Marxism — The War of Classes

The chapter opens with a simple, clear scheme: class struggle is not the invention of individual «agitators» but a practice arising from wage labour itself. Workers' most basic struggle revolves around three demands — higher wages, shorter working hours without a pay cut, and freedom of association. The book adds an interesting historical detail: strikes are documented in ancient Egypt and China, and in Egypt under Roman rule in the first century AD. It then explains how organising a strike itself gives rise to class solidarity and mutual-aid funds.

The chapter then turns to the first forms of the political workers' movement: Gracchus Babeuf's «Conspiracy of Equals» in the French Revolution, the London Corresponding Society in England, the league for universal suffrage after the Napoleonic Wars, and finally the Chartist party. Here the book's factual weakness first appears: the Peterloo massacre is dated to 1817, when it took place in 1819. Such errors recur throughout — the Communist Manifesto is dated 1848 in one place and 1847 a few pages later, and the printing of Capital lands on «29 April 1967».

The section on utopian socialism is the chapter's most balanced part. The ideas of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen — seeing capitalism as wasteful, unjust and unplanned, and proposing common ownership of the means of production — are summarised clearly, and the book notes that the label «utopian» was attached to them later by the Marxist tradition, linked to Marx calling his own socialism «scientific». Huberman's remark that they knew where they wanted to go but not how to get there is well used.

The section on «the birth of Marxist theory» begins with an honest note: Marx and Engels did not discover the concepts of class and class struggle, which utopian socialists and bourgeois historians such as Thierry and Guizot had used before them. After that, however, the text shifts from description to advocacy: the Manifesto is presented as «the highest form of proletarian class consciousness», and the rest of the chapter consists of long extracts from the Manifesto itself — the «spectre haunting Europe» opening and the «Bourgeois and Proletarians» section. Reading the source text is useful, but it does not replace the author's own analysis.

The other chapters we read show the same problem. The biography calls Marx «one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived», describes members who drifted away from the Communist League as «turncoats» and «slippery» elements, and stresses the text's relevance for today's «working-class revolutionaries»; the Capital chapter covers not the economic theory but the story of the book's writing and printing; much of the third chapter is a quotation from Lenin's famous «Three Sources» essay. And the sentence on the Marx family's name change lets «Herschel» read as Karl Marx's own name, when it was the birth name of his father, Heinrich Marx.

In the end the book is of some use as an introduction to Marxism's classic texts and the chronology of the 19th-century workers' movement, but it does not answer the questions promised on the back cover — how Marxism disappeared, how it might be reborn, where the left intelligentsia went wrong; the collapse of the Soviet Union gets two sentences. We recommend that readers who want to study the subject seriously go straight to authors in the book's own bibliography such as Hobsbawm and Mandel, and read this volume alongside the series' other books on ideologies.

• Nine short chapters with brief marginal biographies
• Long extracts from the Communist Manifesto
• Author's and translator's bibliographies at the end