class struggle essay

The Dynamics of Class Struggle: A Marxist Perspective

Table of Contents

Have you ever wondered about the forces that shape society and drive the course of history? One lens through which to view these monumental changes is the concept of class struggle , a central theme in the sociological landscape. At the heart of this theory is the idea that societies progress through the dialectic of conflicting classes, which can lead to revolutionary change.

Unpacking Class Struggle

Class struggle is not just a relic of the past; it is a living, breathing dynamic that continues to influence our world. But what exactly is class struggle? At its core, it refers to the ongoing conflict between different classes in society, primarily between those who own the means of production (the bourgeoisie ) and those who sell their labor to survive (the proletariat ).

The Proletariat vs. The Bourgeoisie

The proletariat, often referred to as the “working class,” comprises individuals who rely on their labor to earn a living. They do not own the means of production—such as factories, machinery, and tools—and thus, must work for those who do. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, are the “capitalist class.” They own the means of production and profit from the labor of the proletariat.

The Political Nature of Class Struggle

Class struggle is inherently political. It’s not just about economic disparities; it’s about power—who has it, who doesn’t, and how it’s used. The bourgeoisie wields its economic power to influence political decisions, maintain social control, and preserve its interests. In contrast, the proletariat seeks to gain political power to improve its economic position and, ultimately, restructure society.

Marx’s Revolutionary Ideals

Karl Marx , one of the most influential thinkers in sociology, saw class struggle as the engine of history. According to Marx, the proletariat has the potential to rise up against the bourgeoisie, overthrow the existing class structures, and create a classless society where the means of production are communally owned.

Exploitation and Alienation

Marx argued that the capitalist system exploits workers, as they receive less value than the labor they put in, with the surplus being pocketed by the bourgeoisie as profit. This exploitative relationship leads to alienation —workers become disconnected from the products of their labor, the labor process, their own essence, and other workers.

The Potential for Class Solidarity

Despite the bleak picture painted by exploitation and alienation, Marx believed in the potential for class solidarity . He envisioned the proletariat uniting, recognizing their common struggles, and collectively working towards overthrowing the capitalist system.

The Complexities of Class Solidarity

While Marx’s ideas about class solidarity are inspiring, achieving it is complex. The capitalist system is structured in such a way that it often pits workers against each other, creating divisions based on race, gender, and other social categories. Overcoming these divisions to unite against a common oppressor is a significant challenge for the working class.

Intersectionality and Class Struggle

In contemporary discussions of class struggle, the concept of intersectionality becomes crucial. It’s essential to understand how various forms of oppression—such as racism, sexism, and homophobia—intersect with class oppression, complicating the picture and making solidarity more difficult, yet even more vital.

Varying Perspectives on Class Struggle

Not all sociologists agree with Marx’s perspective on class struggle. Some argue that class is just one of many factors that influence social conflict, and others believe that class structures have evolved to be more complex than Marx’s binary depiction of proletariat and bourgeoisie.

Envisioning a Classless Society

Marx’s revolutionary idea of a classless society remains a contentious and provocative topic. What would such a society look like? Is it truly achievable, or merely a utopian dream?

The Debate on the Feasibility of a Classless Society

Some argue that human nature is inherently competitive and that hierarchy and inequality are inevitable. Others believe that with the right social conditions, a classless society is within reach.

Modern Movements and the Spirit of Revolution

Throughout history, various movements have sought to bring Marx’s vision to life. From the Russian Revolution to more recent grassroots movements, the spirit of revolution persists, though its outcomes and the paths toward change vary widely.

The dynamics of class struggle as seen through a Marxist perspective offer a powerful framework for understanding the forces that shape our society. While the journey toward a classless society faces many challenges, the discussion it sparks is essential for anyone interested in the pursuit of social justice and equality.

What do you think? Can the proletariat still unite in the modern age to challenge the status quo? Is a classless society an attainable goal, or will there always be some form of class structure? Share your thoughts and join the conversation.

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Sociological Theories & Concepts

1 Social Theory and its Context

• Prominence of Socialism
• Individual vs Collectivity
• Comte and The Enlightenment
• Durkheim and The Enlightenment
• The Marxian Ideology
• Weberian Ideology
• The British Sociologists
• Spencer’s Evolutionism

2 Concept and Theory

• Words and Language
• The Nature of Concepts
• Concepts in Sociology: Some Illustrations
• Concepts to Theorems: Natural Sciences
• Towards Social Science: Durkheim Weber and Beyond

3 Theory and Paradigm

• Sociological Theories
• Classical Sociological Theories
• Law of Three Stages
• Marxian Ideology
• Parson’s Action Theory
• Recent Advances in Sociological Theories
• The Concept of Paradigm

4 Social Construction of Reality

• Construction of Reality
• Phenomena of Social Reality
• Everyday Social Reality
• Language and Social Reality
• The Objective Reality of Society
• Legitimation and Social Reality
• Socialisation and Legitimation
• Social Reality and The Symbolic Universe
• Maintaining Social Reality and Language

5 Concept and Theories of Structure

• Organic Analogy and Structure
• Social Structure is a Reality: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s Contribution
• Social Structure Refers to Relations between Groups: The Contribution of E.E. Evans-Pritchard
• Social Structure is a Model: Contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach

6 Structure and Function

• From Positivism to Functionalism
• The Premises of Functionalism
• Functionalism in Social Anthropology: Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski
• Functionalism of Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton

7 Structure, Function and Neo-Functionalism

• Criticism of Functionalism
• The Thesis of Neo-Functionalism
• Merits and Demerits of Neo-Functionalism: Conclusion

8 The Conceptual and Theoretical Issues of Power

• Concept of Power
• Theoretical Considerations
• The Concept of Elite
• Power Elite and Veto Groups
• Power in Local Communities

9 Class and Legitimacy

• Capitalism, Class Relations, and Development
• Concept of Legitimacy
• Why Legitimacy?
• Bases of Legitimacy: Traditional, Legal-Rational, and Charismatic
• Legitimacy and Social Changes

10 Power- Functional Perspective

• Early Writers: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau
• Nineteenth Century
• Twentieth Century Writers
• Max Weber and Talcott Parsons
• Polity as a Subsystem

11 Power and Institutions

• Instruments of Power
• Sources of Power
• Contexts of Power

12 Power/Knowledge

• Introduction
• Definition of Power
• Power Knowledge and Discourse
• Foucault’s Archeological Writings
• Foucault’s Genealogical Writings

13 Evolution, Development and Function of Capitalism

• Historical Interpretations of Capitalism
• Development and Function of Capitalism
• Commodity Production and Capitalist Production
• Expansion of Markets and Production
• Monopoly Capitalism and Imperialism

14 Rationality, Work and Organisation

• Rationality
• Organisation Theory and Sociology of Organisations
• Work and Organisation

15 Entrepreneurship and Capitalism

• Meaning of Entrepreneurship
• Theoretical Background of Entrepreneurship with Special Reference to Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter
• Contribution of Max Weber
• Contribution of Schumpeter
• Studies on Entrepreneur other than Weber

16 Freedom and Liberty

• Berlin’s and The Republican Theory
• The Value of Freedom
• Free States and Free Citizens

17 Alienation

• De-humanisation of Labour
• Alienation as a Process
• Division of Labour

18 Sovereignty

• The Rise of Sovereign States
• Conceptions of Sovereignty
• Legal and Political Sovereignty
• Internal Sovereignty
• External Sovereignty

19 State; Power as Elaborated by Marx, Weber, Parsons and Others

• The Concept of State
• Marx on State
• Weber on State
• Durkheim on State
• The Concept of Power
• Marx on Power
• Weber on Power
• Parsons on Power
• Other Theoretical Models on State and Power

20 Citizenship

• Historical Perspective
• Global Citizenship
• Dual Citizenship
• State and the Citizen
• Nation-State and the Citizenship
• Rights and Duties of the Citizenship
• Civil Society
• Multiculturalism and the Citizenship

21 Civil Society and Democracy

• Civil Society: A Retrospection
• Democracy: A Universal Appeal
• The Scope of Civil Society
• Relationship between Civil Society and Democracy
• Functions of Civil Society in a Democratic Order
• Civil Society as a Promoter of Democracy
• The Democratic Dangers of Civil Society

22 Conceptualising Ethnicity

• Class and Ethnicity
• Construction of Ethnicity
• Primordialist Approach
• Instrumentalist Approach
• Constructivist Model of Ethnicity
• Jenkin’s Model of Ethnicity
• Race and Ethnicity

23 Construction of Identities

• The Search for Identity
• Erikson’s Contributions to Identity Construction
• Identity and Identification
• Identity in Sociological Theory
• Multiple Identities
• National Character and Identity Studies

24 Boundaries and Boundary Maintenance

• Definitions of Ethnic Group
• Frederik Barth—Ethnic Group and Boundaries
• Ascription as the Critical Factor
• Poly-ethnic Societies
• Melting Pot and Beyond
• Critique of Barth’s Model

25 Concepts of Difference and Inequality

• Difference and Inequality: Conceptual Understanding
• Natural and Social Inequality
• Major Theoretical Perspectives
• The Rise of Meritocracy
• The Concept of Class
• Theories of Class Structure
• Class Struggle
• Social Mobility
• Classlessness

27 Gender and Social Stratification

• Weber Marx and Stratification
• Gender and Social Stratification in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Status of Women
• The Indian Context
• Caste and Gender
• Tribe Gender Stratification and Change

28 Theories of Origin of Caste System

• Definition of Caste
• Theories of Origin of Caste System
• Caste System Through Ages
• Caste: Not an Isolated Phenomenon

29 Theories of Modernisation and Modernity

• Approaches to Modernisation
• Implication of Modernisation Theories
• Phases in Modernisation Processes
• Modernisation: The Asian Syndrome
• The Phenomena of Modernity
• Approaches to Modernity

30 Tradition and Modernity

• Tradition Society and Culture
• Tradition and Modernity
• Modernity as a Juggernaut
• Ontological Insecurity and Modernity
• Modernity Rationality and Norms

31 Post Structuralism and Post Modernism

• Critique of Structuralism
• Post Structural Theories
• Discourse Knowledge and Experience
• Derrida and Deconstruction
• Foucault and the Archaeology of Knowledge
• Jameson and Late Capitalism
• Baudrillard and Post Modernism

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3 Class and Class Struggle

Henry Heller, University of Manitoba

• Published: 10 September 2018
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This chapter affirms that class and class struggle were fundamental to Marx’s conception of history. His claims are affirmed as it is shown that upper-class demands for surplus and lower-class resistance have driven the evolution of society from the Bronze Age to the present and were critical to the passage from the tributary mode of production to the capitalist mode of production. Class struggle exists in all class-based societies but was particularly acute in China and the West. In Classical Antiquity class antagonism mainly took the form of peasant/landlord struggle but also expressed itself in conflict between slave and master. In modern times the bourgeoisie engaged in a two-sided struggle against both the landlord class and against the working class. Its struggle against the latter is ongoing. The state, culture, and ideology are key components of class struggle.

The opening of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto declares that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Indeed, class and class conflict are fundamental concepts of Marx’s theory of historical materialism and are at the core of all of Marx’s writings. Marx and Engels further contended that whereas class and the struggle between classes existed before capitalism they become a distinguishing feature of capitalist society. They believed that class and class struggle were therefore not inert structures and processes but historically developing ones that become more and more salient as capitalism moves towards its ultimate crisis ( Bottomore 1991 :85–86).

It is necessary to begin with an overview of the origins and history of class and class struggle, which are regarded as a motor of historical development. Reviewing the slave, tributary/feudal and capitalist modes of production, the nature of class struggle within each of these modes will be analyzed. Class and class struggle are found to be strongest in China and Europe and more muted in the Near East and India.

This article will demonstrate that class struggle is a particularly marked feature of European history. The political and social combativeness of the bourgeoisie is especially notable. The struggle of this class was two sided. On the one hand, the capitalist class carried on a centuries-long battle against feudalism beginning with revolts in the late Middle Ages and continuing with the early modern revolutions in Germany, Holland, England, and France. Indeed, its combat against feudalism and absolutism continued until 1848. The rise of the absolutist state in the early modern period constituted the main line of defense of the members of the feudal class during the early modern period. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie accumulated capital and power by waging ongoing class war against peasants and workers through primitive accumulation, the reorganization of production into the putting-out system and manufacturing workshops and by the Industrial Revolution.

The working class began its resistance to the bourgeoisie during the Industrial Revolution and French Revolution but only emerged politically as an independent force by raising the red flag during the revolutions of 1848. Working-class confrontation with capital was reflected in day-to-day struggles and the organization of unions and political parties. But it also manifested itself in repeated bids for state power in a series of revolutions beginning with the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and the victorious struggle against fascism, and the Chinese, Korean, Cuban, Vietnamese, and other Third World revolutions.

The working class was certainly pugnacious. But the bourgeois gave no quarter either as shown by the suppression of the Commune, the consolidation of the Argus-eyed ideological and bureaucratic apparatus of the bourgeois state, and its aggressive resort to colonialism and imperialism, fascism and two world wars. The imposition of the Cold War, the gigantic post-1945 development of the forces of production, the fall of Communism, and the imposition of neoliberalism put the working class on the defensive. The outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008 set the stage for a new stage of class war on a global scale.

1. Primitive Communism

The claim by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto that all past society was marked by class and class struggle proved unsustainable. Rather they became aware that class divisions were to be found only in societies that had evolved to the point of having written records. As their knowledge of anthropology and archaeology increased, they realized that in more remote times primitive Communism—hunter-gatherer societies based on common ownership and egalitarian social relations—was the rule. Engels attributed the decline of primitive Communism and the origin of economic classes to the invention of agriculture and the concomitant development of the state, the monogamous family and private property ( Engels 1942, 1972 ).

2. Asiatic Mode of Production

In the wake of the decline of primitive equality and the emergence of agriculture the Asiatic mode appeared. The ruler in this kind of state in theory possessed all land and extracted surplus in the form of tribute. Surplus was extracted through officials of the subordinate state apparatus from self-sufficient, largely agricultural communities. In these communities there was no private property in land, complex division of labour or much external trade. Class and class struggle were muted.

Marx seized upon the concept of the Asiatic mode of production to account for the relative inertia of Chinese and Indian society and his view in this regard is open to question in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, his conception of an Asiatic mode proved to be extremely fertile intellectually. The Asiatic mode is now seen by anthropologists as a transitional phase through which all pre-capitalist societies, including Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, evolved attendant on the development of the early state. The absence of economic classes and class struggle is the key feature of the Asiatic mode ( Godelier 1978 :201–257). Recognition of the pervasiveness of the Asiatic mode helps to highlight the centrality of the birth of class and class struggle to the historical and material development of global society and to qualify a too linear view of historical development.

3. Tributary Mode

Based on the historiography in the major Western countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholarship tended to be dominated by a Eurocentric viewpoint that gave pride of place to Greece and Rome and Western feudalism. But in the twenty-first century the history of class-based societies and class struggle is increasingly discussed in terms of the so-called tributary mode of production: a non-Eurocentric formulation conceived by the Egyptian-Senegalese Marxist political economist Samir Amin (1985) . Amin postulated five modes that might co-exist in a social formation prior to the arrival of socialism: primitive community, petty commodity, slave, tributary, and capitalist. The most common, long-lived, and general pre-capitalist mode has been the tributary in which surplus has been collected in the form of rent or taxes by the social and political ruling apparatus from the peasant village community organized on the basis of a gendered family division of labor. Historically this mode has existed since the Bronze Age and has been found in both European and non-European societies as diverse as China, Imperial Rome, or Old Regime France. This mode is characterized by the existence of the state and towns, state apparatuses, monumental architecture, markets, irrigation systems, canals, and roads. The prevalence of this mode through a long history requires us to carefully examine it and the dynamic of class struggle within it.

Amin allowed that although the tributary mode was predominant historically, medieval European feudalism may be seen as a variant especially owing to its parcelization of sovereignty. Like the tributary mode in general its foundation is based on the subsistence family agriculture of peasants. Its historical importance lies in the fact that that it was the mode whose existence immediately preceded the development of capitalism.

John Haldon has most developed the theoretical premises of the tributary mode emphasizing the key role of the state to its function (1993). Haldon argues that Amin’s view of Western feudalism as a particular variant of the tributary mode is mistaken. Ignoring the importance of Western feudalism to the birth of capitalism, Haldon sees feudal rent and state taxation as simply different forms of surplus extraction (1993: 76–77).

The state in the tributary mode is seen as enjoying a certain autonomy while being constrained by the economic relationships that underlie it. States in this mode have an autonomy of practice in so far as they represent a nexus of historically specific specialized rules and ideological, cultural, and religious practices. The chief characteristic of the tributary mode is the extraction of surplus in the form of rent, taxes, or tribute by means of non-economic coercion. The extraction of surpluses in these forms reflects the degree of centralization achieved in a given state with taxation representing the most developed form of surplus extraction characteristic of a strong centralized state.

The transformation of kin and lineage-based modes of surplus appropriation into those based on class exploitation loosens kinship ties and their associated forms of social practice. The coincident extension of networks of coercive political and economic power across a wider social and geographic space leads to the development of statelike structures. On the other hand, this by no means suggests that localized or regional bonds of kinship and lineage do not continue to play a key role in production and distribution ( Haldon 1993 :88).

The appearance of class antagonisms marks a new stage in the development of the relations of production. As objective antagonisms between social groups with regard to their relations of production evolve and crystallize, the state becomes the legislative and executive arm of the ruling class within the political order. The community with its kinship and lineage structures organized as a set of clans or families with equal or equivalent rights no longer controls the means of production and distribution. Instead one group now exerts control over both the amount of surplus demanded and the mode of surplus appropriation, using mechanisms of non-economic coercion (i.e., law, customary practice, religion, military force), a class now exploits the labor of other groups ( Haldon 1993 :90).

Peasant revolts against the landlord class and the state were an ongoing feature of this mode. The history of imperial China is marked by recurrent peasant revolts against the landlord class and the state. In the 880s, 1350s, and 1640s major peasant upheavals contributed to in the fall of the reigning dynasty (Wickham 1985:175). The Russian imperial state that dates from the sixteenth century was constantly fearful of peasant uprisings, which totaled some 160 in the imperial period. There were four major uprisings after 1606 provoked by resistance to serfdom or excessive taxation. The greatest of these was the Pugachev revolt of the 1770s ( Perrie, Lieven, and Suny 2006 :483). In India such class-based agrarian revolts were more muted due to the largely self-sufficient nature of the village and the power of the religiously based caste system. The imposition of the despotic Moghul bureaucracy in the early modern period also inhibited the formation of popular grassroots opposition. But contrary to a common view India experienced substantial economic and commercial growth in the Mughal era (1526–1707). Excessive fiscal demands and religious intolerance in the reign of Aurangzeb set off peasant revolts at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, which led to the break-up of the centralized state ( Bagchi 2005 :150–151).

Marx, who had a thorough classical education and who therefore inherited the special interest of Europeans for the Greeks and Romans, treated slavery in Ancient Greece and Rome as a distinct mode of production. According to him, direct forced labor was the foundation of the ancient world. In slavery wealth confronted forced labor not in the form of capital but rather as a relation of direct domination.

Marx’s view of ancient slavery was elaborated by Geoffrey de Sainte-Croix’s Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World (1981) ( Talbot 2000 ; Talbot 2000a ). Sainte-Croix saw ancient or chattel slavery as one form of unfree labor that also included serfs and debt bondsman. The great ages of slavery were the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ in Greece and the second and first centuries before Christ in Rome. The late Roman Empire saw a decline in slave labor and an increase in the use of serfs ( de Sainte-Croix 1981 : 52, 53, 146).

Marx, Engels, Sainte-Croix, and others maintained that slavery was a mode of production in its own right. But the salience they gave to the slave mode of production came under criticism. Critics pointed out that except for brief periods the dominant mode of extraction in classical Antiquity had been the collection of rent from a dependent peasantry rather than slavery. Class conflicts between patricians and plebians including peasants played a more important role in the evolution of the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic and Principate than did slavery. But Sainte-Croix had only argued that the extraction of surplus from slave labor had been the way the ruling class in Greece and Rome at their zenith had been able to maintain its rule. Slavery is what made possible the most distinctive features of ancient civilization. Slavery was the means by which Greek city-state elites and Roman patricians extracted the surplus that enabled them to dominate politically and culturally ( de Sainte-Croix 1981 : 52, 54).

5. Feudalism

The transition from the Roman Empire to Western feudalism has preoccupied scholars. The consensus is that feudalism was introduced based on the initiatives of the old Roman or new Germanic landlord class, who imposed a new regime on the agricultural producers through a process of direct and indirect coercion. It was Perry Anderson who initiated discussion claiming that there was a long cultural transition between the fall of the Western Empire and the crystallization of feudalism. Over the centuries feudalism developed out of a slow fusion of Germanic and Roman social and legal elements. As part of this process the slave mode of production was replaced by serfdom ( Anderson 1974 :28–42).

Chris Wickham, on the contrary, sees feudalism as already existing at the beginning of the fourth century and dominant by 700 ad . Reflecting the common view Wickham believed that in order to avoid onerous Roman taxation peasants placed themselves under the protection of lords in the late Roman Empire ( Harman 2011 :98–99). During these so-called Dark Ages peasant resistance on a large scale was rare. There is evidence, however, of ongoing local struggle that took the form of ongoing opposition to the imposition of the feudal system. In Saxony in 841–842, for example, aristocratic feuding made possible a large-scale peasant revolt demanding a return to the pre-aristocratic social order ( Wickham 2005 :350–351, 441, 578–588).

A radically different view was put forward by Guy Bois. Bois argued that the slave mode remained dominant until the tenth century. Feudalism, including the dominance of serf labor, developed out of a movement in the tenth century of a religious fraction of the landlord elite known as the Cluniac monks.

Upset by the secular overlords control of the church and the resultant corruption of religion the Cluniacs among other measures took the peasants under their protection and gained their support. The secular overlords resisted and the resultant anarchy terrorized the peasanty and led to the consolidation of feudalism ( Bois 1992 :145–152). The feudal class then facilitated an economic take-off, including new techniques and technology, towns and trade, and a land market that marked the High Middle Ages.

6. Late Medieval Crisis

There was a crisis of feudalism in Western Europe in the period 1300–1450 due to landlord over-exploitation and the consequent widespread revolt of peasants and towns. It paved the way for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production within a social formation still dominated by the feudal mode.

Bois’s treatment is innovative for emphasizing the importance of peasant resistance as against landlord demands ( Bois 1992 :135). Developing the class struggle the peasants during the High Middle Ages undermined rent or the feudal levy by organizing themselves at the village level against demands for more labor by landlords. The resistance of peasants to surplus labor on the demesne and their struggle to devote labor to the family plot and to keep as much as possible of the product of that labor are inherent characteristics of the class struggle under feudalism. The development of the peasant community as the coordinating center of peasant family plots—and as bulwarks against outside intervention by feudal lords—eroded seigneurial power, especially where aristocratic political organization was weak. The constant struggles of the petty producers over time, aided by the lords’ own ideology of perpetual tenures and service, were successful in eroding feudal levies. Landlords at first reacted by inventing new forms of rent or forcing technological improvements (windmills, watermills, etc.) and later by pillage and warfare which devastated the peasantry.

Indeed, the late Middle Ages was marked by intense class conflict between landowners and peasants. Maurice Dobb put the emphasis on the destructive consequences of the landlords over-exploitation of the peasants. The landlords’ need for revenue prompted an increase in the pressure on the producer to a point where it became unendurable. The result was economic and demographic exhaustion, flight from the land and peasant rebellion. Subsequent labour shortages, peasant resistance or threat of flight led to widespread commutation of labor to money rent and the end of serfdom. The manorial system was further weakened by the thinning of the ranks of the nobility through war, the growing practice of leasing demesne, the emergence of a stratum of rich and middling peasants differentiated from the mass of peasant poor, and the growing use of wage labor. By the end of the fifteenth century the economic basis of the feudal system had disintegrated ( Dobb 1946 :42–46, 60, 65).

Echoing Dobb, Bois stressed the importance of the decline in the feudal levy and blockage of the forces of production in setting off the feudal crisis. At the same time, he emphasized the many-sided nature of the late medieval crisis—political, religious, cultural—reflecting a crisis of values as part of class conflict. Writing in 2000, eight years prior to the financial collapse of 2008, Bois demonstrated the similarities between the crisis of feudalism and the current crisis of the capitalist system ( Bois 2000 :143–176).

Chris Harman took up the views of Bois and transformed them making the crisis of feudalism not so much one of over-exploitation by the landlord class but of advance on the part of the petty producers. He underscored the increases in the productivity of agriculture in the High Middle Ages both in England and on the European Continent. Agricultural surpluses were marketed in the towns, manufactures were consumed not merely by nobles but also by peasants and townspeople, and commercial ties between producers in town and country were strengthened. Wage labor began to be employed on a limited basis by incipient capitalists. Social differentiation among the peasantry strengthened these tendencies. The late medieval crisis affirmed rather than annulled these economic and social advances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. During that period of difficulty, the lead in opposition to the nobles was taken by those peasants and craftspeople who were most in command of the forces of production that had developed in the previous period of prosperity. The religious heresies, new cultural movements, and revolutionary social movements of the late Middle Ages were important factors in the decline of feudalism. Harman in fact considers the social upheavals of the fourteenth century throughout Western Europe to be a proto-capitalist revolution brought on by the development of the forces of production in the High Middle Ages and their fettering ( Harman 1998 :68).

The end of serfdom in Western Europe did not bring feudalism to an end however. As Perry Anderson demonstrated the emergence of the territorial monarchies at the end of the Middle Ages in fact represented “a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position” ( Anderson 1974 :18). The class power of the nobility, which was put in question as a result of the disappearance of serfdom, was displaced upward and centralized into the hands of the new territorial monarchies, which became the principal instruments for the maintenance of noble domination over the peasantry. Moreover, in so far as nobles blocked the emergence of a free market in land and peasants retained access to their means of subsistence, feudal relations persisted. The state was the ultimate rampart of upper-class rule and interstate warfare helped justify landlord rule and was a means of deflecting class struggle. Capitalism developed within the interstices of feudalism co-existing with it and, indeed, allying itself with a revivified slavery from which it greatly profited in the early modern period.

7. Origins of Capitalism

Nonetheless, in England and elsewhere in Western Europe the emergence of the territorial state created a space essential for the further progression of the urban-based bourgeoisie. In the medieval period political and economic control had been combined. With the appearance of the system of competing sovereign territorial states in the early modern epoch, political power began to be separated from immediate control over markets and property, allowing capitalist forces to emerge. The political order remained feudal while society under its aegis became more bourgeois ( Anderson 1974 :23–24).

In his discussion of the birth of capitalism in sixteenth-century England, Marx stresses the relationship between capitalist farmers and rural wage earners and the new social and political importance of profit ( Marx 1977 :905). It should be emphasized that the emergence of this class was made possible by the social differentiation of the peasants that had become about as a result of the class struggles of the late Middle Ages. Capitalists fundamentally differed from feudal landlords in that their goal was capital accumulation rather than consumption and that they used economic rather than non-economic means to extract surplus from peasants. This allowed eventually for a massive expansion of the forces of production under the control of capitalists.

8. Merchant Capitalism

During the period of merchant capitalism (1500–1800) in which production in agriculture and manufacture was re-organized under the control of capital but not yet revolutionized, class struggle took three forms: primitive accumulation, accumulation proper, and bourgeois revolution against feudalism and absolutism.

There was ongoing primitive accumulation directed from on high against subsistence peasants by landlords and rich peasants. This was countered from below by anti-enclosure movements by peasants ( Charlesworth 1983 ; Glassman 2000 ). But from the sixteenth century onward the majority of peasant producers gradually lost access to sufficient land or other means of production that became more and more the possession of landlords, rich peasants, and manufacturer-merchants ( Bryer 2006 ; Dimmock 2014). The loss of access to the land was often a violent and traumatic experience. Dispossession of subsistence peasants forced increasing numbers of them to sell their labor power to employers for wages a form of exploitation that proved more efficient than the extraction of rent. This process is part of what Marx called “primitive accumulation” because it allowed a certain concentration of wealth but especially because it put in place the social relations that permitted the further accumulation of capital. This transformation unfolded between 1500 and 1800 across the face of Western Europe and especially in England, which found itself in the vanguard of capitalist development.

A second form of class struggle occurred based on the growth of capitalist relations of production. As more and more producers became wage workers there was an ongoing struggle between them and employers over how much of their labor power could be appropriated by employers as surplus value, about the intensity of work, and about the length of the working day. Based on the extension of these new social relations commodity production became generalized and an increasing number of producers were forced to sell their labor as a commodity. By the end of the eighteenth century, half the population of Western Europe were wage workers ( Tilly 1983 ; Lucassen 2005 ).

9. Bourgeois Revolution

As capital accumulated in the hands of the bourgeoisie, there developed a series of increasingly powerful capitalist and bourgeois revolutions against the feudal class and absolutism running from the German Peasants’ War and the Dutch Revolt, to the English and French Revolutions and including international conflicts between the revolutionary bourgeois states and the feudal and absolutist states. In short the highest form of class struggle took the form of a struggle for the control of the state. The Dutch fought a prolonged war of national liberation (1576–1648) against the Hapsburgs and in the last years of this struggle the conflict turned into a general European war. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was a struggle between feudalism and capitalism defined in economic terms. But it was in fact a clash between two modes of production that embraced two kinds of society. It was a clash between two power blocks in which the Dutch revolt of the sixteenth century against Spanish absolutism became linked to the English Revolution. It was a class conflict that crystalized into an interstate struggle whose outcome saw the triumph of the capitalist states of northwest Europe, on the one hand, and the re-feudalization of Central and southern Europe on the other ( Polisensky 1971 :262). The unprecedented mass military mobilizations during the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars helped consolidate the revolution, internationalizing the class conflict and enabling the liquidation of feudalism across most of the European Continent ( Blaufarb 2014 :131–154).

Recently there have been attempts to deny that these upheavals or mass movements from below were bourgeois and capitalist. This school of historical thought is part of a broad current of revisionism that is designed deliberately or not to delegitimate the historical significance of revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles overall ( Losurdo 2015 ). Paradoxically it is avowed Marxist scholar and political activist Robert Brenner who has played an important role in disavowing the importance of the concept bourgeois revolution ( Heller 2011 :118–120).

In arguing that they were bourgeois and capitalist, we are not saying that these early bourgeois revolutions were made exclusively by the manufacturing, commercial, and professional bourgeoisie. On the contrary it was the petty bourgeoisie, peasants, and wage workers who constituted the mass of rank-and-file revolutionaries ( Heller 1985 ). But these upheavals were all directed against arbitrary government, restrictions on the market, burdensome taxation, aristocratic and ecclesiastical privilege, and religious persecution that hampered the development of capitalism. The main contradiction was the conflict between existing relations of production that were feudal and absolutist and capitalist forces of production in which leadership came to be controlled by the bourgeoisie or those under their direction. Changes in the political and legal superstructure demanded by the bourgeoisie were designed to remove political and social barriers to facilitate capitalist accumulation. Most of these early bourgeois revolutions were inspired by religion but the French Revolution—the last in the series—dis-established religion and was explicitly bourgeois and capitalist ( Heller 2010 ). The sequence of these increasingly powerful revolutions allows one to trace the growing power of the bourgeoisie as a class. Its repeated drive to control the state announced its capacity to dominate society as a whole.

10. Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution or entry of capital into production, which more or less coincided with the French Revolution, was among other things an attempt by the bourgeoisie to break the independence of workers and establish full control over their labor. Once more we are dealing with class struggle at the point of production. The knowledge of skilled workers was devalued and their autonomy subjected to factory discipline ( Heller 2011 :181–185). Inspired by the French Revolution, workers on both sides of the English Channel fought back and began to organize themselves and develop a sense of themselves as a working class. Historically the awakening of class consciousness among workers was a momentous development ( Guicheteau 2014 ; Schiappa 2003 :142, 505; Thompson 1963 ).

11. Age of Revolutions (1789–1848)

The half century following the French Revolution and Napoleon was marked by intense class struggle. The landlord class and the absolutist monarchies attempted to restore as much as possible of the Old Regime. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution spread to the Continent strengthening the bourgeoisie and working class who were inspired by the political goals of the French Revolution. Their political aims included national sovereignty, legal equality and constitutional government as a minimum, political democracy, and socialism at the outside. The result was a three-fold wave of revolutions of increasing strength. On the periphery of Europe in the 1820s Greece, Russia, Spain, and Latin America experienced revolutions. Belgium, France, and Poland followed suit in 1830. Finally in 1848 France and then the rest of Western and Central Europe—including Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary—exploded. In less acute form unrest struck Spain, Denmark, and Romania while even Ireland, Greece, and Britain were affected.

These revolutionary waves sought in the first instance to advance nationalist and liberal demands. They involved liberal nobles, the professional classes, merchants, petty bourgeoisie and workers. As midcentury approached, reactive forms of popular resistance such as food riots and machine breaking declined, and strikes emerged as the primary weapon of workers—with their frequency and intensity tied to political events ( Tilly 1975 :252). Workers across Europe had already enunciated a version of socialism based on producer cooperatives ( Moss 1976 :4). In the Revolution of 1848 democratic and republican ideas championed by the increasingly powerful middle and working class came to the fore. Shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto introducing the principles of historical materialism to the working class. The marriage of Marxist theory to the workers movement proved a world historical event ( Althusser 1970 ). During the Revolution the working class across Europe raised the red flag of socialism for the first time ( Hobsbawm 1962 ).

Revolutions also marked the second half of the nineteenth century (1848–1914). In Paris the Commune (1871) briefly established a workers’ republic based on direct democracy and workers for the first time in history controlled the levers of political power. Marx who disapproved of the Commune as an adventure without possibility of success nonetheless drew important political lessons for the future of class struggle from its failure ( Hobsbawm 1975 :114). Meanwhile class struggle universalized itself in the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) as an immense peasants revolt against landlordism shook southern China. The revolution came about as a result of the destabilizing of China by the intrusion of an increasingly powerful British capitalism. English textiles and opium from India undermined traditional Chinese society. Part of the leadership of the rebellion was won over to the idea that China needed to modernize itself by adopting Western technology ( Hobsbawm 1975 :127–130). Marx presciently saw the Taiping Rebellion as a stepping stone toward an eventual Chinese socialist revolution.

12. The Nation, Monopoly Capitalism, and Imperialism (1848–1914)

Meanwhile in the West capitalism entered its heyday. In the years following 1848 the nation-state that had been pioneered in England, France, Holland, and Belgium and had become the political model followed by the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Japan. The framework of the nation-state contained the militancy of the working class allowing the consolidation of capitalism and the capitalist market under bourgeois control or under a partnership of bourgeois and landlord rule.

Over the next thirty years the nation-state served as the basic framework for the development of the capitalist market and made possible a major expansion of capital. Following the steep depression of the late 1840s a major boom developed in the 1850s. After a downturn in 1857 growth resumed even more spectacularly over the next decade until the onset of a new major depression in 1873. During these years there was an enormous boom in exports. Between 1850 and 1870 world trade more than doubled facilitated by the discovery of gold in California, the expansion of bank credit, and an overall environment in favor of the free market. The United States and Germany meanwhile achieved unification through major wars. Industrialization leaped ahead especially in these two states and spread throughout Western and Central Europe.

A depression set in 1873 slowing trade and depressing profits, prices, and interest rates and ending only in 1894. But output even in this period soared in heavy industries like steel. Concentration and centralization of capital and protectionism brought the end of free trade while new industries based on chemicals, oil, and hydroelectricity stimulated profits. Economic rivalry spurred a race for colonies ( Hobsbawm 1989 ).

Capitalism had entered into a new stage characterized as monopoly capital and imperialism. This new phase of capitalism had the following characteristics: a) monopoly control over the heights of the national economies by big banks and corporations that tended to fuse together; b) partnership of monopoly corporations with the state that increasingly acted in their interest; c) expanding export of finance capital seeking profitable return; d) scramble for colonies or protected zones for investment and markets for manufactures; e) intensified economic, political, and military rivalry between the major capitalist countries: England, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, United States, Japan, Austria-Hungary, and Russia ( Smith 2000 :10–16).

Bourgeois class power was enhanced by both the increasing institutional power of the state and the colossal growth of the capitalist economy. The working class also grew in these countries. Campaigns for pensions, reduction in working hours, disability and unemployment insurance, and the extension of democratic suffrage attracted working- class support for labor unions and socialist political parties. They grew exponentially in the late 1880s and early 1890s and again between 1905 and 1914. On the Continent at least, Marxism became the dominant ideology in these quarters. With help from Marx, a First International Association of working-class unions and parties came into being in 1864. But it dissolved twelve years later owing to splits between Marxists and anarchists. Class consciousness increased but hopes for sudden, violent change echoing the Revolution of 1848 diminished. The more enduring Second International, which gradually accommodated itself to this reformist current among socialists, was created in 1889 ( Hobsbawm 1989 :130, 133).

The shift in the nature of class struggle in Western Europe in this period was later theorized by Antonio Gramsci who articulated it in the form of the concepts of passive revolution and the contrast between a war of movement as against a war of position. In the first part of the nineteenth century the state apparatus was relatively rudimentary and civil society (i.e., the market and bourgeois institutions) was comparatively autonomous. Revolutionary insurrection was a feasible strategy. But after 1870 the internal and international organizational relations of the state in Western Europe became less communicative with civil society. The possibilities of a revolution or a war of movement diminished. Economic transformation occurred through a passive revolution (i.e., a revolution from above or by the ruling class without political transformation from below) in Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia ( Thomas 2013 :30). Through a wide range of cultural and political institutions ranging from newspapers, schools, to political parties, the bourgeoisie had established its domination as a class. Insurrectionary violence was incapable of overcoming the more solid foundations of this hegemonic order. The more so as imperialism and the gains of mass production made possible certain concessions to the working class. Class compromise seemed increasingly the order of the day.

Under such conditions Gramsci believed the proletariat could overcome bourgeois hegemony only by means of a war of position (i.e., pursuing the class struggle by building an alternative hegemonic culture based on the working class). This proletarian alternative order included trade unions and political parties but also the full range of cultural and educational institutions. In this way Gramsci discovered the cultural dimensions of class struggle as workers and bourgeoisie vied for ideological hegemony ( Thomas 2009 :126, 148–151). The role of women in the industrial workforce that had been dominant in the earlier stages of the Industrial Revolution diminished, and their role in the social reproduction of labor including the labour power of members of the working class family was stressed ( Foster and Clark 2018 ).

13. Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1898–1945)

But already prior to the outbreak of war in 1914 this relatively stable order was being challenged at its periphery by a series of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist revolutions in the Chinese, Ottoman, and Russian empires as well as in Iran, Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Imperialism was in the process of destroying the old structures of the economies of these states while undermining their political institutions. The traditional landed elites who were supported by a comprador bourgeoisie found themselves challenged by an emergent petty bourgeoisie, professionals, and students as well as artisans, small-scale merchants, and peasants ( Hobsbawm 1989 :276–292). From this time forward class struggle on the part of the petty bourgeoisie, working class, and peasantry in the Global South was associated with opposition to comprador elements but also imperialism.

The beginning of the twentieth century thus saw a return to the cycle of revolutions of a hundred years before. The most important of these upheavals of the new century occurred in Russia (1905) where defeat in war against Japan led to a revolution where first the bourgeoisie and then the proletariat took the lead. This proved a prelude to the Russian Revolution of 1917 in which an alliance of workers and peasants overthrew first feudal autocracy and then capitalism ( Hobsbawm 1989 :293–301; Smith 2002 ). The Russian Revolution was led by Lenin who created the highly effective revolutionary instrument of the democratic centralist Bolshevik Party. He then globalized it by organizing the Comintern (1919) made up of Communist parties prepared to accept the discipline of Leninist democratic centralist organization ( Le Blanc 2014 ).

The war of movement spread from Russia to the West where it inspired a near revolution in Germany, army and naval mutinies, and then labor unrest in Italy, Hungary, France, Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States ( Broue 2004 ; Sondhaus 2011 ). Class struggle assumed new forms during the interwar period, which was marked economically at first by runaway inflation and rampant speculation and then a worldwide depression set off by a lack of demand. In Italy the war and the runaway inflation that marked its aftermath sparked a major crisis, including revolts by agricultural and factory workers. Working-class unrest and nationalist disappointment over the failures of Italian imperialism sparked a violent reaction by the middle class, making possible the rise of a reactionary mass movement. Bankrolled by the capitalist bourgeoisie, ex-socialist and war veteran Benito Mussolini invented fascism based on armed vigilante gangs ( fascisti ) of ex-soldiers, landlords, and middle-class youth and espousing extreme violence, the cult of the leader, the corporate state, economic autarchy, anti-Communism, anti-liberalism, extreme nationalism, imperialism, and war. This formula proved successful in repressing Italian Communism, which had been gaining ground in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The same recipe, to which was added a virulent anti-Semitism, succeeded in bringing the Nazi Party to power against the threat of a working-class takeover in Germany following the outbreak of the Depression ( Renton 1999 ).

In order to advance the revolutionary struggle in Germany and elsewhere the Comintern in 1922 articulated the idea of the United Front. It entailed drawing together workers—revolutionary and non-revolutionary—in common struggle. These struggles could range from the basic defense of workers’ conditions under capitalism (trade unions) to the creation of a workers’ state from below (Soviets). The forces involved remained independent. Revolutionaries were able to pursue goals independent of the united front. It also was a site of struggle—reformist and revolutionary currents could argue about strategy and tactics and vie for supremacy. The superior ideas and methods of struggle put forward by revolutionaries allowed them to win some of the reformist workers involved in the united front to revolutionary politics ( Choonara 2007 ).

Failure of the United Front in China and the crisis of the Depression led to its rejection by Stalin in 1927. The lack of a United Front in Germany between Communists and social democrats almost certainly contributed to the triumph of Hitler. Following the Nazi seizure of power, the Comintern outlined an alternate policy known as the Popular Front, which entailed a much looser alliance of the parties of the center and the left to block fascism.

Bitter class struggles between Communists and fascists broke out in France, which saw the triumph of the left in a broad coalition in the election of the so-called Popular Front government (1936) dominated by the socialists and supported by the increasingly influential Communist Party. Electoral victory set off a massive wave of strikes and factory occupations and consequent social and economic gains by the working class ( Danos and Gibelin 1986 ). Meanwhile in Spain rivalry between fascists and Communists culminated in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The fascist side was openly supported by the military intervention of Italy and Germany, while the Soviet Union more discretely supported the Popular Front government of the Republic ( Fraser 2011 ).

14. High Tide of Communism (1939–1949)

The struggle between fascism and Communism climaxed in World War II. Conceding that World War II was primarily an inter-imperialist struggle, the Soviet Union was assaulted by the Nazis. The Nazis wanted to destroy what was called the “Judeo-Bolshevism” of this workers state and to gain access to the immense resources of the Soviet Union. The Red Army was made up of workers and peasants and was inspired by patriotism and the ideology of revolutionary Marxism ( Weiner 2002 ; Hellbeck 2015 ). Partisan units led by members of the Communist parties of the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Czechoslovakia challenged the fascist occupiers and their local supporters ( Mandel 1986 :38–40). Meanwhile in China the Red Army made up of peasants was inspired by nationalism directed against Japanese imperialism as well as the prospect of overthrowing the landlord class. The Protracted Peoples’ War articulated by Mao Zedong combined land reform with innovative military strategy and tactics. It constituted a wholly new and brilliantly successful approach to class struggle in a semi-feudal country under the thrall of imperialism ( Mao Zedong 1954 ).

15. Cold War (1945–1991)

Following World War II and the onset of the Cold War (1945–1989) the world was divided between the informal empire of a triumphant liberal and capitalist United States and its allies and a still-fledgling socialist world dominated by the Soviet Union and China. In the West the wartime destruction of capital and the need to satisfy the economic and political demands of the aspiring working class spurred the postwar emergence of Fordist capitalism. Class compromise was negotiated at the heart of the economic and political system. Demands for higher wages and higher living standards were met by investment in fixed capital and improvements in productivity-enhancing profits while producing a cornucopia of low-cost consumer goods ( Vidal 2015 :184). In the East primitive socialist accumulation imposed from above sparked rapid growth at first at the expense of workers’ living and working conditions. An immense expansion of the forces of production took place.

The working class benefited in the West but eventually in the Communist world as well. But the workers, peasants, and lumpen proletariat of the Global South under the weight of imperialism and neocolonialism were largely left behind. With the direct or indirect help of the Communist states, bitter anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and class struggles raged throughout the Global South highlighted by revolutionary movements in Greece, Korea, Guatemala, Bolivia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, Iraq, Cuba, Indo-China, Central America, and Africa based on the peasantry and relatively weak working classes of these countries. The United States suffered setbacks in Cuba and Indo-China; however, the United States, along with its allies and proxies, fought back using massive firepower and counter-insurgency techniques and its great financial and economic resources to contain these upheavals ( Heller 2006 ). Class-based conflicts in the Global South continue as in the case of contemporary Venezuela or the Philippines but can only have systemic effects when joined to crisis in the major capitalist states (Cicariello-Maher 2013; Sison and De Lima 2015 ).

16. Neoliberalism

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed the American capitalist class and its allies to launch a global attack on the working class in the form of neoliberal austerity and the imperialist reoccupation of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. There has been a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class ( Harvey 2003 , Smith 2016 ). Some scholars assert that the globalization and financialization of the economy in the neoliberal period has created a veritable transnational capitalist class ( Sklair 2001 ). Ongoing study of this question is necessary, but one must remind oneself that the capitalist class (like all historic ruling classes) has always depended on the state to maintain itself. There is little sign that a sufficiently strong international political and institutional framework has come into being that could sustain such a transnational class while dispensing with the state. Analysis of existing financial markets and signs of growing conflicts between the United States, Germany, Russia, and China rooted in economic and geopolitical rivalry casts doubt on this view ( Norfield 2016 ). Samir Amin has suggested that rather than a single transnational capitalist class there are globalized monopoly capitalists that continue to depend on the existing major capitalists states as a base of their operations ( Amin 2013 ). Under neoliberalism the class compromise of the post-1945 period came to an end. A wholesale attack on the working class worldwide marked the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. The working class as a whole fell into confusion and retreated.

17. The Capitalist Crisis (2008)

Rising inequality and the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 led to a sudden rise of working-class consciousness arguably constituting the global working class as a class-for-itself ( Schuman 2013 ). But the paralysis of the working class in the face of global industrial restructuring marked by the displacement of capital to the Global South, lean production and contracting out; the working class’s difficulties in influencing its own organizations; its disorientation in the face of changes in its racial, ethnic, and gender composition; its degradation in the dog-eat-dog competition of the world employment market have inhibited the actions of trade unions and the coalescence of new political and social movements that could challenge capitalism ( Moody 1997 ). The working class may be becoming a class-for-itself, but paradoxically it is far from constituting a class-in-itself. The global working class continues to be rooted in the social relations of production, but these have become extremely complex, while class today has to be understood as the outcome of multiple determinations beyond production relations ( Campling, Miyamura, Pattenden, and Selwyn 2016 ). Developing working-class resistance under such conditions has proven difficult.

The absence of politically effective working-class parties at the national and international level is keenly felt. On the other hand, the lack of wage pressure to spur productivity, the ongoing profit and investment squeeze, growing delegitimation of capitalism and the capitalist state in the eyes of public opinion, inter-imperialist rivalry between the leading powers, and growing ecological problems suggest that contemporary class struggles are rooted in the Marxist contradiction between expanded forces of production and outmoded relations of production ( Streeck 2016 ). Moreover, the working class remains a sleeping giant. The very concentration and centralization of capital has the potential over time of empowering workers socially and politically ( Moody 2014 ).

In conclusion we note that the ecological problems of capitalism appear insuperable ( Foster 2015 ). But they pose a problem especially for the capitalist class whose drive for more growth is rooted in its demand for more surplus without which it cannot accumulate capital. On the other hand, the producers in class societies have always aimed at subsistence or material sufficiency: a norm long since achieved that does not depend on the perpetuation of a system based on profit and that can be enhanced by the multiplication of use rather than exchange values in the form of more leisure and an improved environment.

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Domenico Losurdo’s Historical Interpretation of Class Struggles

Omer Moussaly Pages 131-156| Published online:31 Aug 2022

Moussaly, Omer. 2022. “Domenico Losurdo’s Historical Interpretation of Class Struggles.” Marxism & Sciences 1(2): 131–156. https://doi.org/10.56063/MS.2208.01203 .

This paper explores a misunderstood aspect of the Marxist scientific paradigm. It proposes to develop the idea first elucidated by Domenico Losurdo that the class struggle approach to history, as theorized by Marx and Engels, is in fact a general and scientific theory of social conflict. This general theory was consciously developed by Marx and Engels in opposition to certain irrational and subjectivist paradigms that attempted to explain the political behaviour of subaltern groups living under capitalist conditions. By returning to Losurdo’s explanations of Marxism but also by revisiting classical Marxist works on this topic, this paper reinforces the class struggle centric understanding of Marxism against other possible readings of this worldview. The emphasis on class struggles in no way diminishes the discoveries made by Marx in his critique of Political Economy that also deserve to be actively pursued. This research paper also demonstrates that a scientific understanding of human history requires an insistence on the centrality of class struggle and that the critiques of Marx’s elaboration of his general theory of social conflict are often partial and undialectical. This paper responds to some of these critiques through an exegesis of several key Marxist writings, from Marx to Fanon, that demonstrate the non- dogmatic approach that historical materialists adopted when examining history and social conflict. This return to classical Marxist works also demonstrates that despite certain differences in tone and style the major revolutionary theoreticians shared a common strategic and intellectual framework regarding the class struggle. KEYWORDS: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Losurdo, Marxist philosophy, class struggles. .

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Class Struggle

A Political and Philosophical History

• © 2016
• Domenico Losurdo 0

University of Urbino, Colbordolo, Vallefoglia, Italy

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• Provides an original reinterpretation of class struggle in Marxist-Leninist thought that challenges conventional populist thinking
• Makes available a new work by a leading Italian Marxist-Leninist in the field for the first time in English
• One of the few books to seriously incorporate issues of gender, race, and post-colonial thought within the framework of class struggle

Part of the book series: Marx, Engels, and Marxisms (MAENMA)

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

Front matter, introduction: the return of class struggle.

Domenico Losurdo

The Different Forms of Class Struggle

A protracted, positive-sum struggle, class struggles and struggles for recognition, overcoming binary logic: a difficult, unfinished process, the multiplicity of struggles for recognition and the conflict of liberties, the south-east passage, lenin in 1919: ‘the class struggle is continuing—it has merely changed its forms’, after the revolution: the ambiguities of class struggle, after the revolution: discovering the limits of class struggle, class struggle at the ‘end of history’, class struggle between exorcism and fragmentation, the class struggle poised between marxism and populism, back matter.

• Social polarization
• anti-colonialism
• struggles for emancipation
• historical materialism

About this book

“Losurdo has comprehensively demonstrated that we can, and indeed should, question the context of the appearance or reappearance of many of the bourgeoisie’s crypto-philosophical works. His book shows that class discourse, despite the best efforts of the corporate media, is not dead yet! … .” (Thomas Klikauer, Labor History, Vol. 60 (3), 2019)

“Thanks to a documentation that is very large and amazingly informative, Losurdo convincingly shows how his scheme of class struggle is useful to explain modern history up to the present times. Far from being just a history of the concept of class struggle and of the meanings it has assumed over time, Losurdo’s book is a great essay of philosophy of history.” (Gianni Vattimo, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy)

“In his new book Losurdo demonstrates brilliantly with a great clarity and rigor a very important thesis today: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci and Mao have developed a non-binary conception of class struggle. The integral concept of class struggle goes beyond the classical opposition between Work and Capital. It includes the secular feminist fight for emancipation from male domination and the modern battles for national liberation.” (André Tosel, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Nice, France)

“Losurdo shows convincingly that the often maligned concept of class struggle can be used in a productive way when put in a broader context. When class struggle is thus defined as a comprehensive theory of social conflict the term becomes indeed a highly useful instrument in analyzing the various aspects of the present global crisis and their interconnections.” (Jürgen Pelzer , Professor , Occidental College, USA)

Authors and Affiliations

About the author, bibliographic information.

Book Title : Class Struggle

Book Subtitle : A Political and Philosophical History

Authors : Domenico Losurdo

Translated by : Gregory Elliot

Series Title : Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-70660-0

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan New York

eBook Packages : Political Science and International Studies , Political Science and International Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Softcover ISBN : 978-1-349-70662-4 Published: 09 December 2018

eBook ISBN : 978-1-349-70660-0 Published: 06 October 2016

Series ISSN : 2524-7123

Series E-ISSN : 2524-7131

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 363

Topics : Political Theory , Political Philosophy , Terrorism and Political Violence , Democracy , International Political Economy

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Two hundred years since Karl Marx was born and 170 years since his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto , was published, Eddie McCabe looks at Marx’s theory of class struggle and assesses its relevance for today. Originally published in  Socialist Alternative , the political journal of the Socialist Party (CWI in Ireland)

Without the labour power of workers, capitalists can’t make profits. The system can’t function.

Of all the things a capitalist can buy to build their business, only labour power adds value; meaning the business can produce something worth more than the original cost of the components that went into the finished product. The time, thought and energy applied by workers in the production process – whose efforts are only partially compensated by the employer who keeps the output – is the ultimate source of profit (or surplus value) in a capitalist economy. Put simply, all profits come from the unpaid work of workers. And of course the drive for profit is the beating heart of capitalism. 1

This revolutionary discovery by Karl Marx paved the way for a comprehensive explanation of the workings of the capitalist system – identifying exploitation, and therefore injustice, at its core. It underlies the socialist understanding of the world’s economies and societies today; the contradictions and antagonisms in social relations and the inherent instability and conflict arising from the fundamental division of the world into those who own capital and exploit others, and those who own little or nothing and are exploited; namely, capitalists and workers.

Workers and capitalists

Workers are those who have none of the necessary premises, equipment, materials, or the money to acquire these things, that are needed to engage in production or exchange – to make a living on the market – and can trade only their ability to work (labour power). Capitalists do have the above, but to put them to use efficiently enough to make a profit they need other people to work them. So they offer wages to workers that will (a) allow the workers to subsist, and (b) allow the capitalist to profit from everything made after this subsistence is paid for. The lower the wage and the more hours worked for that wage, the more the capitalist is exploiting the worker, i.e. the more money they’re making at the worker’s expense.

It’s true that this arrangement is one that both the employer and the employee enter into freely, and centuries of ideological sugarcoating have created the impression that this is a fair deal for both parties. From a certain point of view, with a narrow focus on individuals, this can seem reasonable – both worker and capitalist get paid at the end of the day. The problem is that they both get paid from the work that only one of them engages in. This reality becomes clearer when looked at from the perspective not of individuals but classes. When the above scenario is generalised across the whole economy we find two main classes: (1) a majority-class of labourers who do virtually all of the work and create all of the wealth, but own very little, and (2) a minority-class who do very little work and create none of the wealth, but own virtually all of it.

Competition in the market and their insatiable need to make more profits compels the capitalists to expand their enterprises by intensifying the exploitation and amassing greater numbers of – increasingly restless – employees; who in order to defend and extend their rights and conditions are likewise compelled to organise together. This instinctive desire on the part of both capitalist and worker to push the rate of exploitation in opposite directions creates a constant tension in capitalist society: the class struggle (with all its social manifestations in conflicting ideas, organisations, institutions), the very existence of which is denied by right-wing ideologues: but the class struggle, with its ups, downs, swings and roundabouts over time, in the last analysis, decisively influences all social and historical change.

Recognising this ingrained friction (which heightens significantly in times of crises) and their central role in production (which gives them huge potential power), Marx identified the working class as key to challenging the rule of the exploiters; and moreover, establishing a society where the wealth that’s produced collectively would be enjoyed collectively.

Backlash and confusion

For socialists, this analysis remains valid in its essentials. It has withstood not just the test of time and the innumerable challenges from economic and political theorists from across the spectrum, but has been reaffirmed by the history of the working-class movement in the century and a half since Marx worked out his ideas. Conservative ideologues have always disputed the validity of Marxism, fearing most of all its revolutionary conclusions. But over time and increasingly – in the face of the failure to as yet achieve the aims of the socialist movement – even those who are critical of the system and recognise its deep-rooted and insoluble problems, deny the potential for revolutionary change and in particular the revolutionary capability of the working class.

The weakening of the traditional working-class organisations (the trade unions and the social democratic parties), both numerically and ideologically in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism and the rise of neo-liberalism, has left a major political vacuum. In the years since then the leaderships of these organisations in almost every country have made a wholesale accommodation to the system, dumping even their nominal support for an alternative to capitalism. As a result, the workers’ movement, which was a clear point of reference for millions of workers and young people in the past, is now seen as a mere auxiliary to social struggles, not its base and leadership.

On top of this the capitalist establishment, sensing this weakness, has gone on an offensive against the ideas of socialism. Their aim has been to disguise the existence of a class divide at all, but especially the existence of a potentially powerful class that can act independently, and in the interests of all of those who struggle against the system. And they’ve had a real impact, leading to much disappointment, frustration and confusion among the mass of workers and young people in recent decades. However the current crisis of the capitalist system, which sees no end in sight, is itself undermining ideological war against Marxism, as the (ever-present) class struggle ratchets up again.

As we celebrate 200 years since the birth of Karl Marx, reviewing his ideas on the class struggle and revolution will help us engage in the struggle all the better.

‘Oppressor and oppressed’

The Communist Manifesto opens with the declaration that, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Engels later clarified that this meant all ‘written history’, since for the vast bulk our existence human societies were based, by necessity, on cooperation and equality. Primitive conditions and an egalitarian ethos prevented the accumulation of private wealth and property and the development of any significant hierarchy within social groups.

A revolution from this ‘primitive communist’ way of life took place with the domestication of animals and the beginning of farming about 10,000 years ago. This allowed for the production of a permanent surplus product for the first time, and from that – over hundreds or thousands of years – came class divisions between those who had ownership of the surplus, who became the rich, and those who didn’t, who became the poor. Other new features of the more complex, technologically and culturally advanced class society included: wars for land and resources; slavery for exploitation; the state with its armed bodies to protect property; the patriarchal family to pass on privileges to next generations; and popular uprisings of the lower classes, including at times, revolutionary movements. 2

Class-divided society made inequality and injustice systemic, whereas before they were irregular occurrences. Sections of society were now denied the fruits of their collective labour by other sections, who developed institutions and ideological or religious justifications to maintain their powerful positions. These elite minorities made up the ruling classes in pre-capitalist societies: the pharaohs, emperors, kings, sultans, popes, tsars and their relations and ‘noble’ supporters. Beneath these supreme orders, in the societies and economies they ruled over, a class struggle was in constant motion. “An uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”, as Marx and Engels put it, between “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” 3

Marx wasn’t the first to see class division and struggle in human societies, but what he did uncover was the relationship between the class struggle and “the particular, historical phases in the development of production”, 4 which was key to understanding how and why revolutions happen.

Materialist view of history

For Marx, the study of human history and its development, just like the study of natural history, should begin with the question of how humans beings live and reproduce themselves – how they eat, drink and sleep, and stay warm, dry and safe in whatever environment they find themselves in. These basic needs have to be met before any other creative endeavours, like art, science or philosophy, can be pursued. So the starting point for analysing any society is how it organises the production of whatever it needs to exist (the ‘mode of production’), and then, if it can produce more than what is needed to exist, how those additional resources (and indeed the means to produce them, the ‘forces of production’) are used. Or in class society, by whom they are owned and controlled and from whom they are appropriated (the ‘relations of production’).

Reviewing the history of class society, Marx noted that while a general trend of advancement in civilisation was clear, it was not a simple, continuous, unswerving process, but included regression and stagnation as well as progress (in the sense of advances towards a society that, in theory, could produce enough to provide for everyone’s needs), and crucially that the development of the productive capacity of society was the fundamental driver of that progress. He identified three primary modes of production – with various hybrid offshoots also common – these were:

One, the Ancient Mode, in which ‘masters’ literally owned slaves who they exploited in these largely agricultural economies where trade also took place, the type of societies that existed in ancient Greece and Rome for example; Two, the Feudal Mode, a more advanced and widespread agriculture-based economic system, where the main relations were between lords who owned land that was worked for them by serfs who also worked for themselves, the mode of production in most of Europe until the 18th century; and three, the Bourgeois Mode, where industry and trade is dominant and where the main contending classes are capitalists and wage-workers.

Each distinct mode of production had its exploited classes and its ruling classes. And each mode contributed, in its own way and for a definite period, to the evolution of the productive forces. The ruling classes, by establishing the supremacy and expansion of their system for their own selfish interests, also oversaw a break with the old ways of operating. In this sense they played an historically progressive role. But at certain points in time, when the right conditions came together, further technological and scientific breakthroughs were made, opening the way for new, more efficient ways of organising production – but which were inevitably constrained by the existing class relations that were specially suited to a particular (now outmoded) economic and social structure. At this point the progressive character of the ruling class was no more. Marx put it like this:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.” 5

(It’s worth noting how this applies to the capitalist world we live in today. Take just one example, agriculture, where the productive forces actually produce 50% more than what would be needed to feed everyone on the planet, 6 and yet 815 million people went hungry and malnourished in 2016. 7 The reason for this comes back to the relations of production under capitalism, which mean that the profits of the capitalists, and not the needs of the majority in society, are all that matter. In this sense they are clearly a block on so much potential. Only a socialist, democratically planned economy could harness the productive capacity and potential that exists to actually provide for everyone.)

To be sure, the beginning of an ‘epoch of social revolution’ does not necessarily conclude in a revolutionary transition from one mode of production to another. A rising social class has to exist that can move the situation on and challenge the class in power, and even then “the common ruin of the contending classes” is always a possibility. Hence, a mechanical interpretation of Marx’s stress on production as the motor force of history is one-sided and wrong. As he wrote elsewhere, “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights.” The outcome of an epoch of social revolution, therefore, depends on the class struggle.

The role of the Bourgeoisie

What Marx’s materialist conception of history proved is that nothing is fixed, ordained or inevitable. Empires, dynasties and whole social systems that seemed at one time all-powerful and everlasting have in fact disappeared. To invoke Heraclitus, one of Marx’s favourite philosophers, change is the only constant in history. Marx was keen to convey the implications of this for the social system that was predominant in his own time – capitalism. And to that end, his orientation was to the emerging class of wage-labourers, which “of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie” he considered to be the only “really revolutionary class.” 8

What was it that led him to this view? Well Marx was, in the words of his close friend Engels, “before all else a revolutionist.” What made him a revolutionist, from an early age, was an instinctive revulsion at all the injustice in the world, and being the studious type(!), he naturally put his inquisitive mind to work trying to understand that world. Quickly enough he located the root of inequality in class-divided society itself and its modern incarnation, ‘bourgeois’ society, which in the course of its relatively short reign, had shown itself to be incredibly dynamic, and just as brutal. However, Marx and Engels, in their collaborative investigations came to realise that this dynamism is both capitalism’s main strength, and at the same time, its main weakness. They wrote:

“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells… The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions… they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”

Capitalism’s aggressive and unruly ways are the product of acute internal contradictions, which also result in periodic economic crises. But unlike crises in the past which stemmed from scarcity, these crises of competition come as a result of too much being produced, too fast, such that the market is overwhelmed, profits decline and investments dry up. Then the familiar effects of scarcity are felt as human and material waste piles up, while the market tries to adjust itself. As The Communist Manifesto explains:

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”

And then comes the kicker:

“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.” 9

Does Marx’s proletariat still exist?

Famously, Marx and Engels went on to assert that, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.” 10

Before looking at what are the particular characteristics of the working class that make this so, it’s worth dealing briefly with an all-too-common assumption made about Marx and his view of the working class and struggle: specifically that the working class that Marx knew, in the factories of Manchester and London in the mid-19th century, no longer exists and looks nothing like the working class in Manchester and London today, for example; and consequently, that his theories about the role that the working class would or could play, whether they were ever valid, are outdated and not applicable in the modern world.

Of course it’s undeniable that capitalism has gone through many changes in the 150 years since Marx wrote Capital , and naturally the working class has likewise, whether in its size, location or composition. These changes are real, tangible and in some cases significant, and absolutely have to be assimilated by serious Marxists today. But it also has to be said that, had Marx experienced the last 150 years, it’s unlikely he would be terribly surprised that such changes have occurred. In fact, incorporated into his theory of the working class is the expectation that its size, location and composition will continually evolve. After all he wrote, “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority,” 11 at a time when the working class made up only about 2-3% of the world’s population. And the largest section of the proletariat in England when he lived were not burly industrial workers, but domestic servants – predominantly women. His view of the working class was based on much more general considerations than the specific conditions and experiences of any particular sector of workers.

It’s also a fact that the Dickensian conditions faced by workers in Marx’s time are still very much in place in certain regions. For example, corporate exploitation of child labour remains rampant – affecting 168 million children in 2012; whether in the sweatshops of Bangladesh, where they work 11-hour days for the $22 billion garment industry, or in Peru for the $3 billion gold mining industry. 12 And Victorian conditions are commonplace even in high-tech companies like Amazon, where staff work 55-hour weeks and are forced to set up camp in the warehouses because there isn’t enough time between their shifts to travel home. 13

The precariat: a new class?

Precariousness is one feature of the workforce today that has been emphasised by many as a break with the ‘classic’ working class. Economist, Guy Standing, is probably the leading exponent of the new ‘precariat’ who goes so far as to insist that the modern low-paid, insecure, transient worker is part of a new class, or “a new class in the making”, with “distinctive relations of production, relations of distribution and relations to the state” and consequently, separate interests to those in decent-paying, stable employment. He says:

“The precariat [is] not part of the ‘working class’ or the ‘proletariat’. The latter terms suggest a society consisting mostly of workers in long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionisation and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features they were familiar with.” 14

Standing’s view of the proletariat, then, is at odds with the Marxist view, since he has, somewhat arbitrarily, narrowed the definition of the proletariat to exclude a majority of those who sell their labour power to make a living. It seems his definition is influenced by a traditional, cultural view of the working class as it was in the 1950s and 60s in the advanced industrial world, not as it was before then or is in reality today. To the extent that secure, unionised workplaces were prevalent then, it still only represented a certain snapshot in time and even then there existed many precarious workers. Indeed the benefits and rights these workers enjoyed, which many still enjoy, were won through struggle by the equivalent of the ‘precariat’ of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and they have been defended by organised workers ever since.

Precarity has always existed for workers under capitalism; firstly because the contradictions in the system produce periodic crises that can put even ‘stable’ jobs at risk; and secondly because of the existence of a reserve army of labour in the form of the unemployed and underemployed. The hardship faced by the unemployed is counter-posed to the ‘privilege’ of those with jobs. The latter, it’s argued, would be unwise to risk their lot when they can, if necessary, be replaced.

The negative conditions Standing describes, of ‘casualisation, informalisation, agency labour, part-time labour, phoney self-employment and the new mass phenomenon of crowd-labour’ are very real for many workers, especially young people and migrants. The increased precariousness experienced by workers today is a direct result of the neo-liberal policies advanced by right-wing governments the world over and likewise the glaring deficiency of trade union organisation.

Highlighting these issues and focusing on the particular plight of ‘the precariat’ is not in itself a problem. Much needs to be done to grapple with the task of organising these workers. Where it becomes a problem, however, is when a false division is created between sections of workers who do have, regardless of sectional differences, shared interests best summed up in the old labour movement slogan, “an injury to one, is an injury to all.” Standing’s assertion that the ‘old proletariat’ is no longer capable of being revolutionary because it has been bought off by ‘pensions’ and ‘labour rights’ – which are actually under sustained attack by the same neo-liberal forces – is simply false.

Workers of the world today

The truth is that the Marxist definition of the working class, as outlined at the beginning, which includes all those who sell their labour power in order to live and who produce surplus value, encompasses a majority of the planet’s active workforce, which the International Labour Organisation now puts at 3.4 billion people. Within the three main sectors of the economy (services, industry, agriculture), this category breaks down as follows:

• 75 million are employers: big and (mostly) small capitalists who make up roughly 1% of the world’s population, though obviously only a fraction hold the real wealth and power
• 1500 million are classified as vulnerably employed: ‘own account workers’ or self-employed people who don’t employ others. Also included are 400 million unpaid family workers who are related to these self-employed people. This huge group makes up most of the world’s poor.
• 1800 million are workers who earn a wage or salary: 200 million of whom are currently unemployed, many more are under-employed or part-time. Some are paid exorbitant salaries and don’t associate with the rest, but this immense mass can be considered to be the core of the workers of the world. 15

However the working class in its totality also includes retired workers, workers on disability, workers in bogus self-employment (and some other forms of self-employment) and all those also dependent on those paychecks – stay-at-home parents, carers, young people etc. As a class that exists in itself, simply as raw material for exploitation (not conscious of its place in the system or its potential power if organised), it is in fact larger now than it’s ever been and it continues to grow. Urbanisation and industrialisation, particularly in developing countries in the last 30 years or so, has seen the size of the working class increase by more than a third.

This is evidenced by the rapid growth of the world’s urban population. Since 1950 it has more than quintupled from 746 million to 3900 million, now making up 53% of the entire population. 16

Revolutionary character of the working class

The actual or relative size of the working class today is an important thing for socialists to be aware of. Though being a majority, or even just being very big is not what gives the working class its revolutionary character – again something Marx and Engels identified when the working class was still dwarfed by a much larger peasantry. But what the size and the continued growth of the working class today do illustrate is the increasingly powerful position it holds in the dynamics of the capitalist system’s development; something to which no other social force can compare and which is key to breaking down the system and building something new.

Marx explained that capitalism, by its very nature, first makes the working class, and second, makes the working class revolutionary. So what are the special characteristics that bestow on the working class its revolutionary potential? In no particular order, they can be summed up as follows:

1) Capitalism concentrates workers into large towns and cities based around workplaces where the exploitation for surplus value takes place. The organising and collective struggle against this exploitation is likewise concentrated in ways that isn’t possible for peasants who are tied to plots of land spread out across the countryside. More broadly, working-class communities understand that they can resist only by linking with their neighbours who are in the same position. These processes produce a collective class-consciousness, far beyond what most atomized slaves or serfs ever could.

2) The capitalist economic model instills workers with a sense of discipline, cooperation and organisation, in two ways. First, a certain degree of regimentation and teamwork is demanded of workers by management who are tasked with extracting as much labour as possible within the timeframe of the working day. Second, in order to mitigate the worst excesses of this same regimentation and the adverse impact of recurring economic crises, workers have always instinctively moved to form their own organisations – trade unions and then also independent political parties – to safeguard and fight for their economic and political rights.

3) The advancements made by the capitalist system in science and technology means that production and exchange are more complicated arenas, requiring the mass of producers and distributors attain a higher level of basic skills (literacy and numeracy) and knowledge in order for society to function. On top of this, workers have fought for the right to education on a higher level again, for themselves and their families.

4) The world market is based on a global division of labour that connects all workers. Most of the commodities that we use in our everyday lives are the products of labour by not one, but many workers, using diverse skills and from completely different parts of the world. The struggle of the working class is a global one.

5) The liberation of the working class – that is the successful culmination of its political and economic struggle – can only come about by ending the exploitation of its labour under capitalism. As Engels put it: “The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.” 17

6) The working class is the only social force with the power to challenge the rule of the capitalist class. No other class, group or demographic has the necessary weight, cohesion, or organisation to take on the might of the capitalists, and their ideological and physical apparatus (including the surveillance state with its intelligence agencies, police and armies).

Here it’s worth underlining that the above imbue the working class with revolutionary potential only, as it goes without saying the working class is far from being in a revolutionary state at all times. Capitalism has also built up its defences to stave off any threats to its rule. At base is the state apparatus itself (the armed bodies of people, just mentioned), but its more sophisticated defence is the ideological hold it maintains through the prevailing morality, culture and social practices which accept the legitimacy of its rule (not to mention its control of the mass media, education etc.). As Leon Trotsky put it once, “He who owns surplus-product is master of the situation – owns wealth, owns the state, has the key to the church, to the courts, to the sciences and to the arts.” 18 It also consciously stokes and exploits divisions among the workers and oppressed peoples, to weaken its natural opponents.

All of which produces unevenness in the consciousness – the moods, attitudes and awareness – of the working class, which counteracts its unity, confidence and revolutionary power.

Of course the working class is also not a homogeneous mass. Since its very emergence there have always been different layers of the working class, most obviously skilled and unskilled. Its evolution involves absorbing sections of the middle class on the one hand and the urban and rural poor on the other. Its mass character means that it is animated by multiple genders, nationalities, religions, ethnicities and sexual orientations; all of which leads naturally to many shades of political opinion, identity etc. But this diverse, lively and colourful working class is organically united by a common exploitation by a common enemy, which it can only challenge through unity and solidarity in a common struggle.

If it can achieve this, in the right conditions and with the necessary organisation and leadership, then it can make a revolution – the very experience of which is the key to the socialist transformation of society. Wrote Marx and Engels:

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” 19

The struggle ahead

In truth, the validity of Marx’s theory of class struggle has been borne out by the history of the working-class movement. Under capitalism the class struggle has intensified. The 20th century saw far more revolutionary movements than any other, including the first successful socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 (a revolution that was later betrayed, but nevertheless happened). The 21st century has already experienced a profound crisis for the capitalist system, and indeed has seen its fair share of significant mass mobilisations of workers, poor and young people around the world. These movements resemble movements of the past in many ways, but in many other ways are completely novel, which brings with it new challenges for Marxists.

Today we are seeing significant and militant strike action by teachers in the US and lecturers in Britain, reflecting a widespread process of ‘proletarianisation’ in which professions that were once considered to be in some way privileged, have been ground down by neo-liberal assaults on conditions and forced to organise. Strikes by teachers and lecturers would have been unheard-of in Marx’s day, as would the ‘feminist strike’ of five million workers in Spain on International Women’s Day in 2018, which followed the example of women in Poland defending abortion rights in 2016. These examples, and many more just like them around the globe, show that the working-class methods and traditions of organisation and struggle will redevelop, in new forms and on a higher level, as working-class people clash with the same unequal, violent, oppressive system that led them to struggle in the first place.

Nothing is surer than that the greatest (and most trying) events in the history of the class struggle lay ahead of us, not behind. But it’s worth remembering that the aim of the socialist movement for Marx and Engels was to engage in the class struggle on the side of and as part of the proletariat, which they sought to make “conscious of the conditions of its emancipation” – to finally bring the class struggle to an end by sweeping away “the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally… [and] In place of the old bourgeois society… we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” 20

This is the socialist world the workers have to win.

1. For a clear exposition of this theory see Karl Marx, 1865, Value Price & Profit

2. See Friedrich Engels, 1884, The Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State

3. Marx & Engels, 1848, Manifesto of the Communist Party

4. Marx to J. Weydemeyer in New York, 1852

5. Karl Marx, 1859, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , Preface

6. Eric Holt Gimenez, 18 December 2014, “We Already Grow Enough Food For 10 Billion People”, Huffpost

7. United Nations, 2017 – The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) Report

8. Marx & Engels, 1848

12. Ashley Tseng, 26 June 2014, “Child Labour: A Global Scourge”, www.wsws.org

13. Monika Janas, January 2018, “Understanding Wealth Inequality”, The Socialist , Issue 113

14. Guy Standing, 2011, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class , Bloomsbury Academic, p.6

15. International Labour Organisation, Global Employment Trends 2014: supporting data sets, www.ilo.org

16. United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision

17. Engels, 1847, Principles of Communism

18. Leon Trotsky, 1939, Marxism in Our Time

19. Marx & Engels, 1846, The German Ideology

20. Marx & Engels, 1848

• All Marx’s writings listed above can be found online at: www.marxists.org

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How to Write the “Overcoming Challenges” Essay + Examples

What’s covered:.

• What is the Overcoming Challenges Essay?
• Real Overcoming Challenges Essay Prompts
• How to Choose a Topic
• Writing Tips

Overcoming Challenges Essay Examples

• Where to Get Your Essay Edited

While any college essay can be intimidating, the Overcoming Challenges prompt often worries students the most. Those students who’ve been lucky enough not to experience trauma tend to assume they have nothing worth saying. On the other hand, students who’ve overcome larger obstacles may be hesitant to talk about them.

Regardless of your particular circumstances, there are steps you can take to make the essay writing process simpler. Here are our top tips for writing the overcoming challenges essay successfully.

What is the “Overcoming Challenges” Essay?

The overcoming challenges prompt shows up frequently in both main application essays (like the Common App) and supplemental essays. Because supplemental essays allow students to provide schools with additional information, applicants should be sure that the subject matter they choose to write about differs from what’s in their main essay.

Students often assume the overcoming challenges essay requires them to detail past traumas. While you can certainly write about an experience that’s had a profound effect on your life, it’s important to remember that colleges aren’t evaluating students based on the seriousness of the obstacle they overcame.

On the contrary, the goal of this essay is to show admissions officers that you have the intelligence and fortitude to handle any challenges that come your way. After all, college serves as an introduction to adult life, and schools want to know that the students they admit are up to the task. 

Real “Overcoming Challenges” Essay Prompts

To help you understand what the “Overcoming Challenges” essay looks like, here are a couple sample prompts.

Currently, the Common Application asks students to answer the following prompt in 650 words or less:

“The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”

For the past several years, MIT has prompted students to write 200 to 250 words on the following:

“Tell us about the most significant challenge you’ve faced or something important that didn’t go according to plan. How did you manage the situation?”

In both cases, the prompts explicitly ask for your response to the challenge. The event itself isn’t as important as how it pushed you to grow.

How to Choose a Topic for an Essay on Overcoming Challenges

When it comes to finding the best topic for your overcoming challenges essays, there’s no right answer. The word “challenge” is ambiguous and could be used to reference a wide range of situations from prevailing over a bully to getting over your lifelong stage fright to appear in a school musical. Here are some suggestions to keep in mind when selecting an essay subject.

1. Avoid trivial or common topics

While there aren’t many hard-and-fast rules for choosing an essay topic, students should avoid overdone topics.

These include:

• Working hard in a challenging class
• Overcoming a sports injury
• Moving schools or immigrating to the US
• Tragedy (divorce, death, abuse)

Admissions officers have read numerous essays on the subject, so it’s harder for you to stand out (see our full list of cliché college essay topics to avoid ). If events like these were truly formative to you, you can still choose to write about them, but you’ll need to be as personal as possible. 

It’s also ideal if you have a less traditional storyline for a cliché topic; for example, if your sports injury led you to discover a new passion, that would be a more unique story than detailing how you overcame your injury and got back in the game.

Similarly, students may not want to write about an obstacle that admissions committees could perceive as low stakes, such as getting a B on a test, or getting into a small fight with a friend. The goal of this essay is to illustrate how you respond to adversity, so the topic you pick should’ve been at least impactful on your personal growth.

2. Pick challenges that demonstrate qualities you want to highlight

Students often mistakenly assume they need to have experienced exceptional circumstances like poverty, an abusive parent, or cancer to write a good essay. The truth is that the best topics will allow you to highlight specific personal qualities and share more about who you are. The essay should be less about the challenge itself, and more about how you responded to it.

Ask yourself what personality traits you want to emphasize, and see what’s missing in your application. Maybe you want to highlight your adaptability, for example, but that isn’t clearly expressed in your application. In this case, you might write about a challenge that put your adaptability to the test, or shaped you to become more adaptable.

Here are some examples of good topics we’ve seen over the years:

• Not having a coach for a sports team and becoming one yourself
• Helping a parent through a serious health issue
• Trying to get the school track dedicated to a coach
• Having to switch your Model UN position last-minute

Tips for Writing an Essay About Overcoming Challenges

Once you’ve selected a topic for your essays, it’s time to sit down and write. For best results, make sure your essay focuses on your efforts to tackle an obstacle rather than the problem itself. Additionally, you could avoid essay writing pitfalls by doing the following:

1. Choose an original essay structure

If you want your overcoming challenges essay to attract attention, aim to break away from more traditional structures. Most of these essays start by describing an unsuccessful attempt at a goal and then explain the steps the writer took to master the challenge. 

You can stand out by choosing a challenge you’re still working on overcoming, or focus on a mental or emotional challenge that spans multiple activities or events. For example, you might discuss your fear of public speaking and how that impacted your ability to coach your brother’s Little League team and run for Student Council. 

You can also choose a challenge that can be narrated in the moment, such as being put on the spot to teach a yoga class. These challenges can make particularly engaging essays, as you get to experience the writer’s thoughts and emotions as they unfold.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to have succeeded in your goal for this essay. Maybe you ran for an election and lost, or maybe you proposed a measure to the school board that wasn’t passed. It’s still possible to write a strong essay about topics like these as long as you focus on your personal growth. In fact, these may make for even stronger essays since they are more unconventional topics.

2. Focus on the internal

When writing about past experiences, you may be tempted to spend too much time describing specific people and events. With an Overcoming Challenges essay though, the goal is to focus on your thoughts and feelings.

For example, rather than detail all the steps you took to become a better public speaker, use the majority of your essay to describe your mental state as you embarked on the journey to achieving your goals. Were you excited, scared, anxious, or hopeful? Don’t be afraid to let the reader in on your innermost emotions and thoughts during this process.

3. Share what you learned 

An Overcoming Challenges essay should leave the reader with a clear understanding of what you learned on your journey, be it physical, mental, or emotional. There’s no need to explicitly say “this experience taught me X,” but your essay should at least implicitly share any lessons you learned. This can be done through your actions and in-the-moment reflections. Remember that the goal is to show admissions committees why your experiences make you a great candidate for admission. 

Was I no longer the beloved daughter of nature, whisperer of trees? Knee-high rubber boots, camouflage, bug spray—I wore the g arb and perfume of a proud wild woman, yet there I was, hunched over the pathetic pile of stubborn sticks, utterly stumped, on the verge of tears. As a child, I had considered myself a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free. I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms. Yet here I was, ten years later, incapable of performing the most fundamental outdoor task: I could not, for the life of me, start a fire. 

Furiously I rubbed the twigs together—rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers. No smoke. The twigs were too young, too sticky-green; I tossed them away with a shower of curses, and began tearing through the underbrush in search of a more flammable collection. My efforts were fruitless. Livid, I bit a rejected twig, determined to prove that the forest had spurned me, offering only young, wet bones that would never burn. But the wood cracked like carrots between my teeth—old, brittle, and bitter. Roaring and nursing my aching palms, I retreated to the tent, where I sulked and awaited the jeers of my family. 

Rattling their empty worm cans and reeking of fat fish, my brother and cousins swaggered into the campsite. Immediately, they noticed the minor stick massacre by the fire pit and called to me, their deep voices already sharp with contempt. 

“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having some trouble?” They prodded me with the ends of the chewed branches and, with a few effortless scrapes of wood on rock, sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame. 

In the tent, I pondered my failure. Was I so dainty? Was I that incapable? I thought of my hands, how calloused and capable they had been, how tender and smooth they had become. It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive. And I’d gotten glasses, having grown horrifically nearsighted; long nights of dim lighting and thick books had done this. I couldn’t remember the last time I had lain down on a hill, barefaced, and seen the stars without having to squint. Crawling along the edge of the tent, a spider confirmed my transformation—he disgusted me, and I felt an overwhelming urge to squash him. 

Yet, I realized I hadn’t really changed—I had only shifted perspective. I still eagerly explored new worlds, but through poems and prose rather than pastures and puddles. I’d grown to prefer the boom of a bass over that of a bullfrog, learned to coax a different kind of fire from wood, having developed a burn for writing rhymes and scrawling hypotheses. 

That night, I stayed up late with my journal and wrote about the spider I had decided not to kill. I had tolerated him just barely, only shrieking when he jumped—it helped to watch him decorate the corners of the tent with his delicate webs, knowing that he couldn’t start fires, either. When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.

This essay is an excellent example because the writer turns an everyday challenge—starting a fire—into an exploration of her identity. The writer was once “a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes,” but has since traded her love of the outdoors for a love of music, writing, and reading. 

The story begins in media res , or in the middle of the action, allowing readers to feel as if we’re there with the writer. One of the essay’s biggest strengths is its use of imagery. We can easily visualize the writer’s childhood and the present day. For instance, she states that she “rubbed and rubbed [the twigs] until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers.”

The writing has an extremely literary quality, particularly with its wordplay. The writer reappropriates words and meanings, and even appeals to the senses: “My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame.” She later uses a parallelism to cleverly juxtapose her changed interests: “instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano.”

One of the essay’s main areas of improvement is its overemphasis on the “story” and lack of emphasis on the reflection. The second to last paragraph about changing perspective is crucial to the essay, as it ties the anecdote to larger lessons in the writer’s life. She states that she hasn’t changed, but has only shifted perspective. Yet, we don’t get a good sense of where this realization comes from and how it impacts her life going forward. 

The end of the essay offers a satisfying return to the fire imagery, and highlights the writer’s passion—the one thing that has remained constant in her life.

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

While the writer didn’t succeed in getting the track dedicated to Coach Stark, their essay is certainly successful in showing their willingness to push themselves and take initiative.

The essay opens with a quote from Coach Stark that later comes full circle at the end of the essay. We learn about Stark’s impact and the motivation for trying to get the track dedicated to him.

One of the biggest areas of improvement in the intro, however, is how the essay tells us Stark’s impact rather than showing us: His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

The writer could’ve helped us feel a stronger emotional connection to Stark if they had included examples of Stark’s qualities, rather than explicitly stating them. For example, they could’ve written something like: Stark was the kind of person who would give you gas money if you told him your parents couldn’t afford to pick you up from practice. And he actually did that—several times. At track meets, alumni regularly would come talk to him and tell him how he’d changed their lives. Before Stark, I was ambivalent about running and was on the JV team, but his encouragement motivated me to run longer and harder and eventually make varsity. Because of him, I approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

The essay goes on to explain how the writer overcame their apprehension of public speaking, and likens the process of submitting an appeal to the school board to running a race. This metaphor makes the writing more engaging and allows us to feel the student’s emotions.

While the student didn’t ultimately succeed in getting the track dedicated, we learn about their resilience and initiative: I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Overall, this essay is well-done. It demonstrates growth despite failing to meet a goal, which is a unique essay structure. The running metaphor and full-circle intro/ending also elevate the writing in this essay.

Where to Get Your Overcoming Challenges Essay Edited

The Overcoming Challenges essay is one of the trickier supplemental prompts, so it’s important to get feedback on your drafts. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

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Karl Marx's Theory of Class Struggle with Criticism

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Lise ABITONA

IORKONGOSO LUPER

Abstract The political thought of Karl Marx is aimed to liberate workers all over the world and achieve an egalitarian society in which they (workers) will live in true freedom and enjoy ‘real value’ of their labour. He calls this type of society ‘communist society’. In this study, we examine within the purview of the Marxian theory (as a theoretical framework) how Marx hopes to achieve such a society. His life sketch is presented as a precursor to his intellectual enterprise. Themes such as dialectical materialism, materialistic interpretation of history, the theory of surplus value, the theory of class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, classless and stateless society, analysis of capitalism, and nature of communist society have been examined maximally. Dissecting from those purveyors, the study gives an evaluation of Marxist political thought. Marx overstates his case of ‘economic determinism’ however; he brings into political theory a new way of apprehending society which is based on class struggle. Or, Marx offers two set of ideas; first, a comprehensive theory of society to enable us to understand the problems of our society today and, second, which deciphers Marxist philosophy into practical political goals and action, offers us violent revolution as the most decisive way-out of the evils of capitalism in order to step into the ‘communist paradise’ i.e. classless/stateless society. The first of these we can accept, without accepting the second.

Manjunath R

Karl Marx (born May 5, 1818, Trier, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany] — died March 14, 1883, London, England) was a Jewish philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. He published The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, anticapitalist works that form the basis of Marxism.

Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post Marxism

Lucia Pradella

Did Marx develop a critique of capitalism as a global system? And does he provide us with tools for opposing imperialism, racism and gender oppression today? It has become commonplace to portray Marx as a Eurocentric thinker whose critique of political economy never transcended the boundaries of production on a national scale. In reality, Marx’s focus on production relations does not mean that he underestimated processes located outside the immediate process of production but rather attempted to grasp the links between different spheres within the process of total reproduction of capital. Marx’s analysis of capital reproduction in Capital further developed his initial insights on the materialistic conception of history by examining the process of capital accumulation as an inherently international process, deeply gendered and racialized. Marx’s critical analysis of exploitation shows the contradictions inherent in the development of productive forces within capitalism, thus disclosing the new spaces of resistance emerging within the system. Expropriation and state violence not only continue after the initial process of “primitive accumulation” alongside exploitation, they are also deeply shaped by it. The antagonism between wage labor and capital is a global, gendered antagonism in which struggles over wages, working conditions and the duration of the working day are organically linked to struggles over dispossession, social reproduction, ecology, imperialism and racism. Marx increasingly recognized the centrality of anti-racism and anti-imperialism for building the First International, and came to appreciate the importance of women and demands for gender equality and for the socialization of reproductive activities in the program of the communist movement. He sought to show to the global working class created by capital accumulation, torn apart by competition and divisions, that there is a deeper dynamic that brings them together, allowing them to re-appropriate their own collective power. Marx’s Capital thus provides us not only the most lucid analysis of the workings of the capitalist mode of production, but discloses the potential for a free society growing amid the misery of the present.

Finn Olesen

Throughout all his life Karl Marx wrote angrily about capitalism. By use of a dialectic approach he was convinced that the working class had to unite and make a social revolution and thereby free them selves from exploitation. Marx himself was in many ways a dialectic person as we try to show in the note. So in some sense he became one with his scientific methodology.

Anders Ramsay

JOHN MOHAN RAZU

Only a few in the history of the world are remembered for hundreds and hundreds of years. In that Karl Marx undoubtedly figures as one among them, because Karl Marx inspired and continues to inspire generations after generations. Marx is known for unflinching commitment to theoretical rigor, philosophical ideals and total commitment to the laboring class and above all his unflinching belief with the working class as the vanguard of history and change agents. Karl Marx was born on the 5 th of May, 1818, @ Trier in Germany and died on the 14 th March, 1883. As a mark of his life, ideas and contributions, the world has celebrated 200 th birth anniversary and shall continue to celebrate many more centenaries. His ideas, theories and philosophy illumine and continue to shed new light and therefore will be remembered and eulogized. Karl Marx—is undoubtedly a renowned and acknowledged philosopher, economist, historian, political scientist, sociologist, journalist and a revolutionary socialist of par excellence. For me, on par with him only one person can be compared who is none other than B.R. Ambedkar. Both of them in their ways converge as well diverge. Their contributions are distinct, unique and ground breaking. Karl Marx, a composite, organic intellectual and a devoted theoretician beautifully weaved all areas of disciplines to present his ideas with coherence and continuum. This is why, even now, his ideas and theories continue to shed more light in the affairs of human existence in varied societal milieus. He viewed and analyzed the world and offered remedies. His theoretical formulations, societal analysis, how the world was functioning posit integrated method and thus show brilliant answers and findings. Some of the concepts, theories and analyses merit mentioning: His seminal work on Das Kapital also known as capital, critique of political economy (1867-1883), in three parts is a theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics, and politics. Marx was intensely preoccupied in analyzing the economic patterns that underpins capitalist mode of production as against the understanding of the classical economists such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others. Das capital is the most used book in the entire gamut of social sciences. Marx " s tools even now are used for societal analysis. Amongst many contributions a few concepts and theories and the ways with which Karl Marx scientifically analyzed and put forth the arguments by taking clear positions that opposed conventional and classical positions have been noteworthy. For instance, Marx picks on capital the central to his research and discourse and others such as modes and relations of production. Capital being the pivotal, he observed that for capital to grow and to add value should move from one place to another and therefore for Karl Marx capital thus becomes centric. Flight of capital takes place wherever and however it can be multiplied accruing limitless surplus thereby leading to maximization of profits. Capital according to Karl Marx is the key for the capitalists who by

Karl Marx 1818-1883: Before all else a revolutionary

David Yaffe

On the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx on 5 May 1818, we will no doubt see many reflections on the relevance and legacy of his work. Some will claim serious scholarship, others, like a recent Financial Times skit on the Communist Manifesto (‘Life and Arts’, 10 March 2018), will pour scorn on his work. In the imperialist countries it has become the norm to concede that Marx made an important contribution to economic thought but to deny the Marx who would destroy the capitalist system. It is our hope that at least some of these bicentenary contributions will have the political courage not to separate Marx the revolutionary from Marx the social and economic critic of capitalism. At the end of the 20th century, in the year 2000, many commentators and historians reflected on the previous 100 years or so. Francis Wheen, journalist, reviewer and general pundit, chose as his object of reflection, the life and opinions of Karl Marx. This won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1999 and has been translated into 20 languages. There have been other English-language Marx biographies since then, but Wheen is an influential public figure; a rebel against his army family who ran away from Harrow School at the age of 16. In recent years he was to be heard regularly on the Radio 4 panel show, the News Quiz. As a former columnist at The Guardian, a contributor to the London Evening Standard and Private Eye, his views represent those of a middle-class stratum which accepts that Marx’s critique of the capitalist system has a certain validity but fears its revolutionary implications. In this issue of FRFI, we reprint David Yaffe’s review of Wheen’s Karl Marx from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 152, December 1999/January 2000, which shows the unity of Marx’s devastating critique of capitalism with Marx the revolutionary fighter.

Marcello Musto

The return to Marx following the economic crisis of 2008 has been distinct from the renewed interest in his critique of economics. Many authors, in a whole series of newspapers, journals, books, and academic volumes, have observed how indispensable Marx's analysis has proved to be for an understanding of the contradictions and destructive mechanisms of capitalism. In the last few years, however, there has also been a reconsideration of Marx as a political figure and theorist. The publication of previously unknown manuscripts in the German MEGA 2 edition, along with innovative interpretations of his work, have opened up new research horizons and demonstrated more clearly than in the past his capacity to examine the contradictions of capitalist society on a global scale and in spheres beyond the conflict between capital and labour.

Kayreen T . H . Stephenson

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The Marxist Theory on Class Struggle: The History of Human Relations has been one of Class Struggle Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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Historical Materialism

The communist manifesto: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, dialectic: hegel’s romantic thought, continuing class struggle.

A continuous struggle is going on in the world of Karl Marx, for as long as there is an exploiter and an exploited. Karl Marx lived and struggled all his life for the emancipation of the working man who was reduced to a common serf. There is continuing class struggle as people with the same interests form a class to fight for their freedom.

Class struggles exist in any given society when its production powers are falling. This is what happened to the cities of Europe during Marx and Engel’s time. By contrast, primitive societies have no class because their labour tends to be similar and all members of society work hard for their daily subsistence. Unlike in a class society where there is difference between labour and capital; one has to work while the other produces the capital. Here, class struggle is evident. (Wood 2004, p. 97)

Commentators and Marxist critics do not have only one interpretation of the term class struggle. Many would say that it is about material struggle of the classes in society. Others would say that it is used as a metaphor. In the true sense, it is economic in nature. But it is material because it is a struggle for the material means that members of society desperately need. The social order depends upon the results of class struggle, or there cannot be order if class struggle causes social upheaval or conflict or chaos.

In the Marxist philosophy, class struggle means battle of opposing classes. There have been class divisions in society based on the relation of individuals to property and means of production. Because of these class struggles, changes are inevitable. (Chatterjee 2010, p. 24)

Marx believed that world history has been characterized by class struggle. Class struggles are the result of economic development or of society’s forces of production. Tools, technologies and industries are the driving forces in history’s class struggles. These forces can change human relations. (Lowi and Harpham 1997, p. 255)

What are classes? Classes are ‘economic groupings’ in society that depends on their relation to the production process. The moneyed class or the capitalists, those who own the means of production are grouped into one class, while the labourers and the proletariat belong to another; they are also known as the exploiting and the exploited classes (Erckel 2008, p. 6).

Marx’s concept of class is first based with objectively defined interests which are the results of exploitation and oppression in production: the capitalists or the moneyed class dominating the labourers or the have-nots. To talk of it objectively, people have an interest not to be exploited or oppressed, or under control by others.

And this kind of domination can only be countered by collective action. Individual welfare can be realized by upward social mobility at least by some people but not by many people. It forms a class. Class interests motivate people into forming organized interest groups. Marx’s concept of class is not definite although he clearly defined the terms proletariat and bourgeoisie. (Elster 1986, p. 123)

In understanding human societies, Marx considered the economic conditions and how people acted in answering the necessities of life. Stratification is the result of the power struggles due to scarce food or materials. (Tischler 2007, p. 208) Likewise, in understanding societies, Marx also examined how production was organized, which depended on the forces of production, like raw materials and technology, and who took control of production. (Gasper 2005, p. 24)

Moreover, class divisions always exist in a society at any given time. The state was created by capitalists, the owning class, to defend their interests and to oppress the labourers of production, by means of a legal tool, the police. In the Marxist view, therefore, the state was created to serve the interests of the ruling class which is the minority. (Chatterjee 2010, p. 24)

Members of a class are in a similar economic situation and a class is formed because of the members’ ‘economic determinism’, or the members have the will to advance economically. (Erckel 2008, p. 5)

Marx’s concept of history is unique; unique in the sense that he has a pattern for it, although he disregarded progress when talking of history. He would talk of material history. In his writing, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx defined human beings as producers.

Human production is composed of material and social. Men and women met their needs by transforming nature. They organized and needed tools in the process. In production, people cooperate with each other. Through this process, they form the forces of production and the social aspect which is the relation of production. (Callinicos 2011, p. 92)

Marx and Engels formulated the materialist concept of history. Historical materialism states some bold theses about factors of historical change. According to this theory, social development is triggered by progress when social needs are met because of the presence of productive forces, which are the means of production and labour power).

In this process of production, the workforce composed of men and women, enter into social relations. This economic relation is called the economic structure of society, and the economic base is called the mode of production.

This mode of production undergoes change because of internal tensions and contradictions, termed by Hegel as dialectic. The productive forces come into conflict with the rest of the forces of production. The result is a class struggle. It also creates a social revolution. (Derek et al. 2011, p. 1072)

In The Communist Manifesto , Marx and Engels divided humanity into two social classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The book is a history of how classes struggled and survived. (Marx and Engels 1994, p. 157)

The Communist Manifesto sets the tone that we are living in a class society. History states that this is so. The classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, were hostile to each other. They are related in the sense that one cannot exist without the other: the labourer works for his existence, the capitalist provides the food, but the labourers must work for the capitalist. But their historical relation is that of a class struggle.

By this background, Marx sets the real intention of the Communist Manifesto , that the only way that the proletariat could be saved from poverty, slavery, exploitation and oppression, is to overthrow capitalism, abolish clash society, eliminate the state and establish a communist order through the formation of a communal ownership wherein there is no more class.

The proletarian revolution was what Marx was aspiring for. It would be the end of capitalism and there would be a new world order where private property does not exist. (Rühle, Paul, and Paul 2005, p. 131)

By 1848, Marx publicly announced that they had no country. At a time when Europe was being ruled by kings and nobles, and in the United States there were millions of slaves, Marx had in mind that the bourgeoisie was taking over; taking over because the capitalists will fall by the continuing mass actions of the united working class.

Bourgeoisie originally meant people living in urban cities. In short, Marx called the members of this class ‘the owners of means of capitalist production’ (Randall 1964, p. 25). They are the professionals and owners of small businesses, what we call now entrepreneurs. During those times, small businessmen were capitalists who could oppress people in their own way.

The Communist Manifesto pictured Europe as being in the midst of a social and political upheaval between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This social upheaval was marred by strikes and lockouts, sabotage and bankruptcies, problems in businesses, trade unionism, the ‘class consciousness’ of the proletariat, and so on.

The Romantics of the time would announce that progress was brought about by conflicts of opposing views. It was inevitable because by that development would be brought, although the word development was not yet known at that time.

Marx thought that what was happening in Europe at the height of the industrial revolution was only a chapter of the universal history. Marx followed Hegel’s Romantic teaching that the struggle was a ‘continuous evolutionary sequence’ of events between opposing classes and that the struggle would produce something higher.

The process of struggle and evolution was termed by Hegel as ‘dialectic’ and it included absolutely everything about God and man (Randall 1964, p. 27). Because of the contradictions of partial truths, which are termed thesis and antithesis, a higher truth (synthesis) can be reached (Erckel 2008, p. 5).

Marx expounds his concept of historic materialism through economic determinism, but this is contradicted by Wilfredo Pareto (as cited in Erckel 2008, p. 5) who argued that there are factors in pursuing a common interest, and these, aside from economic determinism, should not be disregarded.

Marx’s division of social classes pointed only to the workingmen and the middle class, but in contemporary time, we have the upper, middle and lower classes. Although this division is influenced by economic factors, there are other reasons such as education or profession. (Erckel 2008, p. 5)

Hegel’s philosophy included God and spirit in the concept of dialectic. But Marx did not believe in God and spirit, thus he focused on the material things and the material world, the earthly, visible, and tangible. Communism focused on material things; it proposed that private property should not be practiced in society.

The bourgeoisie was worried about losing their property. But why should they be? asked Marx. They stole those properties from the hands of the proletariat, the farmers and labourers. It is they, the bourgeoisie, who oppressed the proletariat and reduced them to the level of a commodity. (Marx, Engels, Tucker 1972, p. 56)

The proletariat should struggle so that in the final countdown, it becomes the most powerful. That is the concept of Hegel’s dialectic, without God and spirit. Hegel’s dialectic is Marx’s scientific way of contemplating the world. (Boudin 2008, p. 20)

According to Marx, the bourgeoisie cry out that the communists want to abolish the people’s freedom when it fact they are the ones who have enslaved the majority in factories and industries? The bourgeoisie cry out that communism wants to abolish the state, culture, religion and belief in God, and even the family, but it is they who have deprived the workers of a state, culture, a true religion and a decent family because of their oppressive character against the workers.

The bourgeoisie has objectified the worker or made him into an object, a commodity, in fact, he is lower than an object. The worker is not concerned of money and profits; he is after his and his family’s survival. He is after food for him and his family. The capitalist member of the bourgeoisie is concerned of profits and more profits. More good and products have to be produced to create more profits; the labourer must work double time. The products and commodities are more important than the workingman.

At the height of the industrialization, labourers were dying in factories. Workers received no benefits and health programs for themselves and their families, and they received very low wages. The workplace was like a dungeon – no safety measures, no ventilation, etc. In the process of class struggle, the proletariat is reduced to an animal, like a horse. Human labour is like animal labour. Man is paid only for the work he has done. He has to eat in order to work again the next day. Man’s humanity is lost. He is now like an animal.

When Marx announced that they had no country, he was expecting a reaction from the motivated working class, the working class and the members of the unionized group. But Marx and Engels over reacted in staging a revolutionary atmosphere for The Communist Manifesto . There was no reaction in the cities.

A Marxian revolution is the result of class struggle, when the oppressed overthrows the oppressor, the capitalists of his time. Karl Marx conceived of political emancipation for the working man whom he said was not yet called human being.

He said a major step ahead is political emancipation wherein the class struggle will move forward, but it is not yet human emancipation. Real human emancipation will be conceived when the alienating and oppressive nature of capitalism are gone and class oppression is no longer possible, and the ‘bourgeois property’ has been eliminated. (Parla and Davison 2004, p. 95)

Marx, Engels and Lenin conceived that a revolution of the working class, after a long history of class struggle, would finally be realized after the global spread of capitalism. Marx was waiting for this, a real revolution of the working class not of the middle class Europe. The spread of capitalism would intensify the horrible and piteous conditions of the majority of human beings. But it did not.

Technology prospered. Information revolution and globalisation spread like wildfire. Capitalism is like a virus that spreads with considerable speed to the four corners of the world. The capitalist soared to the skies with his vast wealth. The ordinary labourer today remains exploited. Karl Marx is long gone and his class struggle continues, for how long, nobody knows.

Boudin, L 2008, The theoretical system of Karl Marx , Wildside Press LLC, London.

Callinicos, A 2011, The revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx , Haymarket Books, London.

Chatterjee, A 2010, International relations today: concepts and applications , Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi.

Derek, G, Johnston, R, Pratt, G, Wtts, M, & Watmore, S. 2011. The dictionary of human geography , John Wiley & Sons, USA.

Elster, J 1986, An introduction to Karl Marx , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Erckel, S 2008, Marxist and neo-Marxist theories of class , GRIN Verlag, Nordestedt, Germany.

Gasper, P 2005, The communist manifesto: a road map to history’s most important and political document, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels , Haymarker Books, Chicago.

Lowi, T and Harpham, E 1997, “Political theory and public policy: Marx, Weber, and a republic theory of the state”, in K Monroe (ed.), Contemporary empirical political theory , University of California Press, London.

Marx, K and Engels, F 1994, “The communist manifesto”, in L Simon (ed.), Karl Marx, selected writings, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis.

Marx, K, Engels, F, and Tucker, R 1972, The Marx-Engels reader , University of Michigan, Michigan.

Parla, T and Davison, A 2004, Corporatist ideology in Kemalist Turkey: progress or order? Syracuse University Press, New York.

Randall, F 1964, “Introduction”, in J Katz (ed.), The communist manifesto: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , Pocket Books, London.

Rühle, O, Paul, E and Paul, C 2005, Karl Marx: his life and w ork, Kessinger Publishing, United States of America.

Tischler, H 2007, Introduction to sociology, Thomson Learning Inc., California.

Wood, A 2004, Karl Marx (second edition), Routledge, London.

• The Book "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" by Kojève
• Hegel and Marx on Civil Society and Human Freedom
• Hegelian Dialectics
• Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
• Carl Hempel on Theories That Explain or Predict Evidence
• A Critique of Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants
• Hobbes’ School of Thought
• Bernard Russell's Philosophical Legacy
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Bibliography

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A revolutionary socialist organizing project

Social movements are how classes struggle

by Colin Barker

The following article consists of excerpts from Colin Barker’s 2007 draft article, “Class Struggle, Movement, Party”, the full text of which can be found here . In the excerpts that follow, Barker offers crucial insights into the relationship between classes, movements, and organization. Most provocatively, while affirming the centrality of class struggle, he argues that “it is movements rather than classes that prove to be the direct collective actors that possess the capacity to change the world.” Although this argument may sound novel, Barker shows how it was a basic assumption informing the thinking of such revolutionaries as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, and Antonio Gramsci. The dynamics of social movements were a central theme in Barker’s writing throughout his life, always approached with an unparalleled curiosity and creativity.

All of Barker’s writings are animated by a fundamental faith in ordinary people to think and act for themselves, not to serve as pawns or props in the grand strategies of parliamentarians or states. As Barker points out, “the process of mobilization into movements is one of self-activation, of active engagement.” That self-activity or self-emancipation of working people has been the core of the politics of socialism from below since Marx’s time. To recognize the central importance of social movements to class struggle is not, however, to fetishize spontaneity. Movements are “always and everywhere riven by inner contradictions and arguments,” Barker argues, and the working class “will never unify itself spontaneously.” Organization is required precisely to influence the direction of these movements toward greater self-reliance and expansion in moments of upheaval when it counts.

The argument presented in these excerpts is expanded upon in many of Barker’s other writings, but especially in his chapter of the recently published Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age (2021).

This article originally appeared on Colin Barker’s website .

– Sean Larson, for Tempest

Class Struggle as a Concept

I n Marx’s usage, the term “abstract” most decidedly does not mean “unreal”: value and surplus-value define the most fundamental relationships of the whole of capitalist society, permeating every aspect of life. They determine the boundaries of what is possible within the society, determining its other shapes and forms.

I want to suggest that Marx’s concept of “class struggle” is that kind of abstract concept. Class struggle, in Marx’s meaning, also permeates every aspect of life and determines—in the sense of “setting limits to”—the whole of political and social life. It is, however, at the same time an “abstract” or general concept, and if [we] want to study its actual forms of appearance we need to deploy a whole range of other, more concrete, concepts, at the same time never forgetting how these are shaped in their actual functioning by the underlying processes of class struggle.

What I suggest is that “class struggle” is an “abstract concept” in the above sense. We cannot understand the way capitalist societies work without constant awareness of class struggle as a general process that underlies and shapes everything. Nor is it imaginable that, without class struggle, there can be any possibility of future social transformation. However, class struggle always appears in “mediated” forms. Classes, as social wholes, do not directly appear as political entities with formed wills and purposes, acting as homogeneous subjects. Nor should we assume that they ever will. Rather, actual class struggles never involve all workers equally, even at the very peak of mass revolutionary battles, and it is exactly for this reason that such struggles always pose vital questions about strategy and tactics. Nor, indeed, do actual movements ever involve simply members of “one class.” Further, the issues that arise in social struggles are not, mostly, capable of being simply “reduced” to “class issues” without taking account of a whole series of additional mediations.

The Sphere of Politics and Culture

There are all manner of terms that might be developed to discuss the more “concrete,” “immediate,” “surface” level at which “people become conscious of the conflict and fight it out.” Provisionally, we might call it a “socio-cultural-political level.”

It is here that we can and need to discuss all the variety of “formations” and “institutions” and “activity systems” and the like, which comprise our experience of everyday social, political, and economic life. It is at this mediated level that we can begin to discuss historical institutions, specific state forms and “regimes of accumulation,” specific ideological formations. Here, too, “actors and agents” take on color and personality, acquiring specific local and historical definitions. At the abstract level of a mode of production, such actors and agents are no more than line-drawn cartoon figures, having no more definition than simply the “bearers of social relations”: they are simply “the capitalist,” “the banker,” “the landlord,” “the worker,” “the petty-bourgeois,” “the peasant,” and so on. To know that someone is “a worker” is a vital step in beginning to understand her, for that fact sets limits to her possibilities, but it does not tell us how she and those around her see the world and her own place and possibilities within it, what her actual day-to-day relations may be with others, how she and they respond to specific situations and events, how she and they may change their activities, relationships and ideas. At a more concrete, socio-cultural-political level, we must examine people’s concrete purposes and understandings, their multi-dimensional social relations, and intersecting networks of association, in all their rich coloring, diversity, and historical depth.

It is here, too, that we can begin to identify and analyze characteristic patterns of practices, ideas, everyday relationships as they are developed, systematized, differentiated, contested, in ongoing processes of social, scientific, religious, psychological, economic, and aesthetic development. Here belong, for example, initial orienting discussions of such matters as “commonsense” and “good sense,” the practical function of ideas, accounts of language, the role of “intellectuals,” and questions about “ideological domination” and “hegemony.” The potential agenda is enormous, but our starting point does suggest some bases for discriminating between “better” and “worse” ideas. What we need to reject are those accounts of the “cultural” which treat most people as simple prisoners of other people’s ideas or in short every potentially “elitist” conception of everyday consciousness. We need to examine actual struggles to explore how people make sense of the world and what possibilities they find within it—thus such dialectical thinkers as Gramsci, Vygotsky, Vološinov, Williams, or Billig are, on this measure, among those more likely to be helpful to us.

Within cultures, these oppositions manifest themselves in various “subaltern cultures,” themselves responses to the tensions and contradictions of modes of production and cultures, and of the limits to development set by these. They represent the characteristic ways of organizing everyday life and handling its difficulties, within the material and cultural resources available to differentially located groupings within specific social formations. Here, “needs” are given concrete, historical definition, in terms of specific patterns of “taste” and “pleasure”; here, diverse networks of sociality are built, maintained, defended. Here, people love and despair, dream, speak and sing, remember, hope, create each other, form and re-form particular individual and collective personalities. Here, they work and take “leisure” in particular ways. Here, they form definite social ties, family forms, networks of social association, and social division amongst themselves along with means of mutual social control. “Subaltern cultures” contain a variety of potentials for development: being anything but homogeneous, they are fields of dialogue and contest.

Subaltern cultures are also formed, it must be emphasized, within the orbit of existing states and dominant classes, representing at once forms of resistance and accommodation, and they are themselves a focus of direct and indirect “intervention” by those states and dominant classes. We should be concerned to search out, within the formation of subaltern cultures, not only the forms of both resistance and accommodation, but also the nascent development of “alternatives” to the organizational patterns and values of the existing dominant order. Often it is just these potential alternatives which “interventions from above” (the colonization of the life-world) seek to undermine and replace. These are issues of considerable practical-political significance, unless we suppose that only in moments of “social revolution” do subaltern classes suck out of their thumbs principles of some new social order, with no previous aspiration to, experience of, or developing skills in the elements making this up (or, even worse, that just at such junctures vanguard parties step into the historic breach and teach the presumably grateful workers what they should want and need).

Movements as a Category

It is on this “ground,” of historically emergent social-cultural-political formations, that “movements” (or “social movements” as most of the contemporary literature refers to them) arise as specific achievements.

Before saying anything definite about these forms, let’s be clear about their significance in the context of the present argument. Bluntly, classes are not the direct collective actors that struggle to change the world. That historic privilege belongs to this mediated form, “movements.” Our argument is thus consciously “revisionist.”

“Movement” is a category Marxism needs. It’s a term already used by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky, though—to my knowledge—none of them ever explicitly discusses what they mean by the term. Not only do they use it, but—in some cases at least—they more or less explicitly distinguish between the term “movement” and the term “party.” But the relation between the two terms remains not entirely clear. What can we say about “movements”?

In the light of the previous development, we can begin to think of “movements” as a kind of active crystallization out of both “dominant” and “subaltern” cultures. They involve a self-selection of persons-with-themes who collectively resolve, in some sense, to confront some larger or smaller issue posed within their social-cultural-political formation. Movements represent a kind of collective focusing of attention and energy on transforming, more or less, the parameters of some specific question, in opposition to other forces: dominant or subordinate classes, parties, movements, states, etc.

We should not assume that “movements” are necessarily “progressive,” “democratic,” etc. There are movements whose aims are decidedly “regressive”: we need only think of fascism or the Ku Klux Klan, which took a “movement” form, to recognize this.

Movements arise out of, but are not identical with, the social networks which individuals and groups form amongst themselves within social-cultural-political formations: they represent a further level of self-organization. They are products of dominant and subaltern cultures, but they are not identical, either, with those cultures. A few examples: While “working-class culture” includes both trade unionists and scabs, “labor movements” organize in part to contain and control scabs. The majority of the British population, according to opinion surveys, opposes the Iraq war and occupation, yet, despite the huge size of the anti-war movement, only a (quite large) minority has participated in any of the Stop The War Movement’s organized collective activities. The Black Baptist Church network was crucial to the early development of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., yet some Black Baptist churches refused their participation.

Rather than simply “reflecting” a culture, subaltern or otherwise, movements actively select issues, themes, ideas, and methods of struggle from a whole potential “repertoire” of possibilities. In that sense, they are in a nascent sense already “critical” of other ways of living and responding within their own culture. Indeed, some movements arise directly in response to felt deficiencies within existing movements and organizations. Examples include rank-and-file and shop steward movements opposing bureaucratism and conservatism within trade unionism, the emergence of “Black Power” within the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A., the re-birth of feminism in response to the sexism women activists experienced within the Civil Rights Movement and the U.S. student Left.

If movements are networks, they’re also arenas of argument. Every facet of movement activity and organization is potentially debatable. How best should a movement organize its forces, and sort out its decision-making processes? What should be its goals, and how should they be defined? What methods of activity are most appropriate for it to achieve its goals? How should a movement respond to a specific situation? Should some voices and forms of activity be disallowed: in short, should there be criteria for belonging, involving rules of inclusion and exclusion?

Such organizational, strategic, and tactical arguments are, in refracted form, also germane to, indeed they are a living aspect of the class struggle. Indeed, those who participate in these arguments are themselves not immune to interventions from movements’ opponents. If one potential ruling-class response to a subaltern movement is simply repressive, another is more or less ‘cooptative’. Movement opponents may conclude that direct repression is not a suitable or viable response and that they have, in some sense, to “live with” a movement, but this pattern of response is unlikely to be simply passive. Rather they may seek to achieve a form of movement that, if irksome, is nonetheless not directly threatening to their most fundamental interests. They may deploy a battery of means, including both force (legal constraint, selective violence) and persuasion to shape the forms, purposes, and methods of movements. As Shandro suggests, it was part of Lenin’s insight into the workers’ movement that it lies “in the rulers’ strategic sights.” That insight can be generalized to other movements and settings. Movement forms, methods, and goals are “negotiable,” both among their participants but also between them and their ostensible “targets.” The class struggle thus runs not simply between movements and their opponents, but also through them and within them.

Movements move. Within and through them, people mobilize collectively to change some condition. In the process, they come into conflict with opponents. Those conflicts are not static conditions, but consist of sequences of events which more or less reconfigure the relations between the warring parties. Via the indeterminate inner processes of these event-sequences, in which the various individual and collective actors engage their forces, strategize, and choose specific tactics and the like, movements advance or retreat, grow and decline, surface and submerge, concentrate or divert their energies, clarify or confuse their understandings and their goals.

During these processes, the make-up of their personnel may alter, as individuals and groups enter or withdraw. Participants discuss and argue among themselves and with more or less engaged audiences and opponents, assessing and testing various proposals about what their movements are, what they are for, how they should proceed. In selecting among alternatives, movements also validate and invalidate different courses of action and organization, and thus different claims to “leadership” from among the proffered choices. In these same processes, individuals and groups learn, share, test, enlarge, or diminish various skills and capacities, along with the confidence and will to use them.

The process of mobilization into movements is one of self-activation, of active engagement. Its effects on participants are more or less transforming. People change themselves as they deploy their energies and understandings to alter the complex relations with others in which they are, individually and collectively, “hubs” (Gramsci) or “nexuses” (Marx). Individual and collective “emancipation” or “liberation” is an at once “practical” and “cognitive” process involving changing the self and societal relations.

There is thus an implicit measure of movement “success,” in which the criteria are the degree to which movements succeed in altering the social relations and accompanying understandings which inhibit their own emancipation from oppression and exploitation and which advance their individual and collective “welfare,” and thereby alter their participants’ selves and identities in mutually empowering fashion. Such criteria necessarily implicate judgments about movements themselves, in terms of the degree to which their practice actively promotes such empowering transformations—or, rather, proves self-defeating. Movements vary on all manner of axes, but a crucial one concerns the degree to which their own practice begins to embody, or perhaps we should say, to organize, a different way of living, or the outlines of a different kind of society. Those most likely to achieve this are those which engage, actively, with the members of “subaltern classes.”

The evaluation of movements involves the question, what can they become? This question assumes a notion of “immanence:” within the very contradictions of movements there exist, to larger or smaller degree, potentials for social transformation. If individuals can achieve little on their own by way of such transformation, their mutual association in movements contains larger possibilities for societal and thus personal change.

I began this section by suggesting that it is movements rather than classes that prove to be the direct collective actors that possess the capacity to change the world. A “workers’ movement” involves, to the degree it succeeds, large numbers of workers; it never involves them all, and it faces problems sometimes from those workers who oppose it. This is not only true of strike movements, but also of revolutions. On the other hand, active workers’ movements often draw into their ranks numbers of non-workers (students, intellectuals, sympathizing shopkeepers, cafe-owners, publicans, and the like). When they establish new institutions that challenge for political power, as in revolutionary moments, those institutions are movement institutions: think of the forms taken by such bodies as the Commune of Paris, the Russian soviets, the workers and soldiers councils of Germany in 1918-19 or in Hungary in 1956, the cordones of Chile in 1972-73, the inter-factory strike committees that composed Solidarnosc in Poland in 1980-81, along with other more recent examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and elsewhere.

On the other hand, movements are not the same as “parties.” Partly because of their “network” character, because they do contain different “tendencies” of thought, they have a “mobilizing reach” and a potential energy and capacity for innovation that even the most resourceful party can only admire. However, we should be careful not to draw the wrong kind of line of distinction between the phenomena of movements and parties, for confusions on this score have bedeviled Marxist debates in the past, and continue to rankle within today’s “anti-capitalist” movements.

The Party Question

What, then, finally, of the question of “parties”? In order for Marxism to develop the beginning of an adequate approach to this issue, it had first to break decisively with the reformist conception of this issue, as this was developed within the Second International. This was no easy task, for the reformist conception was hegemonic over the theoretical imaginations, not only of the right wing within the International, but also of the left. As a result, the quite heated debates about “organizational questions” in the decade and a half before 1914 were often confusing and confused.

The classic statement of the reformist conception was represented by the very influential book by Karl Kautsky, the “Pope of Marxism,” under the title The Road To Power. That book was very influential far beyond the borders of Germany, for whose Social Democratic Party it was written. The Road to Power offers a seemingly radical prognosis: the choice for humanity lies between imperialism and socialism. Yet Kautsky assigns a remarkably passive role to the working class in the coming crisis. The dynamic element is the ruling class: its internal contradictions, corruption, and loss of self-assurance will drive the system towards self-destruction. The proletariat will passively inherit power after the bourgeoisie’s inevitable self-immolation, which is the necessary result of capitalism’s inherent tendencies of development. Social Democracy, basing itself on “independent scientific investigation by bourgeois thinkers” has the task of raising workers’ consciousness to the point where they have “a clear insight into social laws,” and such a movement’s victory is certain, down to “inevitable necessity.” All the socialist party need do is maintain its integrity by refusing collaboration in a passive stance of “opposition.” The center of such action as is to occur is the socialist party in parliament, and not the workers themselves. As Harman notes, in this social-democratic conception, “Other forms of working-class organization and activity can help, but must be subordinated to the bearer of political consciousness.” In Kautsky’s words, “This ‘direct action’ of the unions can operate effectively only as an auxiliary and reinforcement to and not as a substitute for parliamentary action.” Nowhere does Kautsky reveal any of Marx’s or Luxemburg’s sense of the working class itself as an active, world-shaping force.

The difficulty with the whole position, from the standpoint of the Left, was that it induced the kind of historical fatalism that Kautsky cheerfully accepted. One just had to wait for the workers to catch up with an already established theory, and for the contradictions of capitalist development to assist them along the way. What the theory did not suggest was that the Left should form its own party, or even a coherent tendency within the established parties, to fight for a different conception of the struggle, in which it would be the self-activity of the workers’ movement itself which would provide the basis for a “socialism from below,” and in which it would not be “the party” that would come to power, but new, directly democratic organizations created out of workers’ struggles.

Lenin is always prone to make statements not about “the consciousness of the workers” in the abstract, but rather of the form, “this section has moved to this point, but others are still behind.” This gives his political writings a concreteness and sharpness of focus not found in his contemporaries, and which provided a lesson book for those who, during and after 1917, joined his side. It also represents a vantage point from which the “fatalism” of the Second International is most effectively combated. Rather than “waiting” for the working class to complete its development and for it to then vote in a parliamentary government that will legislate socialism into existence—a scenario shown to be more than unlikely after a miserable century of experience of social-democratic parties!—revolutionary socialists should be attentive to the shifts in activity and consciousness among the working class, and indeed among all those opposed to the existing ruling class and its policies, and be ready to join in with their struggles and become part of their movements in order to play a part in connecting those particular struggles to the larger struggle to transform society. “Waiting” for the working class to unify itself under the parliamentary leadership of a social democratic party, or for it to unify itself spontaneously into an effective revolutionary force, is like Waiting for Godot: a drama without any conclusion, for such a “subject” will never unify itself spontaneously, since movements whether of workers or others are always and everywhere entities riven by inner contradictions and arguments. Revolutionary socialists should be part of those arguments, not outside them commenting.

Capitalism engenders and rests upon not simply the immediate process of exploitation of wage-labor, but a multitude of other oppressions and injustices. The struggle against capitalism is not simply a matter of the self-organization of workers to oppose their employers, but equally—and sometimes more importantly, depending on specific conditions—a host of struggles, against imperialism, against racism and ethnic and religious oppression, against the unequal treatment of women, against vicious policing and penal policies, against homophobia, against environmental degradation, and so on. Always and everywhere, socialists have to be active in defense of the “underdog,” to be, in Lenin’s outstanding phrase, “tribunes of the people.” All movements of the oppressed demand socialist support, all require that revolutionary socialist organizations participate in their struggles and seek to link them together as part of the overall challenge to the capitalist system as a whole. Within the workers’ movement itself, even at the cost of temporary unpopularity, socialists have to campaign for a politics of human liberation.

For those looking to learn more about Colin Barker and his work, in addition to his books, you can check out his more recent writings for rs21 in the UK, his website that collects many of his writings and drafts, a collection of some of his writings on marxists.org , as well as the obituary written by Ian Birchall.

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Colin Barker View All

Colin Barker (1939-2019) was a revolutionary socialist activist and an innovative Marxist sociologist whose work drew from many traditions and made essential contributions to a number of fields. He wrote and edited many books and articles, including Revolutionary Rehearsals (1987), Marxism and Social Movements (2013), and the quintessential new book, Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age (2021) published posthumously.

Eugene V. Debs

The negro in the class struggle.

Source: International Socialist Review , Vol. IV, No. 5. November 1903 Online Version: E.V. Debs Internet Archive, 2006 Transcribed/HTML Markup: Robert Bills for the Socialist Labor Party of America and David Walters, December, 2006

It so happens that I write upon the Negro question, in compliance with the request of the editor of the International Socialist Review , in the state of Louisiana, where the race prejudice is as strong and the feeling against the “nigger” as bitter and relentless as when Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation lashed the waning Confederacy into fury and incited the final and desperate attempts to burst the bonds that held the southern states in the federal union. Indeed, so thoroughly is the south permeated with the malign spirit of race hatred that even Socialists are to be found, and by no means rarely, who either share directly in the race hostility against the Negro, or avoid the issue, or apologize for the social obliteration of the color line in the class struggle.

The white man in the south declares that “the nigger is all right in his place”; that is, as menial, servant and slave. If he dare hold up his head, feel the thrill of manhood in his veins and nurse the hope that some day may bring deliverance; if in his brain the thought of freedom dawns and in his heart the aspiration to rise above the animal plane and propensities of his sires, he must be made to realize that notwithstanding the white man is civilized (?) the black man is a “nigger” still and must so remain as long as planets wheel in space.

But while the white man is considerate enough to tolerate the Negro “in his place,” the remotest suggestion at social recognition arouses all the pent-up wrath of his Anglo-Saxon civilization; and my observation is that the less real ground there is for such indignant assertion of self-superiority, the more passionately it is proclaimed.

At Yoakum, Texas, a few days ago, leaving the depot with two grips in my hands, I passed four or five bearers of the white man’s burden perched on a railing and decorating their environment with tobacco juice. One of them, addressing me, said: “There’s a nigger that’ll carry your grips.” A second one added: “That’s what he’s here for,” and the third chimed in with “That’s right, by God.” Here was a savory bouquet of white superiority. One glance was sufficient to satisfy me that they represented all there is of justification for the implacable hatred of the Negro race. They were ignorant, lazy, unclean, totally void of ambition, themselves the foul product of the capitalist system and held in lowest contempt by the master class, yet esteeming themselves immeasurably above the cleanest, most intelligent and self-respecting Negro, having by reflex absorbed the “nigger” hatred of their masters.

As a matter of fact the industrial supremacy of the south before the war would not have been possible without the Negro, and the south of today would totally collapse without his labor. Cotton culture has been and is the great staple and it will not be denied that the fineness and superiority of the fibre that makes the export of the southern states the greatest in the world is due in large measure to the genius of the Negroes charged with its cultivation.

The whole world is under obligation to the Negro, and that the white heel is still upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized.

The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.

Why should the white man hate him? Because he stole him from his native land and for two centuries and a half robbed him of the fruit of his labor, kept him in beastly ignorance and subjected him to the brutal domination of the lash? Because he tore the black child from the breast of its mother and ravished the black man’s daughter before her father’s eyes?

There are thousands of Negroes who bear testimony in their whitening skins that men who so furiously resent the suggestion of “social equality” are far less sensitive in respect to the sexual equality of the races.

But of all the senseless agitation in capitalist society, that in respect to “social equality” takes the palm. The very instant it is mentioned the old aristocratic plantation owner’s shrill cry about the “buck nigger” marrying the “fair young daughter” of his master is heard from the tomb and echoed and re-echoed across the spaces and repeated by the “white trash” in proud vindication of their social superiority.

Social equality, forsooth! Is the black man pressing his claims for social recognition upon his white burden bearer? Is there any reason why he should? Is the white man’s social recognition of his own white brother such as to excite the Negro’s ambition to covet the noble prize? Has the Negro any greater desire, or is there any reason why he should have, for social intercourse with the white man than the white man has for social relations with the Negro? This phase of the Negro question is pure fraud and serves to mask the real issue, which is not social equality , BUT ECONOMIC FREEDOM.

There never was any social inferiority that was not the shrivelled fruit of economic inequality.

The Negro, given economic freedom, will not ask the white man any social favors; and the burning question of “social equality” will disappear like mist before the sunrise.

I have said and say again that, properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside of the labor question—the working class struggle. Our position as Socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colorless.” The capitalists, white, black and other shades, are on one side and the workers, white, black and all other colors, on the other side.

When Marx said: “Workingmen of all countries unite,” he gave concrete expression to the socialist philosophy of the class struggle; unlike the framers of the Declaration of Independence who announced that “all men are created equal” and then basely repudiated their own doctrine, Marx issued the call to all the workers of the globe, regardless of race, sex, creed or any other condition whatsoever.

As a social party we receive the Negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms. We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race prejudice; and if we should be coaxed or driven from the straight road we will be lost in the wilderness and ought to perish there, for we shall no longer be a Socialist party.

Let the capitalist press and capitalist “public opinion” indulge themselves in alternate flattery and abuse of the Negro; we as Socialists will receive him in our party, treat him in our counsels and stand by him all around the same as if his skin were white instead of black; and this we do, not from any considerations of sentiment, but because it accords with the philosophy of Socialism, the genius of the class struggle, and is eternally right and bound to triumph in the end.

With the “’nigger” question, the “’race war” from the capitalist viewpoint we have nothing to do. In capitalism the Negro question is a grave one and will grow more threatening as the contradictions and complications of capitalist society multiply, but this need not worry us. Let them settle the Negro question in their way, if they can. We have nothing to do with it, for that is their fight. We have simply to open the eyes of as many Negroes as we can and bring them into the Socialist movement to do battle for emancipation from wage slavery, and when the working class have triumphed in the class struggle and stand forth economic as well as political free men, the race problem will forever disappear.

Socialists should with pride proclaim their sympathy with and fealty to the black race, and if any there be who hesitate to avow themselves in the face of ignorant and unreasoning prejudice, they lack the true spirit of the slavery-destroying revolutionary movement.

The voice of Socialism must be as inspiring music to the ears of those in bondage, especially the weak black brethren, doubly enslaved, who are bowed to the earth and groan in despair beneath the burden of the centuries.

For myself, my heart goes to the Negro and I make no apology to any white man for it. In fact, when I see the poor, brutalized, outraged black victim, I feel a burning sense of guilt for his intellectual poverty and moral debasement that makes me blush for the unspeakable crimes committed by my own race.

In closing, permit me to express the hope that the next convention may repeal the resolutions on the Negro question. The Negro does not need them and they serve to increase rather than diminish the necessity for explanation.

We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.

The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.

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In Nineteen Eighty-Four , society is made up of three distinct social classes: the elite Inner Party, the industrious Outer Party, and vast numbers of uneducated proles. When Winston reads Goldstein's book, he learns that the history of humankind has been a cyclical struggle between competing social groups: the High, the Middle, and the Low. This theory was originated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century and became known as Marxism. Marxists believe that the aim of the Middle group is to change places with the High, which they do by enlisting the support of the Low group. After the Middle group seizes power in a revolution, they become the High and thrust the Low back into servitude. Eventually a new Middle group splits off and the cycle begins again. At various points in the narrative, Winston entertains the hope that the proles will become conscious of their oppressed state and initiate a revolution. At other times, he despairs that since the proles cannot rebel until they become conscious, and cannot become conscious until only after they have rebelled, such a development is extremely unlikely.

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Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. That, [Winston] reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. […] But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

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Racism and the Class Struggle

The Meaning of Black Revolt in the United States

by James Boggs

Published by: Monthly Review Press

Imprint: Monthly Review Press

Sales Date: May 2021

• 9781583679142
• Published: May 2021

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• Description

An updated edition of James Boggs’ influential essays on revolution and Black Power Having just written his groundbreaking book, The American Revolution, Detroit autoworker James Boggs sat down in the early 1960s to continue his study of revolution. Boggs looked at the Black Power uprisings then beginning in the United States within the global context of the overthrow of rightwing puppet regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Racism and the Class Struggle , Boggs produced thirteen powerful and prescient chapters that wrestled with topics such as the specific character of American capitalism and its intricate relationship to American democracy, the historic mission of the Black revolution in the United States, and the need for the 1960s Black movement to develop theoretically and organizationally. Boggs also hailed the coming of what was at the time the new slogan of the "Black revolution" with a momentous essay called "Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come." In other essays, he hammered at his theme of a "second civil war" and Black control of the cities. With conflicting U.S. forces so sharply polarized, wrote Boggs, "No one can predict when or whether a revolution will succeed, but we do know that … there is no turning back until one or the other side is defeated." Today, amid the metastasizing manifestations of "white power," Racism and the Class Struggle is stunningly pertinent to people of all races who, in the struggle against Empire and white supremacy, will not turn back.

James Boggs (1919–1993) was an African American auto worker and radical activist raised in rural Alabama. His books include The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook and Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (with Grace Lee Boggs), both published by Monthly Review Press.

[H]eady, controversial writing–pungent polemical essays and speeches–which spells out forcefully his Marxist-Fanonist thesis that 'the issues of the black revolt are fundamentally rooted in the American system itself. ~Publishers' Weekly