“An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.”

“A history of the working class in the United States should, first of all, give a sense of what is meant by "the working class in the United States." It means most of us who live in the United States of America-which, unfortunately, has not been the focus of a majority of history books that claim to tell the story of this country. This doesn't make sense because without the working class there would be no United States. (From a certain point of view, this history book deficiency does make sense, given the biases built into our business-dominated culture.)”

“In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.”

“I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first, and when I think of the United States first in an arrangement like this I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails the best hopes of mankind fail with it.”

“Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.”

“We Americans” is a fabrication of the rulers. There are the tens and tens and tens of millions of workers and farmers in the United States; we are part of a “we” with our class brothers and sisters throughout the world. There is a “they”: the tiny handful of propertied families in whose interests the imperialist United States government acts at home and abroad. It is “they,” their state, that “we” must overthrow in order to end imperialism’s inexorable advance toward deepening crisis, violence, brutality, and devastation—toward fascism and world war.”