Marx inherited the ideas of class and class struggle from utopian socialism and the theories of Henri de Saint-Simon. These had been given substance by the writings of French historians such as Adolphe Thiers and François Guizot on the French Revolution of 1789. But unlike the French historians, Marx made class struggle the central fact of social evolution. “The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles.”

In Marx’s view, the dialectical nature of history is expressed in class struggle. With the development of capitalism, the class struggle takes an acute form. Two basic classes, around which other less important classes are grouped, oppose each other in the capitalist system: the owners of the means of production, or bourgeoisie, and the workers, or proletariat. “The bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers. The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (The Communist Manifesto) because

the bourgeois relations of production are the last contradictory form of the process of social production, contradictory not in the sense of an individual contradiction, but of a contradiction that is born of the conditions of social existence of individuals; however, the forces of production which develop in the midst of bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for resolving this contradiction. With this social development the prehistory of human society ends.

When people have become aware of their loss, of their alienation, as a universal nonhuman situation, it will be possible for them to proceed to a radical transformation of their situation by a revolution. This revolution will be the prelude to the establishment of communism and the reign of liberty reconquered. “In the place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and its class antagonisms, there will be an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

But for Marx there are two views of revolution. One is that of a final conflagration, “a violent suppression of the old conditions of production,” which occurs when the opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat has been carried to its extreme point. This conception is set forth in a manner inspired by the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave, in Die heilige Familie (1845; The Holy Family). The other conception is that of a permanent revolution involving a provisional coalition between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie rebelling against a capitalism that is only superficially united. Once a majority has been won to the coalition, an unofficial proletarian authority constitutes itself alongside the revolutionary bourgeois authority. Its mission is the political and revolutionary education of the proletariat, gradually assuring the transfer of legal power from the revolutionary bourgeoisie to the revolutionary proletariat.

If one reads The Communist Manifesto carefully one discovers inconsistencies that indicate that Marx had not reconciled the concepts of catastrophic and of permanent revolution. Moreover, Marx never analyzed classes as specific groups of people opposing other groups of people. Depending on the writings and the periods, the number of classes varies; and unfortunately the pen fell from Marx’s hand at the moment when, in Das Kapital (vol. 3), he was about to take up the question. Reading Das Kapital, one is furthermore left with an ambiguous impression with regard to the destruction of capitalism: will it be the result of the “general crisis” that Marx expects, or of the action of the conscious proletariat, or of both at once?

The contributions of Engels

Engels became a communist in 1842 and discovered the proletariat of England when he took over the management of the Manchester factory belonging to his father’s cotton firm. In 1844, the year he began his close association and friendship with Marx, Engels was finishing his Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie (Outline of a Critique of Political Economy)—a critique of Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and J.-B. Say. This remarkable study contained in seminal form the critique that Marx was to make of bourgeois political economy in Das Kapital. During the first years of his stay in Manchester, Engels observed carefully the life of the workers of that great industrial centre and described it in Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England (The Condition of the Working Class in England), published in 1845 in Leipzig. This work was an analysis of the evolution of industrial capitalism and its social consequences. He collaborated with Marx in the writing of The Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The Communist Manifesto. The correspondence between them is of fundamental importance for the student of Das Kapital, for it shows how Engels contributed by furnishing Marx with a great amount of technical and economic data and by criticizing the successive drafts. This collaboration lasted until Marx’s death and was carried on posthumously with the publication of the manuscripts left by Marx, which Engels edited, forming volumes 2 and 3 of Das Kapital. He also wrote various articles on Marx’s work.

In response to criticism of Marx’s ideas by a socialist named Eugen Dühring, Engels published several articles that were collected under the title Herr Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1878; Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, better known as Anti-Dühring), and an unfinished work, Dialektik und Natur (Dialectics of Nature), which he had begun around 1875–76. The importance of these writings to the subsequent development of Marxism can be seen from Lenin’s observation that Engels “developed, in a clear and often polemical style, the most general scientific questions and the different phenomena of the past and present according to the materialist understanding of history and the economic theory of Karl Marx.” But Engels was driven to simplify problems with a view to being pedagogical; he tended to schematize and systematize things as if the fundamental questions were settled. The connections that he thus established between some of Marx’s governing ideas and some of the scientific ideas of his age gave rise to the notion that there is a complete Marxist philosophy. The idea was to play a significant role in the transition of Marxism from a “critique of daily life” to an integrated doctrine in which philosophy, history, and the sciences are fused.

Anti-Dühring is of fundamental importance for it constitutes the link between Marx and certain forms of modern Marxism. It contains three parts: Philosophy, Political Economy, and Socialism. In the first, Engels attempts to establish that the natural sciences and even mathematics are dialectical, in the sense that observable reality is dialectical: the dialectical method of analysis and thought is imposed by the material forces with which they deal. It is thus rightly applied to the study of history and human society. “Motion, in effect, is the mode of existence of matter,” Engels writes. In using materialistic dialectic to make a critique of Dühring’s thesis, according to which political forces prevail over all the rest in the molding of history, Engels provides a good illustration of the materialistic idea of history, which puts the stress on the prime role of economic factors as driving forces in history. The other chapters of the section Political Economy form a very readable introduction to the principal economic ideas of Marx: value (simple and complex), labour, capital, and surplus value. The section Socialism starts by formulating anew the critique of the capitalist system as it was made in Das Kapital. At the end of the chapters devoted to production, distribution, the state, the family, and education, Engels outlines what the socialist society will be like, a society in which the notion of value has no longer anything to do with the distribution of the goods produced because all labour “becomes at once and directly social labour,” and the amount of social labour that every product contains no longer needs to be ascertained by “a detour.” A production plan will coordinate the economy. The division of labour and the separation of town and country will disappear with the “suppression of the capitalist character of modern industry.” Thanks to the plan, industry will be located throughout the country in the collective interest, and thus the opposition between town and country will disappear—to the profit of both industry and agriculture. Finally, after the liberation of humanity from the condition of servitude imposed by the capitalist mode of production, the state will also be abolished and religion will disappear by “natural death.”

One of the most remarkable features of Anti-Dühring is the insistence with which Engels refuses to base socialism on absolute values. He admits only relative values, linked to historical, economic, and social conditions. Socialism cannot possibly be based on ethical principles: each epoch can successfully carry out only that of which it is capable. Marx had written this in his preface of 1859.