INTRODUCTION TO MARXISM-LENINISM

SECTION I: The Fundamentals of Marxist Philosophy

Lesson 4 - The Class Struggle

TEXTS FOR DISCUSSION

1. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles … Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

(Marx, Communist Manifesto)

2. “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”

Questions:

1. In what ways does class struggle express a unity and conflict of opposites?
2. What are class interests? Why are they objective?
3. What are the class interests of the main classes in Australia?
4. In what ways has the capitalist class attempted to absorb the working class into the middle class? Will it succeed?
5. Is the Labor Party a working class party? Why or why not?

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Further and Recommended Reading

Class (Marxist Internet Archive: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms)

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