This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.
It was Aristotle who first observed that civilization does not really begin until an economic surplus is produced by one class for use by another—a point taken up by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the opening line of The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”1
Without slaves and masters, plebeians and patricians, serfs and lords, workers and capitalists, then systems of writing, military, philosophy or political authority could not have been developed and expressed by civilization. While a surplus depends on a labouring majority of the population to produce it, throughout history it has been captured by a minority of ruling class elites who have used it to entrench authority. The struggle over production and control of this surplus is known as class conflict and it manifests itself in myriad ways—terms of interest and debt, governmental leadership, monetary policy, the dictatorship of the workplace, cost of education and healthcare, decisions regarding the social safety net, access to home ownership and the rights of tenants, etc. It is within this confrontation between elites and the labouring masses that all political decisions are made and social direction is taken.
Class systems, while persistent and stubborn, have no basis in nature and present themselves as an obstacle to harmonious living. This is why both Thomas Jefferson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed indigenous societies provided more happiness and social stability to their members, as fruits of labour were democratically allocated and law was a matter of popular opinion instead of a violently-enforced dictate by one class onto another. Marx writes:
One thing, however, is clear—nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other, men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.2
As discussed in the article on capitalism, it is only when the capital owner meets in the marketplace those with nothing but their labour to sell that the capitalist mode of production is born. From this point onward, workers and capitalists are locked into an interpenetration of opposites and go on to supplant the previously dominant lord and serf class relation in Europe before conquering the globe. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, proto-capitalism could only be concerned with looting existing riches from the technologically disadvantaged. And while the coercive elements of capitalism have never disappeared, it did manage to become a mode of production in its own right—the most productive to ever exist—owing to the unlocking of resources on a massive scale, subsequent technological innovation and the forceful drawing of an urban wage labour pool from the countryside. The latter is a process still underway in many less-developed parts of the world.
Like feudalism and the slave economies of antiquity, multiple classes exist along the base and superstructure of capitalism: bureaucrats, intellectuals, media personalities, contractors and soldiers exist alongside destitute slum-dwellers, drug addicts and the fully homeless. But the employer–employee relation is dominant because it enables vast wealth and power to concentrate in few hands and produces almost every available good and service for consumption. These two classes are inter-dependent, they cannot exist without the other and yet they possess contrary material interests: the employer wants to keep wages paid for labour time as low as possible, while the employee wants the opposite. Owing to this contradiction, capitalism has witnessed a succession of struggles over union-organizing, outsourcing of jobs to cheaper, less-regulated countries and political conflict at the state level over public benefits and investment.
Consciously recognized or not, class conflict between employers and employees provide much of the friction that animates our politics, society and individual lives. Despite the inter-dependence of these two great classes, the power imbalance clearly favours capital owners. While an employer may choose to hire a worker to assist in generating profits, the employer will have many prospective employees to choose from and, in any case, does not need any specific worker in order to survive. This is not true for the worker, who must find employment to survive and will have far fewer employment prospects available to them than an employer will have prospective employees. In other words, as presently constructed, the capitalist class needs the working class to create value but the working class needs the capitalist class to actually survive.
This power imbalance that exists at the economic base of capitalism likewise manifests in the superstructure. Whereas the Catholic Church played the dominant role in mediating class relations and asserted the nobility’s “divine right to rule” during feudalism, it is the state that performs this function in capitalism. As the locus of production shifted from farmlands and enslaved populations toward a global web of resource extraction and colonial markets, a robust state apparatus in the service of the capital class became necessary to ensure the protection of property throughout the supply chain:
State formation and the origins of financial capitalism were closely connected, and this nexus provided a way for prosperous urban citizens in high finance, a small elite, to establish their influence on politics while simultaneously making their entrepreneurial success dependent on powerful rulers and their shifting political fortunes.3
It is through the capitalist state apparatus that much of the world became exploited as colonies or subjugated by unequal treaties in the service of investment. It is through this state apparatus that great wars over resources and markets are fought, where great masses of debt are leveraged, where prisons are filled, where school curriculums are devised, where infrastructure projects are authorized, interest rates are set and budgets are formed. All of this is carried out under the direction of elite stakeholders, while the public is only roused to “vote” every so often for this-or-that corporate-backed political party. Since this vote is the only meaningful say that the public has in its own politics, Emma Goldman adroitly observed: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”4
If the state were in the hands of the public, it would be unlikely to mediate class conflict in the interests of capital owners. But in the hands of financial capital, the state has the unique ability to socialize costs and privatize profits. For example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was funded largely by debts leveraged against the American taxpayer and fought with the bodies of working-class sons and daughters. Meanwhile trillions of dollars of public money disappeared into the pockets of bondholders and the CEOs of defence contractors. Another example was during the COVID-19 response when central banks around the world acted in unison to eliminate interest rates and prop up stock market assets by printing money at a time of mass lay-offs and restrictions on movement for the non-yacht owning public. In the aftermath, it is no surprise that the capital owners came out wealthier than ever before while the global working class suffers crippling inflation and a punitive cost of living. This is the capitalist state working as intended—socializing costs and privatizing gains—and this service is the chief reason why “a stateless capitalism is unthinkable.”5
From its outset, capitalism was predicated on the violent destruction of traditional societies, the coercive acquisition of wealth, class conflict, environmental ruination and reinventions of production in the interest of profit. These core characteristics have hardly changed. Workers and consumers alike are powerless relative to the capital-controlled market, and the state is in the hands of those same elite interests lurking behind every crisis, making a serene life on this Earth nearly impossible. While capitalist technology has given humanity the tools to solve economic scarcity, employing them in a socially and ecologically harmonious way is stonewalled by a state of class contradiction. Class consciousness describes the active decisions of one class to pursue their interests by state capture and force. The economic elites have accomplished this. But there is an emerging consciousness bubbling under the surface of digital connectivity, a new language developing in the full sunlight of existing oligarchy. Once working class consciousness has crystallized, the construction of a new, liberatory government may commence.
Further Reading:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019), 120. ↩︎
Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2016), 43. ↩︎
This quotation is somewhat apocryphal, and is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain as well. ↩︎
David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 72. ↩︎
