ABSTRACT
Marx's theory of the class-struggle was first explicitly formulated in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. Marx never restated it in a similar full and explicit form, though of course it underlay the whole of his thought. Actually, the unfinished final chapter of the third volume of Capital, edited from Marx's papers by Engels after his death, is the beginning of what promises to be a thorough discussion of the nature of economic classes and of their relationships. But this chapter remains the merest fragment, broken off before the exposition has fairly begun, and highly provocative in the wonder which it arouses. Would Marx, if he had expounded the nature of classes towards the close of his life, have written of them in the same terms as he had used more than thirty years before? Or would he have recognised that there had been, in the interval, vitally important changes in the class-structure of advanced industrial societies, and that these changes were, to some extent, different from the anticipations which he had entertained? The question is probably unanswerable; but let us at any rate remember that the familiar Marxian account of the class-struggle was written near the beginning of Marx's public life, and reflects the capitalist conditions of the first half of the nineteenth century, and not of Marx's later years.
