Class Struggle and Historical Materialism

The Communist Manifesto opens with one of the most famous sentences in modern intellectual history: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. It is worth pausing on how large a claim that is.

Marx and Engels are not saying that class conflict sometimes plays a role in history, or that economic factors are one among several important causes of historical change. They are saying that the fundamental dynamic of human history — across all eras, all civilizations, all cultures — is the conflict between groups defined by their relationship to the means of production. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman: each era has its own version of this basic opposition. In the era of capitalism, the opposition is between the bourgeoisie (those who own the means of production) and the proletariat (those who must sell their labor to survive).

This is an empirical claim — a claim about how history actually works, not just how it should work. And like any empirical claim, it can be tested against evidence, refined, and challenged. One of the things you will want to keep in mind as you read is whether you find this account convincing. Does it explain what it claims to explain? What does it leave out?

But before evaluating the claim, you need to understand what exactly it is. That requires unpacking the theoretical framework Marx brings to the Manifesto — particularly the idea of historical materialism.

Historical materialism is Marx’s account of how history works. The name has two parts worth unpacking separately.

Materialist means that the foundation of any society is not its ideas, its values, or its culture — but its material conditions of production. How do people produce the things necessary for life? What tools and technologies do they have? How is labor organized? Who owns the means of production — the land, the factories, the equipment? These economic facts, Marx argues, are primary. They determine — or at least powerfully constrain — everything built on top of them: law, politics, religion, art, philosophy.

Marx uses the image of base and superstructure. The economic base is the foundation: the productive forces (technology, resources, labor) and the relations of production (who owns what, who works for whom). The superstructure is everything built on that foundation: legal systems, political institutions, cultural forms, ideological frameworks. The superstructure is not simply a neutral reflection of the base — it is shaped by it, and it tends to serve the interests of those who control the base.

Historical means that these conditions change over time, and that they change in a specific way — through the dialectical conflict between the existing mode of production and the contradictions that develop within it. Feudalism gave way to capitalism not because people had better ideas, but because the existing mode of production could no longer contain the productive forces developing within it. Capitalism, Marx argues, will follow the same logic: it generates contradictions — particularly the deepening conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat — that will eventually produce a new mode of production.

This is a Hegelian structure: development through contradiction and resolution. But where Hegel’s dialectic runs through ideas and Spirit, Marx’s runs through material conditions and class conflict. As Marx put it: it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.

Marx defines the two main classes of capitalist society in terms of their relationship to the means of production — not in terms of income, lifestyle, or social status, though those tend to follow.

The bourgeoisie are those who own the means of production: the factories, the equipment, the land used for industrial agriculture, the financial capital that funds production. They do not primarily work with their own hands. They hire workers and profit from the surplus value those workers produce. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels trace the historical rise of the bourgeoisie from the merchant class of the medieval guilds through the great commercial and industrial expansion that followed the discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The proletariat are those who own no means of production and must therefore sell their labor power to survive. They work for wages. And crucially, on Marx’s analysis, the wage they receive is systematically less than the value their labor produces — the difference being extracted as profit by the owners. This is not a matter of individual employers being greedy or dishonest; it is how the system is structured. Competition among capitalists forces them to extract as much surplus as possible, or fall behind those who do.

Marx and Engels are at pains in Part 1 of the Manifesto to acknowledge the historical achievements of the bourgeoisie. Capitalism has revolutionized production, created enormous wealth, broken down the old feudal social structures, and connected the whole world through trade and commerce. They write with something close to admiration for the dynamism and energy of the capitalist class. But they argue that this same dynamism contains a fatal contradiction: capitalism produces the very class — the industrial proletariat — that will eventually bring it down.

The proletariat grows larger, more concentrated (in factories and cities), and more organized as capitalism develops. The conditions of capitalist production, Marx argues, forge the working class into a potential political force even as they exploit it. This is the dialectical logic at the heart of Part 1 of the Manifesto.

One of the most philosophically interesting aspects of historical materialism is what it implies about ideas — including the ideas people use to understand and justify their own society.

If the superstructure is shaped by the base, then the dominant ideas in any era tend to be the ideas of the dominant class. The ruling class controls not just economic production but the production of ideas: through the institutions they fund, the culture they shape, the education system they design, the religion they support. The result is that the ideology — the set of ideas, values, and assumptions — that circulates most widely in a society tends to reflect the interests of those at the top, and tends to make the existing arrangement seem natural, inevitable, and just.

Think about the concept of private property. In a capitalist society, the right to own and profit from property is typically presented as a basic feature of human nature and social order — something that any rational person would recognize as just. Marx argues that this is not a neutral philosophical conclusion. It is an ideological one: a conclusion that happens to serve the interests of those who own the most property, dressed up as a universal principle. The same analysis applies to ideas about the market as natural and efficient, about competition as a fundamental human drive, about inequality as an expression of merit.

None of this means the people holding these ideas are lying or consciously manipulating anyone. The point is more subtle and more unsettling than that: the ideas feel true, feel obvious, feel like simply seeing the world clearly. That is precisely what makes ideology so effective. It does not announce itself as ideology. It presents itself as common sense.

This has a profound implication: the critique of capitalism cannot simply be a matter of pointing out that it is unjust and expecting people to agree. If people’s sense of justice is itself shaped by the system, the critique has to go deeper — it has to expose how the framework of evaluation was produced. This is one of the most original and challenging aspects of Marx’s project.

Part 1 of the Manifesto (“Bourgeois and Proletarians”) covers the most theoretical ground. As you read, watch for these moves: