Class Warfare In 2012. Ho, Ho, Ho

The media are filled with stories claiming that the Obama vs. Romney race is all about class warfare. I have my doubts. Here is why.


Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in their then-anonymous tract, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), began chapter 1 with these words: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

You would be hard-pressed to find any theory of history more wrong-headed than this one.

To prove their case, they should have defined "class." They never did. In the unpublished third volume of Das Kapital, Marx wrote this: "The first question to he answered is this: What constitutes a class?" – I see. The first question. This appears in Chapter 52. Three paragraphs later, the manuscript broke off.

This was written around 1865. He died in 1883. He never wrote another book. It appeared in 1895. Engels edited it. It would have helped if Marx had told us what a class is. In The Manifesto, he followed sentence one with this:

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