one, as it comes to appreciate its own creative potentiality. ”