Class struggle
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Last updated: 2026-08-26
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism
Class struggle is not, in Marx, just another labor conflict.
It is the thesis that all history after the primitive community has the same motor: the confrontation between those who appropriate the labor of others and those who suffer it.
If that thesis falls, so do historical materialism, the proletariat as universal subject, and revolution as a “necessary” outcome.
1. What Marxism says
The formula is in the first line of the Manifesto (1848):
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Engels, in the 1883 preface, specifies the core he attributes to Marx: the mode of production and the organization that derives from it are the basis of political and intellectual history; therefore, since communal property in land was dissolved, history is a struggle between exploiters and exploited.
The proletariat cannot emancipate itself from the bourgeoisie without emancipating at once the whole of society from exploitation and from classes.
How a class is defined
Not by income, occupation, or “lifestyle.” By the relation to the means of production:
- Bourgeoisie: owners of the social means of production who employ wage labor.
- Proletariat: those who, deprived of means of their own, sell their labor power in order to exist.
The rest of history is read by the same criterion: freeman/slave, patrician/plebeian, lord/serf, guild master/journeyman.
Always “oppressor and oppressed,” in veiled or open struggle, which ends in a revolution that reconstitutes society or in the common ruin of both contending classes.
What capitalism “simplifies”
According to the Manifesto, the bourgeois epoch does not put an end to antagonisms: it reduces them to two camps.
The intermediate strata (peasants, artisans, petty bourgeoisie) tend to be proletarianized.
Only the proletariat is “really revolutionary”: the other classes decay with modern industry; it is its product.
That implies a dynamic, not a snapshot:
- Interests that are objectively antagonistic (wage vs. profit; control of the process vs. factory discipline).
- Passage from class in itself (same economic position) to class for itself (consciousness, organization, party).
- The ruling ideology is that of the ruling class; “false consciousness” explains the worker who does not recognize himself as a proletarian.
- The State is, in the last instance, the managing committee of the possessing class.
- Outcome: revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, extinction of classes.
In Capital the antagonism receives economic mechanics: surplus value. The conflict is not “they do not get along”; it is that the wage contract conceals the extraction of surplus labor.
Marx did not invent the idea of classes. He himself acknowledges debts to French historians of the Restoration (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet) and to economists who spoke of rents, wages, and profits. What is his own is to unify those struggles into a law of history and to make the industrial proletariat the last subject.
2. Austrian critiques
a) There is no homogeneous class interest (Mises)
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), in Socialism and Theory and History, attacks the assumption that “the bourgeoisie” or “the proletariat” are subjects with a common interest. Within each grouping there is competition:
- The worker in the protected sector does not have the same interest as the one in the exposed sector; the unionized worker, not the unemployed; the skilled, not the one entering the market.
- The entrepreneur does not form a bloc: he competes with other entrepreneurs for labor, credit, and customers. The “capitalist” who buys cheap and the one who sells dear are not a collective self.
If class struggle is carried to the end —every particular interest as a war of camps— one obtains a war of all against all, not a society.
Mises insists: real socialization is not struggle, but cooperation through the division of labor.
Struggle in the proper sense is antisocial: it prevents working together.
The market does not deny the conflict of valuations; it channels it into contracts instead of into camps.
Moreover, Marx never rigorously defines what a class is when the binary scheme ceases to serve (peasants, lumpen, financial aristocracy, bureaucracy). The theory needs sharp borders so that history has two actors; economic reality blurs them.
b) Polylogism: the class does not have a logic of its own
If social being determines consciousness, each class would have its “reason.”
Mises calls that polylogism.
Immediate consequence: the adversary’s argument is not refuted; it is classified (“bourgeois economics”).
But the Marxist uses the same logic when he calculates, organizes a union, or writes Capital. There are not two logics; there is one, and different positions on property and power.
Class struggle, so understood, ceases to be a testable hypothesis and becomes a filter: whoever does not struggle as he should is in false consciousness. That immunizes the theory.
c) The wage antagonism is not exploitation of a value-substance (Böhm-Bawerk)
Without the labor theory of value, the wage/profit clash does not prove a systematic theft.
The wage is the price of a service in time; profit includes interest (waiting), a risk premium, and the entrepreneurial function.
There can be conflict over the division of a joint product, as in any cooperation. That does not turn the parties into “historical classes” whose duel closes prehistory.
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) adds another angle: entrepreneur and worker do not confront each other as blocs of social substance. They coordinate —badly or well— through prices, even when they bargain. To treat that coordination as a mere mask of a war is not to see the informational function of the contract.
d) There was a liberal theory of classes before Marx —and it is another
The French liberals of the nineteenth century (Charles Comte, Dunoyer, Thierry; in the line of Turgot and, later, Bastiat) already spoke of classes.
The cut was not owner/wage-earner. It was producers versus plunderers: those who live from exchange and those who live from privilege, tax, war, and legal monopoly.
Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), McCaffrey, and Hoppe recover that line. There is class struggle, yes; but the axis is political, not the labor contract.
The exploiting class is the one that obtains rents by coercion (State, privileged guilds, banking with legal tender, tariffs). The exploited is the one that produces and is stripped. The market does not create that relation; privilege does.
Hoppe goes so far as to say that several Marxian theses (there are classes, there is exploitation, there is a tendency to centralize exploiting power) are “essentially correct” if the criterion is changed: exploitation = violation of property, not surplus value.
Marx’s error would have been to credit to the capitalist what belongs to the political apparatus.
Hence socialism, by maximizing the power of political allocation, does not extinguish class struggle: it statizes it.
e) Predictions that organized the struggle were not fulfilled
The scheme required: polarization into two camps, immiseration, disappearance of the middle strata, international solidarity of the proletariat above the nation.
What was observed in the West: expansion of middle classes, rise in the working-class standard of living, unions integrated into the political order, and in 1914 workers who killed one another for flags, not for the International.
Each failure can be redefined (“labor aristocracy,” “imperialism,” “hegemony”). That, for an Austrian, confirms that class struggle operates as a flexible narrative, not as a law.
4. Other useful objections
Nation, race, sex, caste. The twentieth century showed loyalties that do not line up with the wage relation. A worker may hate the foreign worker more than the national boss. Late Marxism (imperialism, colonialism, intersectionality) multiplies subjects in order to save the scheme; in doing so, it admits that “two classes” never sufficed.
Ancient and medieval history. “Patrician/plebeian” or “lord/serf” are not the same type of relation as capitalist/wage-earner. Forcing analogies erases institutions (citizenship, vassalage, fuero, guild) that are not mere masks of surplus value.
Biology and psychology of coalitions. Human primates form camps by kinship, status, territory, and reputation, not only by “relation to the means.” That does not “refute” that property matters. It does suggest that a single historical dualism is poor: there will always be coalitions, and the State is an especially effective machine for creating them (we who collect / you who pay). That is, in fact, the intuition of the liberal theory of classes.
5. What remains and what does not
What remains, and serious Austrians do not deny it, is that there are conflicts of interest tied to property, wages, privilege, and the fisc; that those who live from political rents tend to align; that the narrative of “one single people” conceals real exploitations.
What does not stand, if the Austrian and liberal critique is accepted:
- that all history is that duel;
- that capitalist and worker are, by definition, historical enemies and not cooperators in an order of exchanges;
- that consciousness is a function of class to the point of nullifying argumentation;
- that the industrial proletariat is the subject that closes the struggle forever;
- that abolishing private property in the means of production extinguishes classes instead of replacing them with an administrative class.
This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Marxism
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