In 1848 Marx wrote this in the Communist Manifesto:
“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”
In Capital Volume 3, Chapter on Classes he wrote:
“The owners merely of labour-power, owners of capital, and land-owners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent, in other words, wage-labourers, capitalists and land-owners, constitute then three big classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production.”
At the end of this chapter Marx goes on to say:
“However, from this standpoint, physicians and officials, e.g., would also constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords-the latter, e.g., into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries.”
Then the third volume of Capital ends…
I propose to this group that the Marxist theory of class struggle is a facade formulated by Marx in order to substantiate his historical materialism dialectic. The idea of ‘classes’ in a society are ambiguous and can be carried out to suit the subjective needs of the viewer as Marx described in his above statement. Capitalists are in constant competition in acquiring wealth and resources, certainly not thinking of ‘class interests’. The workers themselves can be described as thus “This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.” Therefore, both capitalists and workers are continually competing with one another under the premise of self-interest. We have here above the ‘logic progression’ [if it can be called such] of Marx’s inevitable class antagonism theory. From a theory of simplification of classes into either Bourgeois or Proletariat into a hints of a complex multi-class system with Ricardian flavor. If there is a multi-class system where one can be in any class at any time at any point of there life, then it is absurd to establish the claim that society will advance from the inevitable ‘consciousness’ of a class that is so haphazardly defined. Marxists to date are constantly changing what it means to be a proletariat in order to sustain their dying religion. I had recently been told that the proletariat class was now everyone from the lower to middle classes. Certainly Marx did not see the ‘middle class’ as the proletariat, perhaps in his mind they could be pushed into that class but it is very clearly stated that they are workers who make only subsistence. Capitalists themselves were described as those sustaining their lifestyles on ‘surplus profit’ and nothing else, yet Bill Gates labors for his corporation [however much he does is irrelevent, for when he labors he stops being a ‘capitalist’] and yet these serve as examples of the facade I am presenting. Class could mean anything to anyone and this is only confirmed by continued Marxist revisionism.