Karl Marx · Economics
Marx’s claim that all of history is a story of conflict between economic classes - and that capitalism has boiled it down to two: owners and workers.
The Communist Manifesto (1848) opens with one of the most famous sentences in political writing, and it is a sweeping claim about the whole of human history. Every society, Marx argues, has been divided into classes with opposed economic interests - freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf - and the relationship between them has been one of conflict, sometimes hidden, sometimes erupting into open revolution. History is not a record of harmony or gradual progress, but of struggle between those who own and those who labour.
Marx is no simple hater of capitalism - the Manifesto contains an astonished tribute to it. The bourgeoisie, he writes, has been the most revolutionary force in history, smashing the old feudal world, creating colossal productive powers, drawing every nation into a global market, and constantly transforming everything it touches. It has ‘accomplished wonders far surpassing’ the pyramids and cathedrals. But this same dynamism is restless and destructive: capitalism tears apart all stable relations and traditions, reducing every human bond to cold cash payment, leaving nothing settled, everything in perpetual upheaval.
To grasp Marx’s theory of class struggle precisely, you have to understand what he means by a class and how a mere economic category becomes a fighting political force. For Marx, a class is defined not by income, status, or lifestyle but by its relationship to the means of production - whether you own productive property (and so live by owning) or own only your labour-power (and so live by working for those who own). This objective economic position is what fundamentally divides the bourgeoisie from the proletariat: not how much they earn, but their structural place in the system of production. On this definition, a class can exist as an objective fact long before its members are aware of it as a shared identity.
This leads to one of Marx’s most important distinctions: between a class in itself and a class for itself. A class in itself is a group of people who objectively share the same relationship to the means of production - all the wage-workers, say - but who do not yet recognise their common situation, do not see themselves as a class, and do not act together. They are a class on paper, a statistical category, but not yet a historical actor. A class for itself is what that group becomes when it achieves class consciousness - when its members recognise their shared interests, understand their common antagonist, develop solidarity, and organise to act collectively in their own interest. The transformation from a class in itself to a class for itself - from a scattered mass of individuals who happen to share a condition into a self-aware, organised, fighting collective - is the central political drama of Marx’s theory, because only a class for itself can make history, can struggle effectively, can become the revolutionary agent Marx counted on. The whole question of whether the proletariat would fulfil the role Marx assigned it comes down to whether it could make this transition - whether the workers, objectively a class in themselves, would ever become a class for themselves, conscious and organised enough to overthrow the system. As we will see, this is precisely where Marx’s prediction ran into trouble, and where later Marxists like Gramsci would focus their attention: not on whether the workers shared an objective class position (they did), but on why they so often failed to develop the class consciousness that would turn that shared position into revolutionary action.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Marx sees class conflict as the motor of history. Explain who the two great classes under capitalism are, and why he thought their interests are irreconcilable, in your own words.
Leads to Antonio Gramsci.
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