Class struggle is the conflict between social classes whose interests are structurally opposed within a given mode of production. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels placed it at the center of historical analysis: the history of all existing society, in their formulation, is the history of class struggles — freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Each pairing names a relation of exploitation in which one class appropriates the labor of another.
In capitalist society, Marx identified the primary antagonism as that between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (those who sell their labor power for wages). The bourgeoisie extracts surplus value from workers — the difference between the value workers produce and the value they receive as wages. This extraction is not incidental but structural: it is how capital accumulates. Class struggle, in this framework, is not a matter of individual grievances but of the objective contradiction between the interests of those who own and those who work.
The concept has been challenged on multiple fronts. Racial capitalism theorists, beginning with Cedric Robinson, argued that capitalism was racial from its origins — that class formation in Europe was always entangled with racial differentiation, and that treating race as secondary to class misidentifies how exploitation operates. Social reproduction theory demonstrates that the class relation presupposes unwaged reproductive labor, overwhelmingly performed by women, that produces laborers as laborers. Operaismo inverted the orthodox framing by insisting that working-class struggle drives capital’s development, not the other way around.
Indigenous and decolonial critiques raise a different problem. Class analysis, even in its most sophisticated forms, tends to center the wage relation and the factory as the primary site of exploitation. This framing erases the constitutive role of land dispossession — primitive accumulation and ongoing settler colonialism — in producing the conditions under which wage labor exists at all. For peoples whose primary relation to land is not ownership but kinship, class analysis as conventionally formulated does not describe the relevant antagonism.
Related terms
- Surplus value — the economic mechanism of class exploitation
- Historical materialism — the theoretical framework
- Racial capitalism — the critique that race is constitutive, not secondary
- Social reproduction — the unwaged labor class analysis tends to obscure
- Operaismo — the inversion of the capital-labor relation
- Primitive accumulation — the dispossession that precedes and accompanies wage exploitation
- Settler colonialism — the structure class analysis often erases