Marx did not invent either class or the class struggle.
The use of the word class, as a social group, was clearly present in 1817 when David Ricardo established the term as a central concern of political economy in the regulatory distribution of income.
In The Principles of Political Economy, Ricardo wrote;
The product of the earth – all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community … in different stages of society, the proportions of the whole produce of the earth which will be allotted to each of these classes, under the name of rent, profit and wages, will be essentially different… To determine the laws which regulate this distribution is the principal problem in political economy…
(Original Preface; Everyman ed. 1923 p. 1)
The utopian socialists, Piercy Ravenstone (The source and Remedy of the National Difficulties 1821) and Thomas Hodgskin (Labour Defended against the claim of capital 1825) used Ricardo’s ideas to highlight the class conflict within capitalism and which could only be resolved politically by the action of the working class acting in its own interests.
Why is Marx’s theory of class a powerful and explanatory tool? Why are class relationships primary in any discussion of society? To answer these questions, let us consider the various strands of ideas, which already existed, which were then woven by Marx into a new theory of class.
First, there was the idea of class as understood by the utopian socialists who had been influenced by David Ricardo’s theory of political economy.
Second, there was the idea of social progress, of the transformation of society through the unfolding, development and resolution of contradictions, which came from Hegel and the Young Hegelians.
Third, there was the renaissance in materialist philosophy beginning with the French Enlightenment and writers like Helvetus, Holbach, Diderot and D’Alambert onto the materialist writings of Feuerbach in the 1840’s.
Fourth, there was the growing awareness of human stages in history, which had been obvious to earlier writers like Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations), and J. Millar (An Historical View of British Government, vol. IV. London 1803).
Fifth, there was the understanding of the political class struggle from French writers like F. Guizot and A. J. N. Thierry. Karl Marx highly valued Thierry’s work on the history of the third estate (the so-called “common people” of France) and called him “the father of the class struggle” of French historiography particularly his book Attempt at a History of the Formation and Development of the Third Estate(Marx to Engels July 27th 1854 Correspondence, p.87).
And sixth, Marx and Engels observed the class struggle as it took place around them. The class struggle was in the 18th and 19th century, as it was in the 20th century and in this century an empirical fact. In a letter to Weydemeyer, Marx set out exactly what was new in his theory;
What I did that was new was to demonstrate: 1) that the existence of classes is merely linked to particular historical phases in the development of production, 2). That class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
And the existence of the working class linked to a particular historical phase in the development of capitalist production was given revolutionary intent in the Communist Manifesto where Marx developed these ideas into a revolutionary theory of class struggle more penetrating than anything dreamt of in David Cannadine’s history.
So we conclude with the following passage taken from the first section of the Communist Manifesto:
“… the proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth pangs begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie … [at first]…the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition…with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels its strength more…the workers begin to form combinations (Trade Unions) against the bourgeoisie. Now and then the workers are victorious but only for a time … this organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier…
For the working class to become conscious and political makers of history they have to become what the conservative historian, John Vincent, called “history’s winners”. And to become history’s winners, workers; male and female, young and old, black and white; factory workers and office workers, they all have to organise consciously and politically into a principled Socialist Party with only Socialism as its object.
