“Deny it as may the cunning capitalists who are clear-sighted enough to perceive it, or ignore it as may the torpid workers who are too blind and unthinking to see it, the struggle in which we are engaged today is a class struggle, and as the toiling millions come to see and understand it and rally to the political standard of their class, they will drive all capitalist parties of whatever name into the same party, and the class struggle will then be so clearly revealed that the hosts of labor will find their true place in the conflict and strike the united and decisive blow that will destroy slavery and achieve their full and final emancipation.”

— Eugene V. Debs

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Deny it as may the cunning capitalists who are clear-sighted enough to perceive it, or ignore it as may the torpid work…" by Eugene V. Debs?

Eugene V. Debs 108

American labor and political leader 1855–1926

Related quotes

“On the ground of the class struggle we are invincible; if we leave it we are lost, because we are no longer socialists. The strength and power of socialism rests in the fact that we are leading a class struggle; that the laboring class is exploited and oppressed by the capitalist class, and that within capitalist society effectual reforms, which will put an end to class government and class exploitation, are impossible.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State

“Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

“We live in the capitalist system, so-called because its dominated b the capitalist class. In this system the capitalists are the rulers and the workers the subjects. The capitalists are in a decided minority and yet they rule because of the ignorance of the working class.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Working Class Politics (1910)

“But every class struggle is a political struggle.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Section 1, paragraph 39, lines 8-9.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“... You have discovered the class struggle, or rather its reflection, in the ranks of the party.”

Max Shachtman (1904–1972) American Marxist theorist

The Crisis in the American Party: An Open Letter in Reply to Comrade Leon Trotsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1940/03/crisis.htm, March 1940