We explain what the class struggle is and how it is related to Marxist doctrine. Historical background. Class consciousness.
What is the class struggle?
The class struggle is a fundamental theoretical principle in the philosophical doctrine of Marxism and historical materialism.
It proposes the existence of conflicts on the society as a consequence of a dispute or antagonism between the sectors that compose it (the social classes), to the extent that each class tries to reorganize it politically and economically in its favor. From this constant struggle, inherent in all forms of human political organization, the political and social progress that makes up the History.
According to Marxist proposal, capitalist industrial society is the most recent in a succession of economic and social systems in which there has always been a tension between rich and poor, masters and slaves, feudal lords and serfs, or in contemporary terms, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
These tensions have dynamited the systems inside, pointing more and more towards new structures more egalitarian, in a process culminating in the classless society, of social equality and economical. Only then could the conflict be resolved.
The concept of the class struggle is popular among the leftist militancy and bases the revolutionary conception of the world, which aspires to detonate the insurgency of the oppressed classes in order to move from the capitalism to the communism, which would be its egalitarian and evolved form.
Historical background of the class struggle
Although it was formulated in (and is attributed to) the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the 19th century, from whose influence and popularity the doctrines of the socialism, communism and historical materialism, the antecedents of the class struggle can be traced much earlier, in the writings of Nicholas Machiavelli (16th century).
The Italian philosopher divided the sides in tension in any politically organized society between "the people" governed and "the great" rulers. Later, with the advent of the Modern era and the triumph of bourgeois values (such as the private property and the liberalism), these tensions became between owners and workers. Jean Jacques Rousseau, François Quesnay, Edmund Burke and the father of capitalism, Adam Smith studied this process in their respective works.
The anarchists, it should be added, were the ones who assumed the concept more similarly to how Machiavelli posed it, giving rise at the time to a wide range of political and philosophical positions regarding the way in which the overthrow of the bourgeois state should occur: anarcho-capitalism, the anti-statism, anarconidividualism, etc.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (Karl Marx in German) was the one who best formulated this concept and popularized it in the contemporary world. Taking the line thought that went from Machiavelli to Burke, proposed that the tensions of the class struggle pushed the wheel of history, generating progress and social change. His words were: "The (written) history of all existing societies up to now is the history of the class struggle”.
Thus, Marx formulates the “Theory of the class struggle as the engine of history”. In its view, this fight was to appropriate the means of production, kidnapped by the private property and the bourgeoisie in order to exploit the working class and maintain a privileged life status, at the cost of the efforts of the impoverished majority.
The resolution envisioned by Marx was the gradual transformation of capitalism until he himself planted the foundations of the Revolution, which would overthrow the bourgeois order and would establish the "Dictatorship of the proletariat", necessary for the advent of a classless society: communism.
Class consciousness
The doctrine Marxist calls "class consciousness" the ability of individuals and the masses to be aware of what social class they belong to, in order to act in accordance with the needs of their social class and not play the game. play of the ruling classes. Alienation is the opposite of class consciousness: the inability to perceive the capitalist exploitation to which the workers are subjected.
This terminology is widely used in the discourses of the revolutionary left and socialist ideologies, often as a mandate (class consciousness) or a pejorative term (alienation).