Lenin in 1919: ‘The Class Struggle is Continuing—It has Merely Changed its Forms’

Abstract

But what happened to ‘class struggle’ in the country where the Bolsheviks who followed the Communist Party Manifesto reached power? In October 1919 Lenin claimed: ‘The class struggle continues; it has only changed shape’. And so we find a dramatic turn of events in the history of Marx and Engel’s theory of class struggle. We are now in the presence of a class struggle that is developed from above, by a party that has come to power.