The Theory of Class Struggle in the Peasant War in Germany

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to rethink Engels’s theory of class struggle, focusing on Engels’s early writing, especially German Peasants’ War written in 1850. It explores his theory of class struggle from three perspectives. First—comparing his early writings with later writings—it will be shown that his early descriptions of class struggle are not class reductionism. Rather, they indicate that he tried to regard so-called non-class elements as what forms class. Second, by comparing his early works with Marx’s early works, including The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this paper examines the significance and limitation of Engels’s early writings in related to the theory of the state. Finally, I consider the flaws of Engels’s theory of class from the perspective of Marx’s critique of political economy. His argument could lead to a problematic understanding of class struggle that emphasizes only economic relations in a narrow sense.