Introduction: The Return of Class Struggle?

Abstract

Nowadays, on the wave of the economic crisis of 2008 and of increasing polarisation between rich and poor, there is much talk of ‘the return to class struggle’. Had it actually disappeared? After WWII, renowned thinkers have inferred the demise of class struggle from the advent of the Welfare State. They have not realized that the advent of the Welfare State was the precise result of class struggle. Moreover, they have not lent attention to the conflicts that have raged in countries like Algeria, Vietnam, or Cuba and to the struggles of the blacks in South Africa or in the USA. Has the revolt of colonial peoples or of peoples of colonial origins nothing to do with class struggle? Or rather, have these thinkers (Habermas, Dahrendorf) a limited vision of Marx’s class struggle?