An original re-reading of the theory of Marx and Engels that draws on the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

As the economic crisis increases society’s polarization, making the historic memory of the Great Depression of 1929 newly relevant, condemns millions and millions to unemployment, a precarious existence, constant anxiety in the fight for survival, and even hunger, essays and articles on a “return of the class struggle” have proliferated. But had they ever ceased?
The class struggle is not just a conflict between the proprietary classes and subordinate forms of employment. It is also, as Marx denounced, the “exploitation of one nation by another” and, to paraphrase Engels, the oppression of women at the hands of men. We are therefore in the presence of three forms of class struggle, destined to radically change the division of labour and the dynamics of exploitation and oppression at international level, in sovereign nations, and within families. Given the massive upheavals marking the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the theory of the class struggle today appears more vital than ever, so long as it is not transformed into facile populism that reduces everything to the clash between the ‘meek’ and ‘powerful’, and neglects precisely the multiplicity of forms that social conflict can take. In a tightly woven debate that draws on the work of scholars such as Habermas, Arendt and Weil, and on the old and new currents of Marxism and post-Marxism (Negri, Zizek, Harvey…), Domenico Losurdo discusses the varying guises of an enduring conflict.