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“The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own "effort" with their "courage to take risks." ”

“In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more...even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing.”

“The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.”

“This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. This climate creates in the oppressor a strongly possessive consciousness— possessive of the world and of men and women.”

“Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it-oppressors and oppressed alike. Both are submerged in this situation, and both bear the marks of oppression. ... This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate.”

“For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things." For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.”

“But even when... a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors...consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel...while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled...”

"An act is oppressive only when it prevents people from being more fully human.”

“It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors... the contradiction will be resolved by the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man in the process of liberation. If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply changing poles.”

“As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.”

“Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human.”

“For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call "the oppressed" but—depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not—"those people" or "the blind and envious masses" or "savages" or "natives" or "subversives") who are disaffected, who are "violent," "barbaric," "wicked," or "ferocious" when they react to the violence of the oppressors.”

“It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well).”

“With regards to traditionally masculine manual forms of waged labour, Cockburn notes that the construction of skill depends on a process of exclusion of women from certain types of work. She writes that 'men have built their own relative bodily and technical strength by depriving women of theirs, and they have organised their occupation in such a way as to benefit from the differences they have constructed'. ”

“Work has often been explicitly associated with particular skills and capacities in ways which have contributed to the naturalisation of gender. Women's supposed lack of physical strength has been used as an argument to exclude women from many types of work, and these exclusions still operate despite many decades of legislation against workplace discrimination.”

“They [black women] were subjected to regimes of forced biological productivity while simultaneously being denied the right to relate to their children as kin. This legacy is still present today. Racialised women have often been denied the status of motherhood based on the assumption that they are naturally unqualified for the 'spiritual' labour required to raise a child.”

“While the capacity for motherhood appears to be the essential function of women's bodies, it is in fact unevenly distributed. Many women lack the ability to bear children. But motherhood itself should also be understood as a profoundly social category rather than just a natural capacity of bodies. As Roberts has shown, enslaved black women were excluded from the nineteenth-century construction of femininity.”

“This point is supported by the argument that the gender pay gap is in fact a 'motherhood penalty', as women are penalised for having children while it does not affect the earnings of men.”

“Motherhood tends to attach itself even to those female workers who are not engaged in mothering work. Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton argue that the naturalising assumption that all women are potential mothers forms the basis for women's low value on the labour market, as a potential cost of reproduction is turned into an expression of women's worthlessness.”

“The conflation of femininity and motherhood reinforces this relation, even as many women do not have children. Arlie Russell Hochschild writes: "Because [women] are seen as members of the category from which mothers come, women in general are asked to look out for psychological needs more than men are. The world turns to women for mothering, and this fact silently attaches itself to many a job description."”

“Under capitalism, Joan Acker writes, the worker is constructed as abstract and disembodied, lacking ties to other people. However, feminised people are often tasked precisely with producing such ties. Women are increasingly called on to be workers and non-workers at the same time, both producing and obscuring social ties to others.”

“Individualism cannot exist on its own, because people are vulnerable and rely on others to meet their need for care. Liberalism thus produces split forms of subjectivity — one hegemonic form and one that is necessary for that hegemony to persist.”

“Cooper writes that neoliberalism posits 'an... ethics of virtue and a spontaneous order of family values that it expects to arise automatically from the mechanics of the free market system', adding that 'the nature of family altruism... represents an internal exception to the free market, an... order of noncontractual obligations and inalienable services without which the world of contract would cease to function'.”

“Individualism is built around self-possession and control of one's own emotional life. Femininity appears as lacking precisely the ability to be the master of one's own feelings. It is understood as the condition of being the passive victim of emotional states rather than a sovereign individual.”

“Capitalist society creates a division between possessive individualism and emotional altruism a split that maps onto gendered subjectivity. The labour of building affective relations becomes obscured in a world where the term work appears as the opposite of intimacy and emotion. The construction of possessive individualism is contrasted with the supposed emotionality of women.”

“In contrast to possessive individualism, feminised subjectivity is geared towards relational modes of being. Emotional reproduction is concerned with creating not merely feelings but with forming and maintaining social relationships. That is why the subject of emotional labour appears as the opposite of possessive individualism — it is a subject fundamentally concerned with building the relationality of society.”

“the possessive individual appears to owe his capacities only to himself. He depends on a subject that does not inhabit possessive individualism. As Stephanie Coontz writes, 'Self-reliance and independence worked for men because women took care of dependence and obligation.”

“The production of possessive individualism is not an automatic result of capitalist economic relations, but requires continual reaffirmation. As Fraser and Gordon show, independent subjectivity relies on gendered, classed, and racialised modes of dependence, which work as contrasts. These forms of dependence have been increasingly constructed as psychological traits rather than social positions.”

“Possessive individualism can be understood in relation to the commodity form. Marx argues that the commodity appears to have an inherent value — hiding the social source of that value in relations of production. The commodity form makes invisible the labour it took to produce that commodity.”

“Affective individualism, possessive individualism, and the form of subjectivity assumed by the sale of labour power are all interrelated. These forms of individualism were all initiated by the bourgeoisie, but through the employment contact they came to influence working-class subjectivity as well.”