Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 83–87.
Collected Works
“In the countries of the ancient world, even before the formation of the empire, slavery was the basis of society. In each was a capitalist class and a slave class. The capitalists, however, were constantly in fear of slave insurrection. The dread clouded their sunshine by day, and nightmared their sleep; for they saw, piling up against them, a discontent hell-deep and heaven-high.”
Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 8
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Bouck White 21
American author and novelist 1874–1951Related quotes
“The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.”
in P. Beresford Ellis (ed.), James Connolly - Selected Writings, p. 191.
The Irish Worker, 29 August, 1915. Reprinted in P. Beresford Ellis (ed.), James Connolly - Selected Writings, p. 248
Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), pp. 117-118
Source: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution
Outlook for Socialism in the United States (1900)
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)
Source: The State and Revolution (1917), Ch. 5
Context: Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.