Class denial and class renewal in America

Abstract

“All history is the history of class struggles.” When Marx and Engels wrote this in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, neither the capitalist nor the working class constituted a majority of society. Instead this majority consisted of vast strata of large and small proprietors of land and small enterprises (and the peasants, employed journeymen and service workers who were in their employ), of leasees of land for cultivation, and of share‐tenants of large landowners. There were also a fair number of usurers, bankers and other lenders who, according to Marx and other capitalist critics, preyed on small proprietors and industrial capitalists alike and worst of all held back capital accumulation. In a famous commentary on class in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx argued that peasants did not constitute a “class” in the strict meaning of the term. While they divided according to whether they owned property or were propertyless tillers of the soil or workers in small artisanal shops, their conditions of life—isolated enclaves of producers without the means of communications that transcended local markets—inhibited the development of a common culture, for Marx the twin presuppositions of class formation. Moreover, from Marx's perspective, peasants were constantly marginalized by the expansion of capital into the countryside just as craftspeople were gradually but relentlessly reduced to being wage laborers in the cities.