“‘The history of the hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.’ Critically comment on this Marxian thesis.” (1991)
The sentence opens The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It compresses historical materialism into one claim: since private property arose, every society has been split into antagonistic classes, and their conflict, rather than ideas or great individuals, moves history.
Interpreting the thesis
- Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman: in each epoch an owning class appropriates the surplus of a producing class.
- The struggle, hidden or open, ends either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes, so Marx promises no automatic victory.
- Class struggle is the mechanism that resolves the contradiction between forces and relations of production (1859 Preface). Capitalism simplifies it into bourgeoisie versus proletariat.
- In the 1888 edition Engels restricted the claim to written history. Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) had described classless kin-based communities.
Support for the thesis
- E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963) showed class being made through struggle and shared experience.
- Barrington Moore Jr. (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966) traced routes to democracy or dictatorship to alliances and conflicts among lords, peasants and the bourgeoisie.
- A. R. Desai (Peasant Struggles in India, 1979) and D. N. Dhanagare (Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950, 1983) rooted Tebhaga and Telangana in agrarian class relations.
- Current India shows class action too. The farmers’ movement forced repeal of three farm laws in 2021. Ten central trade unions called a nationwide strike on 12 February 2026 against the four labour codes in force since November 2025. Delivery-platform workers struck in December 2025 over pay and ten-minute deadlines.
Critique
- Economic reductionism: Max Weber separated class from status and party, and in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05) gave religious ideas causal weight.
- Caste and hierarchy: Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) read Indian society through purity and pollution, not class antagonism. André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) found caste, class and power increasingly separate in Sripuram. B. R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) called caste a division of labourers, whose graded inequality blocks class unity.
- Other axes of domination: feminist scholars show that patriarchy predates and cuts across class. Nationalism in 1914 outweighed workers’ class loyalty.
- Institutionalised conflict: Ralf Dahrendorf (Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 1959) located conflict in authority relations, channelled by collective bargaining. Lewis Coser showed that conflict can integrate societies.
- Historical record: revolutions came in peasant Russia and China, not industrial Britain, and welfare capitalism absorbed labour. If every conflict is redefined as class struggle, the thesis becomes unfalsifiable, as Karl Popper objected.
Evaluation
As a universal law the thesis overreaches; as a heuristic it remains powerful. With India’s top 1% holding 40.1% of wealth in 2022-23, material conflict is hardly obsolete. Gail Omvedt’s caste-class analysis shows the productive path: class struggle entangled with caste, gender and community.
Conclusion
Marx was wrong that history has a single plot, but right that asking who produces and who appropriates explains much social change. The thesis survives best as a method of inquiry rather than a prophecy.