Reading · Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
The first section of the Manifesto opens with its most famous sentence, and it is a large claim set down without proof. Every society that has existed has been a contest between classes. The next paragraph names the pairs, from freeman and slave to guild-master and journeyman, and says each fight ended either in a remaking of society or in the ruin of both sides.
The sentence was too large even for its authors. In the English edition of 1888 Engels added a note to say it meant all written history, because in 1847 almost nothing was known of how people lived before records began. Forty years on, he had to narrow the line that made the pamphlet famous.
What I keep from the passage is a smaller phrase: “now hidden, now open.” A conflict between classes does not need a strike or a barricade. Most of the time it is hidden, and it runs through wages and prices and the question of who keeps what a working day produces.
On 5 November the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published its figures for the third quarter of 2026. In the nonfarm business sector, the share of output paid to workers as wages and benefits fell to 53 per cent, the lowest since the series began in 1947. For most of the years after the Second World War it stood between 60 and 66 per cent. Over the past year output per hour rose 2.1 per cent and real pay per hour rose 1.0 per cent. Workers produced more, and the larger part of the gain went to capital and not to pay.
Economists do not agree on what the number means. Some, such as Benjamin Bridgman at the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, argue that part of the fall comes from how output is measured, since more of what firms earn now goes to replace software and machines that wear out fast. Others, such as David Autor and his colleagues, trace it to the rise of a few dominant firms that employ few people for what they sell. The first reading makes the fall smaller than it looks, and the second makes it a question of power, which is closer to what Marx meant.
No one marched against those numbers. There was no strike call and no headline about a war between classes, only a line in a government release. That is the hidden fight. It is fought in pay rounds and contracts, in the choice between raising wages and buying back shares, and in the decision to put a new machine where a worker stood.
But the passage asks more of me than a match between an old sentence and a new number. Marx and Engels said each struggle ended in a new society or in common ruin. A falling labour share has reached neither end. It is a slow shift, and a slow shift lets both sides carry on as if nothing has changed.
If what workers produce keeps rising and their share keeps falling, what would an economy and a state have to change for the gain to reach the people who make it, and who would make that change?