“Write short note: Class struggle as conceived by Karl Marx.” (2005)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles: with this opening line of The Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made class conflict the motor of history. Engels later added a footnote restricting the claim to recorded history, after primitive communism.
Basis of class struggle
- Class is defined by relation to the means of production, not by income or prestige. Every class society has an owning class and a producing class: master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
- The struggle is structural, not personal. The owning class lives off the surplus produced by others, as rent under feudalism or surplus value under capitalism, so the two classes’ interests are objectively opposed whatever individuals feel.
- The conflict is now hidden, now open (Manifesto): it ranges from everyday resistance and wage bargaining to open revolt.
How the struggle develops under capitalism
- Economic struggle: isolated workers resist wage cuts; they form combinations and trade unions.
- Consciousness: factory concentration, deskilling and crises turn a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself.
- Political struggle: every class struggle is a political struggle; workers organise a party to capture the state, whose executive Marx called a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
- Revolution: the proletariat establishes a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat, abolishes private property and, being the last exploited class, ends class struggle itself.
Role in social change
Class struggle is how the contradiction between forces and relations of production is resolved. Each rising class, such as the bourgeoisie against feudal lords, overturns the old order and remakes law, politics and ideas in its own image. The ruling class holds back the struggle through ideology, since its ideas become the ruling ideas.
Criticisms
- Max Weber: status groups and parties also struggle; class is one axis among several.
- Ralf Dahrendorf: conflict rests on authority in all organisations, not property alone, and is institutionalised in modern societies.
- Lewis Coser: conflict often integrates rather than overturns.
- Revolution came to agrarian Russia and China, not industrial England; Western middle classes expanded.
- B. R. Ambedkar: in India, caste divides the working class itself, so struggles form around caste as much as class.
Indian illustration
At Samsung’s Sriperumbudur plant in Tamil Nadu, workers struck for 37 days in September–October 2024, demanding recognition of their union. The state registered the union in January 2025 after a Madras High Court deadline. The dispute was over organisation, the step Marx saw as essential to class struggle, and it ended through courts and bargaining, not revolution, as Dahrendorf would predict.
Conclusion
Class struggle remains the core of Marx’s sociology because it links exploitation, consciousness and historical change in a single mechanism. Its forms have changed from barricades to bargaining tables, but the underlying conflict over the surplus has not disappeared.