Class and Class Struggle

Oxford Handbooks Online

Class and Class Struggle  
Henry Heller
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew

Subject: Sociology, Social Theory Online Publication Date: Sep 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.4

Abstract and Keywords

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.

Keywords: class, class struggle, tributary mode of production, capitalism, revolution, state

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.

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Class and Class Struggle

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).

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Class and Class Struggle

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

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Class and Class Struggle

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 state. 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-
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Class and Class Struggle

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).

4. Slavery
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
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Class and Class Struggle

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,
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Class and Class Struggle

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

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Class and Class Struggle

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
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Class and Class Struggle

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

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Class and Class Struggle

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

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Class and Class Struggle

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
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Class and Class Struggle

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).

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Class and Class Struggle

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 (Bellamy-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.

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Class and Class Struggle

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,

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Class and Class Struggle

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

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Class and Class Struggle

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.

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Class and Class Struggle

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

(Bellamy-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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