RUR Society and Class Quotes

Helena is arguing for viewing workers as human beings. Domin, the factory owner, rejects that; workers are just widgets. Or at least, they'd be best if they were just widgets. The working class, for Domin, is best treated as not human. Domin sounds like he'd treat human workers like robots if he could get away with it.

Again, Helena tries to think of robots as human and Domin won't have it. Robots are not hired like workers, Domin insists, they are bought like equipment—or like slaves.

Gall says he can't give the robots souls. What does this mean if robots are workers? Does it mean that working class people don't have souls? Or does it mean, as Fabry and Busman suggest, that treating working class people as if they have souls is expensive, inconvenient, and dangerous?

Gall says that people would attack Domin if he got rid of the robots. People like having a working class—or at least, people who aren't working class like it.

The Communist Revolution is imagined as a Robot Revolution. Marx, the founder of Communism, thought the worker's revolt would be worldwide, but really there were only Communist revolutions in one or two places, like Russia and China. The robots do better though. They're not just better workers than humans, they're better rebels.

Robots may or may not be higher on the evolutionary scale, but humans in the play do live off them like parasites. Maybe Domin thinks it's heinous because it's true?

Helena thinks people sympathize with each other; Domin disabuses her. But this is not just about individuals hating each other. It's about class hatred. The robots hate humans because humans treat robots like… well, like slaves. You don't want cars becoming sentient because then they wouldn't take you where you want to go. Then you'd have an underclass of resentful motor vehicles.

Radius thinks Alquist is a robot because Alquist is a builder—he's sort of part of the working class.

For Marx, workers were supposed to seize the "means of production"—or the factories—and thus become the rulers of the nation. Radius is following the Marxist plot. Though, of course, things don't really work out for him, since seizing the factories gives the robots the means of production but not the means of reproduction—they can't make baby robots. Čapek sets it up so that Communist revolution results in biological confusion and breakdown. (There are reasons to think Communist revolution might not work in real life, but a sudden end to the birth of children isn't really one of them.)

Primus and Helena seem to have developed souls in part because Dr. Gall fiddled with them and figured out how to put souls in. The workers develop consciousness and higher feelings through upper-class charity. This is indicative of Čapek's attitude towards workers throughout the book. He sympathizes with their plight to some extent, but he has trouble thinking of them as human. To the extent they are human, it's the doing of folks further up the class ladder. Working-class people, left to their own devices, seem to have no culture and no soul. It's only when they stop being working class people and race off into the sunset to do obscure things not involving work, as at the end of the play, that robots, or workers, are seen as human.