“The great mass of so-called ‘higher grade’ workers - such as state officials, military people, artists, doctors, priests, judges, lawyers, etc. - some of whom are not only not productive but in essence destructive, but who know how to appropriate to themselves a very great part of the ‘material’ wealth partly through the sale of their ‘immaterial’ commodities and partly by forcibly imposing the latter on other people - found it not at all pleasant to be relegated economically to the same class as clowns and menial servants and to appear merely as people partaking in the consumption, parasites on the actual producers (or rather agents of production). This was a peculiar profanation precisely of those functions which had hitherto been surrounded with a halo and had enjoyed superstitious veneration. Political economy in its classical period, like the bourgeoisie itself in its parvenu period, adopted a severely critical attitude to the machinery of the State, etc. At a later stage it realised and - as was shown too in practice - learnt from experience that the necessity for the inherited social combination of all these classes, which in part were totally unproductive, arose from its own organisation” - Karl Marx

“Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An ever-increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept of productive labour, and those who perform it are classed as productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its process of production and expansion” - Karl Marx

“The same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital” - Karl Marx

“The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as a division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above” - Karl Marx

“The distinction between skilled and unskilled labour rests in part on pure illusion, or, to say the least, on distinctions that have long since ceased to be real, and that survive only by virtue of a traditional convention; in part on the helpless condition of some groups of the working-class, a condition that prevents them from exacting equally with the rest the value of their labour-power. Accidental cirumstances here play so great a part, that these two forms of labour sometimes change places” - Karl Marx

“The petty-bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very powerful. It not only embraces the great majority of the urban middle class, the small industrial merchants and master craftsmen; it also includes among its followers the peasants and rural proletariat in so far as the latter has not yet found support among the independent proletariat of the towns. The relationship of the revolutionary worker’s party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position” - Karl Marx

“A certain strata of the working class who have been bribed [with] imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement” - V.I. Lenin

“As a matter of fact, the exposures merely dealt with the relations between the workers in a given trade and their employers, and all they achieved was that the sellers of labour power learned to sell their ‘commodity’ on better terms and to fight the purchasers over a purely commercial deal; Social Democracy [Workers movement] represents the working class, not in its relation to a given group of employers alone, but in its relation to all classes of modern society and to the state as an organised political force. Hence, it follows that not only must Social-Democrats not confine themselves exclusively to the economic struggle, but that they must not allow the organisation of economic exposures to become the predominant part of their activities. We must take up actively the political education of the working class and the development of its political consciousness” - V.I. Lenin

“The so-called ‘working’ peasant is in fact a small proprietor, or a petty-bourgeois, who nearly always either hires himself out to work for somebody else or hires workers himself. Being a small proprietor, the ‘working’ peasant also vacillates in politics between the masters and the workers, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” - V.I. Lenin

“The question arises: what elements predominate? Clearly in a small-peasant country, the petty-bourgeois element predominates and it must predominate, for the great majority of those working the land are small commodity producers” - V.I. Lenin

“It is also clear that, in general, the arrest of the Kadets and quasi-Kadets was the necessary and correct measure to take… What a tragedy, you’re thinking! What an injustice! Intellectuals in prison for several days or even weeks just to prevent the massacre of tens of thousands of workers and peasants… The forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their acomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit” - V.I. Lenin

“Engels has created a lot of confusion here. There was a time when we used to boast that the technical staff and the engineers would receive not more than what the qualified workers get. Engels did not understand a thing about production and he confounded us too. It is as ridiculous as the other opinion that the higher administrative staff must be changed every so often. If we had gone along with this everything would have been lost” - J.V. Stalin

“The landlord class and the comprador class. [A comprador, in the original sense of the word, was the Chinese manager or the senior Chinese employee in a foreign commercial establishment. The compradors served foreign economic interests and had close connection with imperialism and foreign capital]. In economically backward and semi-colonial China the landlord class and the comprador class are wholly appendages of the international bourgeoisie, depending upon imperialism for their survival and growth. These classes represent the most backward and most reactionary relations of production in China and hinder the development of her productive forces. Their existence is utterly incompatible with the aims of the Chinese revolution. The big landlord and big comprador classes in particular always side with imperialism and constitute an extreme counterrevolutionary group. Their political representatives are the Étatistes and the right-wing of the Kuomintang” - Mao Zedong

“Marx pointed out that ordinary engineers and technicians join in the creation of surplus value. That is to say, they, too, are exploited by the capitalists” - Deng Xiaoping

“Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially and exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labour (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labour). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing. Both orthodox social scientists and ‘Left’ ABC [Anything But Class] theorists treat the diverse social factions within the non-capitalist class as classes unto themselves; so they speak of a ‘blue-collar class,’ a ‘professional class,’ and the like. In doing so, they claim to be moving beyond a ‘reductionist’ Marxist dualistic model of classes. But what is more reductionist than to ignore the underlying dynamics of economic power and the conflict between capital and labour? What is more misleading than to treat occupational groups as autonomous classes, giving attention to every social group in capitalist society except the capitalist class itself, to every social conflict except class conflict? Both conventional and ‘Left’ ABC theorists have difficulty understanding that the creation of a managerial or technocratic social formation constitutes no basic change in the property relations of capitalism, no creation of new classes. Professionals and managers are not an autonomous class as such. Rather they are mental workers who live much better than most other employees but who still serve the accumulation process on behalf of corporate owners” - Michael Parenti