Class Struggle and the Theory of Ideology

The opening line of the Communist Manifesto (1848) states that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," and Marx's mature social theory treats social class not primarily as a matter of income or status but as a structural position defined by one's relationship to the means of production — the bourgeoisie owning capital and purchasing labor power, the proletariat owning nothing but its own labor power and compelled to sell it for a wage. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), analyzing the coup d'état by which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte made himself Emperor Napoleon III in December 1851, Marx develops a more historically textured account of class than the Manifesto's binary schema, distinguishing the finance bourgeoisie, industrial bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and the notoriously heterogeneous lumpenproletariat, and introducing the important distinction between a "class in itself" (an sich), sharing an objective economic position, and a "class for itself" (für sich), which has developed collective self-consciousness and organized political capacity to act on shared interests — a distinction French sociologist and historian later developed further but which originates in Marx's own Hegelian-inflected vocabulary of an-sich and für-sich.