Has the class struggle returned?

Musings on Marx in the 21st Century

Karl Marx in 1875. Img: John Jabez Edwin Mayall - https://sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/de/werk/portraet-karl-marx, public domain

The most famous sentence from the Communist Manifesto is its first: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t aged well. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that sentence amid the social turmoil and despair of the 1840s, the idea of creating an order in which things are commonly owned and distributed according to need may indeed have been appealing to some struggling workers and therefore haunted the owning classes. But the historical realities that followed have disillusioned most people and relegated communism to the political fringes, at least in Europe.

Estimates of how many people were killed by the communist regimes of the 20th century vary, but historian Timothy Snyder reckons that Stalin alone killed between 6 and 9 million people, depending on whether you just count deliberate murders or also foreseeable deaths resulting from his policies. While some may still be willing to entertain the notion that theoretical communism should be distinguished from its “actually existing” forms in the real world, communism as a current political ambition appears to no longer be haunting Europe.

The second first sentence of the Manifesto is a different matter, the one that introduces not the preamble but the first chapter: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This, too, was long dismissed by many as nonsense.

Growing up in Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s — in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War — I was told in my history lessons and at university that viewing the human past through the lens of class conflict was something only Marxists did to distort the truth for their own nefarious purposes. To even speak of “classes” was at best considered outdated, at worst deviously ideological. Now, however, the concept appears to be enjoying a revival of sorts in Germany. The class struggle is back in mainstream discourse, used both by those who want to reconjure it and by those who fear its return.