“The history of all hitherto existing society is· the history of class struggle.” (Karl Marx) Comment. (2003)
The sentence opens Section I of the Communist Manifesto (February 1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Engels’s footnote to the 1888 English edition narrowed it to “all written history”, since research by August von Haxthausen, Georg Ludwig von Maurer and Lewis Henry Morgan had since revealed classless communal societies. The claim makes conflict over the social surplus the motor of history. It is an indispensable lens, though not the whole of history.
What the Claim Means
- Classes are relations. A class is fixed by whether its members own the means of production or must sell their labour power. The Manifesto pairs them: freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, “in a word, oppressor and oppressed”.
- The struggle is constant but varied, “now hidden, now open”. It runs through wages and hours, through state power and the franchise, and through ideas about what is natural.
- Dialectical ground. Struggle expresses the contradiction between developing forces of production and fettering relations of production (Preface, 1859); rising classes, such as the bourgeoisie against feudalism, carry the new mode.
- No guarantee. Each fight ended “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.
- Modern simplification. Capitalism splits society into “two great hostile camps”, bourgeoisie and proletariat. The bourgeoisie produces “its own grave-diggers”, and a proletarian victory abolishes classes altogether.
Evidence For
- The Conflict of the Orders in Rome, the German Peasants’ War (1525) and the reading of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution by Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul all fit the scheme.
- Irfan Habib (The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1963) explained Mughal decline through peasant revolt against rising revenue demand; the Telangana struggle (1946–51) and Bengal’s Tebhaga movement (1946–47) were open agrarian class wars.
- Today the struggle is juridified: India’s four Labour Codes, in force since 21 November 2025 and consolidating 29 laws, were contested by most central trade unions.
Critique
- Reductionism. Max Weber added status and party; nations, religions and races have mobilised more people than classes. B. R. Ambedkar showed caste dividing labourers into graded ranks, and feminists find the scheme blind to patriarchy.
- Contested history. Alfred Cobban (The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, 1964) and François Furet (Penser la Révolution française, 1978) argued that 1789 was not a class revolution; wars of religion and dynasty cut across classes.
- Institutionalisation. Thomas Humphrey Marshall (Citizenship and Social Class, 1950) showed social rights taming class conflict; Ralf Dahrendorf saw it institutionalised in collective bargaining. The welfare state replaced the predicted polarisation.
- Falsifiability. Karl Popper judged a theory that explains every outcome as explaining none.
- Outcomes. Revolutions made in Marx’s name occurred in peasant societies and ended in party dictatorship, not a classless society.
Conclusion
The claim is a powerful heuristic: ask who produces the surplus, who appropriates it, and how that conflict shapes law and politics. As a total history it is too narrow. Class struggle is one great engine of history, not the only one.