“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.” “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” “Workers of the world, unite!”
These are among the ideas and slogans Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gave revolutionary expression to in 1848, when they wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The class society they described is just as relevant now as it was more than 175 years ago.
The Communist Manifesto describes how capitalist society developed toward two great opposing classes. Marxists call the capitalist ruling class the bourgeoisie and the working class the proletariat. Each class is defined by its relationship to the major means of production.
The ruling class makes up a tiny minority of society. It owns or controls the great means of production and finance — factories, banks, telecommunications companies, retail corporations, transportation networks and much more. Most politicians in a capitalist democracy either belong to this class or serve its interests. Managers administer capitalist workplaces; judges, police and the armed forces enforce the existing system of property and class rule; capitalist media help defend and justify it.
The capitalist class grows rich through the exploitation of workers’ labor. Capital is not simply money or machinery. Money, factories and machinery become capital when they are used to employ workers and expand value for their owners. The capitalist advances wealth in order to come back with more.
The ruling class is a small group, and many of its names are household words. Elon Musk — who in 2026 became the world’s first trillionaire — Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Warren Buffett and the Walton family that owns Walmart are among the biggest names in modern capitalism.
The working class is far larger. It consists broadly of people who do not own the major means of production and therefore depend on selling their labor power in order to live. It includes industrial and warehouse workers, teachers and nurses, service and retail workers, drivers, programmers, farmworkers, public employees and millions of others.
A worker can still be working class while owning a retirement account or a few shares of stock. Owning a sliver is not the same as living off it. The capitalist can stop working and continue drawing income from ownership and from the wealth created by others; the worker generally cannot.
Unpaid household labor is also indispensable to working-class life. Raising children, cooking, cleaning and caring for family members reproduce the working class from one generation to the next. This work has historically been imposed on women, even though it is necessary for the whole society.
The unemployed remain part of the working class. Capitalist accumulation continually creates unemployment and underemployment. Capitalists use part of the profit extracted from workers’ labor to buy new machinery and technology that can produce more with fewer workers. As businesses close, production shifts and labor-saving technology spreads, workers are thrown out of jobs even while capital grows. Marx called this unemployed and underemployed population an industrial reserve army. Its existence puts pressure on employed workers: the threat of unemployment helps employers hold wages down and impose worse conditions.
High unemployment and the lack of decent jobs also bear heavily on young people. When civilian life offers unemployment, low wages or insecurity, military service can appear to offer a paycheck, housing, healthcare, education and a way out. Economic insecurity becomes a recruiting weapon for the armed forces, drawing working-class youth into the military machine.
The working class is an international class. Workers in different countries live under different historical conditions and belong to different nations and peoples, but they share a common relationship to capital. Capital crosses borders in search of labor, markets, resources and profit, while ruling classes use national divisions, racism and chauvinism to set workers against one another.
The working class is an international class. Workers in different countries live under different historical conditions and belong to different nations and peoples, but they share a common relationship to capital. Capital crosses borders in search of labor, markets, resources and profit, while ruling classes use national divisions, racism and chauvinism to set workers against one another and rally them behind the competition of capitalist powers for markets and resources.
Many immigrant workers face the threat of deportation, which employers can use to hold down wages, steal wages already earned and weaken workers’ resistance. Mass incarceration has created a vast pool of prison labor that is unpaid or paid only pennies, while disproportionately imprisoning oppressed peoples.
These divisions are part of the class struggle. Capitalists use them again and again to divide workers, weaken resistance and enlist working people behind their own struggle for markets, resources and profit. Real working-class unity cannot be built by ignoring racism, national oppression, women’s oppression or anti-LGBTQ+ oppression. It has to be built through struggle against them.
Between the capitalist and working classes there is an irreconcilable conflict of interests. Capitalists seek as much surplus value as possible from workers’ labor. Workers fight for higher wages, shorter hours, safer conditions and greater control over their working lives.
Out of that contradiction comes the daily class struggle — over wages, hours, safety, the speed of work, layoffs and the right to organize. It appears whenever workers form a union, walk a picket line, occupy a workplace or strike.
But the class struggle does not stop at the workplace.
In political struggles, workers can unite with oppressed peoples, students, rebellious sections of the military and other exploited and oppressed layers of society against capitalist rule.
Nor can the fight stop at a better paycheck. As long as the capitalist class owns the great means of production and controls a state apparatus — government, courts, police, prisons and armed forces — built to maintain its rule, gains won by workers can be weakened or taken back.
The deepest interest of the working class is therefore not simply a better deal from the capitalist class, but an end to capitalist rule.
That is what socialist revolution means: the working class and its allies taking political power out of the hands of the capitalist minority and bringing the great means of production — major industry, finance, transportation, communications and large-scale landholdings — into social ownership, to be organized around human need instead of private profit.
Marx and Engels pointed to the Paris Commune of 1871, when the workers of Paris held political power for 72 days, as the first historical glimpse of working-class rule.
The class struggle runs through written history wherever exploiting and exploited classes confront one another. Under capitalism it has brought into being a force capable of ending class rule itself: an international working class with the numbers, the place in production and the interest to remake the world.
It is revolutionary because of its position under capitalism: capital cannot exist without workers, while workers can organize society without capitalists.
They have a world to win.
Additional reading
Manifesto of the Communist Party — by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848). The classic statement of the struggle between the capitalist and working classes and the revolutionary aim of the proletariat.
The Paris Commune — by Karl Marx (1871). An excerpt from Marx’s The Civil War in France, written immediately after the Commune, examining the first historical experience in which the working class seized political power.
Introduction to The Civil War in France — by Frederick Engels (1891). Written for the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune. Engels draws out its lessons for working-class state power and concludes: “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
The State and Revolution — by V.I. Lenin (1917). Written on the eve of the Russian Revolution, on why the working class must build its own political power rather than simply take over the existing capitalist state.
Class Struggle in Africa — by Kwame Nkrumah (1970). Examines class divisions, imperialism and neocolonialism in Africa and places the African class struggle within the wider struggle for socialism. The first edition was published in 1970.
Strike! — by Jeremy Brecher (1972; revised and expanded 2014). A history of mass strikes and working-class rebellion in the U.S., told largely from the standpoint of rank-and-file workers. The expanded edition carries the story into more recent struggles.
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