“The workers 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 a few of the slogans still in use today that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first popularized in 1848, when they wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The slogans, and the class society they describe, are just as relevant now as when they were written more than 175 years ago.
The Communist Manifesto describes how society developed over time into what is today roughly two great classes. Marxists often call the 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 the property of industry and commerce — the factories, banks, telecommunications companies, retail stores and more. Most politicians in a capitalist democracy are either direct members of the ruling class or its hired agents. Managers, police officers, judges and corporate newspaper editors are ruling-class agents too. The ruling class makes its profits by exploiting the labor of the working class. These capitalists see money as a means to make more money and increase their power. Money reinvested to make more money is called capital.
The ruling class is a small bunch, and many of their 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 a few of the biggest names in modern capitalism.
The working class includes all the people who create the goods and services in capitalist society. These workers can survive only by working for someone else — a capitalist. A person is still working class even if they’ve got money in the market — a retirement account, a few shares on an app. Owning a sliver is not the same as living off it. The capitalist can stop working and keep collecting; the worker cannot.
The unemployed are also workers. Unemployment is a constant feature of capitalism, built into the system. As capital installs machines and drives for profit, it throws workers out of work faster than it takes new ones on, keeping a reserve army of the unemployed. Their competition for jobs holds wages down and lets the bosses hire cheap when business expands.
Stay-at-home parents are also members of the working class. Their unpaid labor is needed to raise the next generation of workers. Children are workers’ dependents, brought up and trained to be future workers; the children of workers are members of the working class.
The working class is a single international class, split into separate nations by the history of class rule. Those borders are not natural or eternal — the modern nation is a creation of the capitalist era, a few centuries old — and the ruling class uses them to set worker against worker. (How states and classes first arose is taken up in How the state arose.)
The U.S. working class is multinational. A large portion of the workers here belong to oppressed Black, Latine, Asian, Native and Arab nationalities. Some are immigrants, documented or not. Workers from the oppressed nationalities, including immigrants, form a super-exploited section of the working class. What all workers have in common is that their labor produces the wealth of society — and that they do not own or control it.
Between the two classes there is no peace. The bosses live by squeezing as much unpaid labor from the workers as they can; the workers fight to keep more of what they produce. Out of that clash comes the daily struggle — over wages, hours, safety, the speed of the line, the right to organize — waged every time workers form a union, walk a picket line, or strike.
But the fight cannot stop at a better paycheck. As long as the ruling class owns the factories, the banks and the land, and holds the government, the courts and the police to guard that ownership, every gain the workers win can be taken back. The workers’ deepest interest is not a better deal from the bosses but an end to their rule. That is what socialist revolution means: the working class — the great majority — taking power out of the hands of the tiny class above it, and taking the factories, banks and land into common ownership, to be run for human need instead of private profit. Marx and Engels pointed to the Paris Commune of 1871, when the workers of Paris held power in their own hands for 72 days, as the first glimpse of that rule.
The class struggle runs through all of written history. Under capitalism it has brought forth the force that can end class rule for good — an international working class with the numbers, the place in production and the interest to remake the world. They have a world to win.
Additional reading
Manifesto of the Communist Party — by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848). The founding statement of the class struggle and the workers’ aim; the source of the slogans above.
The Paris Commune — by Karl Marx
Introduction by Friedrich Engels to The Civil War in France – “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? 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 power rather than take over the existing state — drawing directly on Marx and Engels on the Commune.
- Return to What is Marxism?