- "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war ... and we're winning."
– Warren Buffett
- "The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat."
– Karl Marx
Historical Context
“The history of all hitherto existing society,” wrote Marx in the opening of his 1848 Communist Manifesto, “is the history of class struggle.” To which Engels added the caveat “all written history” in the 1888 English edition to account for the fact that for millennia primitive peoples lived in classless collectives. In their interpretation of history, civilized peoples live in a state of tension due to the competing socioeconomic interests between the differing classes. This view that the class struggle provides the impetus for radical change is central to the work of both Marxists and anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin.
As with everything, there are at least two ways to understand the term “class struggle” – each popular with competing Marxist-Socialists. One approach understands it to mean a political movement where one or the other of contending groups considers itself to be a “class” (hence, having a class consciousness) consciously pursuing its interests. In the other, the class struggle inevitably breaks out wherever there is exploitation of one class by another. Thus, the slave who refuses to work hard and the master who whips him or her are both engaged in a class struggle, even if neither considers themselves to belong to a class. In the latter, the class struggle is a permanent, daily fixture in any industrial society.
All of this was just intellectual posturing until the inequities of industrial capitalism made it clear that there was a ruling class which controlled the state and owned the means of production – the land and its resources, the workshops and factories, the banks and schools. At the other end of the spectrum were the “actual producers” of wealth, those who own little but their ability to work hard for minimal wages. It was the inequities between the capitalist class and the working class that fueled the great ideological divide of the 20th Century and so shaped modern civilization.