Amid an economic crisis that is exacerbating social polarization and rekindling memories of the 1930s Great Depression, condemning millions of people to unemployment, insecurity, constant anxiety about getting by, and even hunger, essays, and articles making reference to the âreturn of class struggleâ have become more frequent. So had it disappeared?
In the mid-twentieth century, sharply criticizing the âdogmaâ of Marxâs theory of class struggle, Ralf Dahrendorf summarized the achievements of the capitalist system: â[t]oday the allocation of social positions is increasingly the task of the educational systemâ. Property had lost any influence and been replaced by merit, âmaking a personâs social position dependent on his educational achievementâ. And that was not all: âthe social situation of people [has] bec[o]me increasingly similarâ and there was undoubtedly a tendency to a âlevelling [of] social differencesâ. The painter of this rosy picture was nevertheless obliged to criticize other sociologists for whom the world was spontaneously heading towards âa state in which there are no classes and no class conflicts, because there is simply nothing to quarrel aboutâ. 1
These were years when an enormous number of men, women, and children from the global South and the countryside began to abandon their birthplace to seek their fortune elsewhere. This was also a mass phenomenon in Italy, where, hailing for the most part from the Mezzogiorno, immigrants crossed the Alps or stopped this side of them. Working conditions in north Italian factories can be illustrated in detail. In 1955, in order to suppress strikes and working-class militancy, hundreds of thousands of militants and activists from the CGILâa trade union accused of unacceptable radicalismâwere sacked. 2 Such practices were not confined to under-developed countries. In fact, the model was furnished by the USA, long characterized by yellow dog contracts, whereby, on being hired, workers and employees pledged (were forced to pledge) not to join any trade union organization. Was it really class struggle that had disappeared? Or was it substantive union freedoms, confirming the reality of class struggle?
Subsequent years witnessed the âeconomic miracleâ. But let us see what was happening in 1969 in the Westâs model country, giving the floor to a US periodical with an international diffusion (âReaderâs Digest Selectionâ), engaged in propaganda on behalf of the âAmerican way of lifeâ. âHunger in Americaâ was the eloquent title of an article that had this to say:
According to Dahrendorf, what determined individualsâ social position was solely or predominantly educational merit. But the US magazine drew attention to an obvious but wrongly ignored fact: â[d]octors are convinced that malnutrition impacts on the growth and development of the brainâ. 3 Once again, the indicated question is, did such terrible poverty in a country of capitalist opulence have something to do with class struggle?In Washington, the federal capital, 70 per cent of patients in the paediatric hospital suffer from malnutritionâŠ. In America, food aid programmes cover only about 6 of the 27 million in needâŠ. Having undertaken a tour of inspection in the Mississippi countryside, a group of doctors stated before a Senate sub-committee: âthe children we saw are obviously lacking in health, energy and vivacity. They are hungry and sick; and these are direct and indirect causes of deathâ.
Subsequently, abandoning his illusory observations-predictions of the mid-twentieth century, Dahrendorf noted âan increase in the percentage of the poor (often working poor)â in the USA. 4 The most interesting and disturbing observation was consigned to an inconspicuous parenthesis: even a job was insufficient to avert the risk of poverty! Long forgotten, the figure of the working poor reappeared and, with it, the spectre of class struggle, which seemed to have been exorcized for good. Even so, a famous philosopherâJĂŒrgen Habermasâreiterated the positions now abandoned by the famous sociologist. What refuted Marx and his theory of class struggle was something obvious to everyone: the âpacification of class conflictâ by the welfare state, which had developed in the West âsince 1945â, thanks to âa reformism relying on the instruments of Keynesian economicsâ. 5 What is immediately striking here is an initial inaccuracy: while this might apply to Western Europe, it certainly does not to the USA, where the welfare state never flourished, as is confirmed by the distressing picture just seen.
But that is not the main thing. Above all, Habermasâs claim is marked by the absence of a question that should be obvious: was the advent of the welfare state the inevitable result of a tendency inherent in capitalism? Or was it the result of political and social mobilization by the subaltern classesâin the final analysis, of a class struggle? Had the German philosopher posed this question, perhaps he would have avoided assuming the permanence of the welfare state, whose precariousness and progressive dismantlement are now obvious to everyone. Who knows whether Habermas had subsequently had his doubts. In the West, the welfare state emerged not in the USA but Europe, where the trade union and labour movement is traditionally more deep-rooted; and it emerged when that movement was at its strongest, because of the discredit which two world wars, the Great Depression, and fascism had brought upon capitalism. But is this refutation or confirmation of Marxâs theory of class struggle?
Habermas points to 1945 as the starting point for the construction of the welfare state in the West and the attenuation and disappearance of class struggle. The previous year, visiting the USA, the Swedish sociologist, Gunnar Myrdal, reached a dramatic conclusion: âsegregation is now becoming so complete that the white Southerner practically never sees a Negro except as his servant and in other standardized and formalized caste situationsâ. 6 Two decades later, the slave-master relationship between blacks and whites had far from disappeared: â[i]n the 1960s, more than 400 men of colour in Alabama were used as human guinea pigs by the government. Suffering from syphilis, they were not treated because the authorities wished to study the effects of the disease on a âpopulation sampleââ. 7 Historically, the decades from the end of the Second World War to the successful âpacification of class conflictâ also witnessed the explosion of the anti-colonial revolution. The peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America threw off the yoke of colonialism or semi-colonialism, while the USA saw the development of the struggle by African-Americans to end the regime of racial segregation and discrimination, which continued to oppress and degrade them, relegate them to the bottom rungs of the labour market and even treat them as guinea pigs. Did this massive revolutionary wave, which profoundly altered the division of labour globally and did not even leave it untouched in the USA, have something to do with class struggle? Or is the latter limited to the conflict pitting proletarians and capitalists, dependent labour, and haute bourgeoisie, against one another in a single country?
Such is clearly the opinion of a bestselling contemporary British historian, Niall Ferguson. In the major historical crisis of the first half of the twentieth century, âclass struggleâââthe supposed struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisieââplayed a very modest role. Decisive, instead, was what Hermann Göring, with his main focus on the conflict between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, defined as the âgreat racial warâ (see Chap. 5, Sect. 8). Does Nazi Germanyâs attempt to reduce Slavs to the condition of black slaves in the service of the master race, and the epic resistance to this war of colonial subjugation and actual enslavementâthe âgreat racial warâ undertaken by the Third Reichâmounted by entire peoples, have nothing to do with class struggle?
For Dahrendorf, Habermas, and Ferguson (but also, as we shall see, for distinguished scholars of a Marxist or post-Marxist persuasion), class struggle refers exclusively to the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisieâin fact, to a conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie that has become acute and of which both parties are conscious. But was this Marx and Engelsâ view? As is well known, having evoked âthe spectre of communismâ âhaunting Europeâ, and even before analysing the âexisting class struggleâ between proletariat and bourgeoisie, the Communist Manifesto opened with a statement that was destined to become famous and play a prominent role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary movements: âthe history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class strugglesâ(KlassenkĂ€mpfe). 8 The transition from the singular to the plural clearly signals that the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie is but one class struggle among others and the latter, running throughout world history, are by no means a feature exclusively of bourgeois, industrial society. Should any doubts remain, some pages later the Manifesto reiterates: âthe history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.â 9 Not only âclass strugglesâ but also the âformsâ they take in different historical epochs, different societies, and different concrete situations are declined in the plural. But what are the multiple class struggles or the multiple configurations of class struggle?
To answer this question, we must reconstruct the significance of a theory, as well as the alterations and oscillations it has undergone, philologically and logically. But textual history is insufficient; we must also refer to real history. What is required is a double reinterpretation of a historico-theoretical kind. On the one hand, we need to throw light on the theory of class struggle formulated by Marx and Engels, integrating it into the history of their development as philosophers and revolutionary militants and their active engagement in the political struggles of their time. On the other, we must determine whether this theory is capable of shedding light on the rich, tormented history that starts out from the Communist Manifesto.
Hence, the first reinterpretation concerns the theme of class struggle in âMarx and Engelsâ. But is this conjunction legitimate? I shall rapidly clarify the reasons for my approach. In the context of a division of labour and distribution of tasks that was jointly conceived and agreed, the authors of the Manifesto were in a relationship of constant collaboration and intellectual cross-fertilization. At least as regards politics proper and class struggle, they regarded themselves as members or leaders of a single âpartyâ. In a letter to Engels of 8 October 1858, after having raised an important theoretical and political problem (could an anti-capitalist revolution occur in Europe while capitalism remained in the ascendant in most of the world?), Marx exclaimed that â[f]or us, this is the difficult questionâ. 10 The indicated respondent is not an individual intellectual, however brilliant, but the leadership group of a po...