Reviewed by Joseph Jamison
May 6, 2025
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Class Struggle, A Political and Philosophical History by Domenico Losurdo (first published 2013 in Italian, translated into English 2016) (Palgrave MacMillan, N.Y. 363 pp.) Translated by Gregory Elliott.
The late Domenico Losurdo’s recently translated works Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (translated 2023); Western Marxism (translated 2024) are making him better known to English-speaking readers. A slightly earlier book, Class Struggle, A Political and Philosophical History, reviewed here, is an equally significant study, and its subject matter is all-important.
In fact, there is hardly an idea more fundamental to Marxism than class struggle. The very first lines of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto (1848) proclaim:
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 reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Marx’s word is plural, not singular, “class struggles,” a fact that Losurdo considers highly significant.
Class Struggle takes up so many questions it is impossible in a short review to give an exhaustive picture of the richness of this work. Losurdo’s method is to make no assertion about theory not backed up by a reference to a historical example. The book is organized chronologically in 13 chapters. He surveys the evolution of the concept of class struggle from early Marx and Engels, to their mature works, to Lenin, Gramsci, Mao, Deng, and later theorists up to the present.
Marx did not originate the theory of class struggle. In a letter of March 5, 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer Marx wrote:
As for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
In Class Struggle, Domenico Losurdo’s main thesis is that the concept of class struggle, as developed by Marx and Engels, should be understood as a comprehensive theory of social conflict that transcends simplistic, binary interpretations. In other words: the class struggle is not merely the conflict between capitalists and workers. A key Losurdo idea is the need to overcome “the binary interpretation of social conflict, which perceives only one contradiction (for example, opposing rich and poor) which does not make it possible to understand emancipatory movements, whose social basis is not formed exclusively of poor people.”[1]
Losurdo critiques the populist tendency to reduce class struggle to a moral opposition between the poor and the rich, arguing that such a perspective overlooks the complexity and multifaceted nature of social conflicts. Instead, he emphasizes that Marx, Engels and Lenin arrived at a concept of class struggle that includes struggles for national liberation, gender equality, and anti-colonial movements, each interwoven in unique historical contexts.
Written in the years following the 2008 global financial crash, which revived memories of the 1930s Great Depression and its fierce class struggles and unprecedented interest in Marxism, Class Struggle begins by noting how in recent decades major bourgeois thinkers (for example, sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, philosopher Jurgen Habermas, historian Niall Ferguson) had complacently dismissed Marxism’s claim that class struggle is the driving force of history. However, the 2008 crash may have given them a reason to rethink their position.
Losurdo aims:
“to reconstruct the significance of a theory as well as the alterations and oscillations it has undergone… we need to throw light on the theory of class struggle formulated by Marx and Engels, integrating it into the history of their development as philosophers and revolutionary militants and their active engagement in the political struggles of their time…we must determine whether this theory is capable of shedding light on the rich, tormented history that starts out from the Communist Manifesto.”[2]
Losurdo contends that Marx and Engels developed their theory of class struggle in “fits and starts” and only gradually did they arrive at a mature formulation, which included not only the central worker-capitalist contradiction, but also national, racial, and colonial oppression and gender inequality. The book traces the evolution of the concept of class struggle through history, highlighting how it has manifested in different forms—such as slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—beyond the few industrialized capitalist societies of Marx’s time.
In the late 19th century there were rival theories (“paradigms” is Losurdo’s phrase ) to explain the main dynamic of history: for example, the racial theory of Arthur de Gobineau, or the stereotypical characteristics attributed to that or that people by John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hippolyte Taine, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and even the psychopathological theory of Gustave le Bon used to explain the many political convulsions of modern France.
Losurdo offers this typology: On the one hand there are conflicts that counterpose exploiting classes – when the bourgeoisies of various nations rise up against the landed aristocracy and the old regime, overthrow it, and then confront one another in fierce competition, possibly leading to war. Then there are emancipatory class struggles: Workers against capitalists (the main interest of Marx and Engels) but also colonial peoples against colonizing powers, and oppressed women against patriarchal men. Losurdo’s view is:
In short, what escapes, [Benedetto] Croce and [Karl] Popper and [Niall] Ferguson is the role played by class struggle in the contradictions, clashes and confrontations that seem purely national and racial in character. None of them appreciates that Marx and Engels’s theory of class struggle is a general theory of social conflict, even if it is not organically and systematically expounded.[3]
Losurdo shows that Engels and even Marx did not always handle the complexity of social conflict well. For example, in the 1848-49 revolutions which shook the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the archreactionary ruler Count Metternich used the legitimate national aspirations of smaller peoples (Croats, Cossacks) to mobilize them against the revolutionary workers of Vienna and Budapest. Defending the workers, Engels denounced the “counterrevolutionary” peoples who were fighting the revolutionary workers and even advocated the use of force against them. Another example: in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a journal edited by Marx, an article by Engels dated Feb. 15, 1849 states “thanks to the bravery of the American volunteers, splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it.”[4] Losurdo notes that a more mature Engels would of course change his view. He advises “We must not lose sight of the conflict of liberties… a historical situation can require the ranking of class struggles.”
Losurdo observes that ruling classes can instrumentalize a class-struggle demand – in the 19th century Britain Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli granted the right to vote to the popular classes—in exchange for support for the policy of colonial expansion.
By the early 20th century, with the development of imperialism and consequently opportunism in the socialist movement represented by Eduard Bernstein in Germany and the Fabian Society in Britain, Lenin “could no longer share the illusion harbored by Marx and Engels in their youth” that the condition of the proletariat by itself would impel it to revolutionary consciousness. In “What Is to be Done?” (1903) Lenin set out his view that a new kind of party was needed to enable the working class to achieve revolutionary consciousness and to lead a revolutionary struggle against class oppression, national and colonial oppression, and gender inequality. Losurdo states that “Lenin’s great theoretical merit is that he superseded the binary interpretation of class struggle for good and broke with the sensualist epistemology of Marx and Engels’s early writing.” Young Marx and Engels thought that revolutionary consciousness would arise automatically from the very condition of the proletariat.
Losurdo maintains that Lenin, with his theory that in October 1917 “capitalism broke at the weakest link in the chain,” to explain why a revolution occurred in Russia and not elsewhere, broke with the binary interpretation of the revolutionary process. Lenin encouraged agitation in the factories not only on economic demands but also on “struggles for recognition” (a Hegelian term), i.e., more respectful treatment by employers.
Surveying Bolshevik policy in the post revolution aftermath, Losurdo quotes Lenin “the class struggle is continuing – it has merely changed its forms.” So-called War Communism (1918-1920), when followed by the New Economic Policy (1921-29), tested all of Lenin’s persuasive powers to win his party comrades to a less heady but more realistic view of the class struggle.
A sympathetic student of People’s China, Losurdo gives considerable attention to the Chinese revolution and its class struggles. After discussing the two forms of inequality (within a given nation and between nations) – he declares that two tragic chapters in the Peoples Republic’s history, the Great Leap Forward (1959-61) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), represented attempts to tackle both forms of inequality at the same time. They ended up aggravating both.
From Deng Xiaoping’s point of view China’s turn under his leadership (1978 onward) was the second revolution or a new stage of the revolution but for his domestic opponents and a large number of Western Marxists, it was a bourgeois and capitalist counterrevolution. How are we to explain these opposed interpretations?[5]
Losurdo answers: once socialism was portrayed as “free of any contradictions and conflict and, in any event, as totally different from the existing order — in fact, from any historically existing order – the affirmation of the non-socialist character of the revolution in Russia, or any other country was tautological.”[6]
Mao, even before Deng, declared China’s policy to be the “political expropriation” of the bourgeoisie, but only its partial economic expropriation. People’s China, with a substantial private sector, has therefore a contradictory, hybrid character. Losurdo declares, “It is enough to enter a privately owned Chinese firm to realize the influence wielded within it by the Communist Party and organized Communist workers.”[7] He concludes, “Nobody can foresee the outcome of this struggle.”[8]
Losurdo contends that class struggle has its limits: the attribution to class struggle of a sovereign power to remould (and even erase) the social being of the state, nation, religion, market and so forth:
made a decisive contribution to the defeat suffered by the socialist project between 1989 and 1991; in difficult or dramatic situations this view acts like a kind of a drug, burdening the struggle for social change with excessive expectations. Intoxication gave way to exhaustion. And on the eve of its collapse the condition of real socialism in Eastern Europe was one of exhaustion.
While he does not propose a full theory of the defeat of socialism in 1989-91, scattered throughout the work are references to his view that labor indiscipline (“anarchy in the workplace”, absenteeism, malingering) played a significant role in the defeat of socialism.[9]
The counterrevolution in Eastern Europe in 1989-91, and the brutal de-modernization of the Soviet Union in the 1990s can be seen as class struggle. In the USSR it was accompanied by a cratering of adult male longevity and decimation of vulnerable social groups such as pensioners and children. Losurdo sees the exploiting, thieving post-Soviet oligarchs as a new class effecting “a new primitive accumulation of capital.” They accomplished a “dis-emancipation.” Losurdo believes that, after 1989-91 in conditions of a theoretical crisis of Marxism, “a tendency to evade the challenge involved in interpreting the tangle of contradictions — what might be characterized as the populist tendency to fall back on the binary interpretation of conflict – asserts itself.”
The global crash of 2008 has changed things. “Today…the theory of class struggle once again enjoys a large and sometimes sympathetic audience.”[10]
Losurdo concludes: “what is needed more than ever is a re-reading of Marx’s theory of class struggles (plural). Only thus can we reappropriate an indispensable tool for understanding the historical process and undertaking struggles for emancipation”.[11]
Domenico Losurdo (1941-2018) blended his academic work with open political commitments. He joined the PCI (Communist Party of Italy) at age 19. He was a Marxist professor of philosophy and history at the University of Urbino. The PCI, which had led the armed antifascist resistance in Italy, emerged from the Second World War as the second largest party in the country. In 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and many Communist parties either dissolved or else moved to social reformist positions, he joined Partito della Rifondazione Comunista. (Party of Communist Refoundation).
This is not a book that can be skimmed. It needs to be read slowly and carefully. It is amply footnoted and has a large bibliography that suggests the immense learning of Losurdo. There is a useful name index. It is not for beginners in Marxism; it presupposes a certain familiarity with Marxism and with modern history. Careful readers, however, will be rewarded by the book’s convincing defense of the unrivaled explanatory power of the Marxist theory of class struggle.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Class Struggle, 102
[2] Ibid., 5.
[3] Ibid., 46.
[4] Ibid., 130.
[5] Ibid., 196.
[6] Ibid., 199.
[7] Ibid., 303.
[8] Ibid. 302.
[9] Ibid., 237-238.
[10] Ibid., 276.
[11] Ibid 341.
