The War Was Never the Radical Part

In the spring of 494 BC, the ordinary working people of Rome did something that had no name yet. They walked out.

Not a few of them. Most of them. The men who dug the ditches and carried the spears and planted the grain packed up and left the city, crossed the river Anio, and sat down together on a hill a few miles off. They did not burn anything. They did not attack anyone. They simply stopped, all at once, and refused to come back. The Greek biographer Plutarch, writing centuries later, records what they said as they went. They complained that they had for a long time been, in his words, “expelled and excluded from the city by the cruelty of the rich,” and that the countryside would at least give them “the benefit of air and water and a place of burial, which was all they could expect in the city, unless it were, perhaps, the privilege of being wounded and killed in time of war for the defence of their creditors.”

The only thing this city lets us do, they were saying, is die in its wars to protect the property of the men we owe money to. So we quit.

Rome panicked. A city that has sent its whole working population to sit on a hill is a city that cannot feed itself, defend itself, or function. The Senate, the rich men, the property owners, the creditors, sent negotiators. Their best speaker was a man named Menenius Agrippa, and he did not offer the workers money or land. He told them a story.

Once, he said, all the parts of the human body got angry at the stomach. The hands and the feet and the mouth did all the hard work, they complained, hauling and chewing and carrying, and for what? To feed a lazy belly that just sat there in the middle doing nothing. So the parts went on strike. They would not feed the stomach anymore. And of course the whole body, including the rebellious hands and feet, began to starve, because it turned out the stomach was quietly taking in the food and sending it back out to everyone. “Such is the case,” Menenius told the workers, “between you and the senate.”

The workers came back. In exchange they got a new office, the tribunes, officials whose job was to speak for them. The class that owned Rome and the class that worked Rome went on existing exactly as before. Nothing about who owned what changed. What changed was that the quarrel between them now had a referee.

That scene is where this ends up, so it is worth keeping in view.

What you already believe

Here is what almost everyone raised in the last century or so believes about this, whether they lean left or right, and believes it so automatically they have never had to say it out loud.

The idea that society is really split into two warring economic classes, the people who own things and the people who only work, and that history itself is the story of that war, is a Marxist idea. It is the signature of Karl Marx. It is the thing that, if you say it seriously at a dinner party, marks you as a certain kind of person. “The history of all society is the history of class struggle” is a line people can half-quote without ever having opened a book by Marx, the way they can hum a song they have never chosen to listen to. Accepting it feels like signing up. Rejecting it feels like refusing to sign up.

So the political menu, as most of us have received it, looks like this. On one side there is the Marxist, who sees everything as class war, who divides the world into oppressor and oppressed, who thinks your boss is your enemy by definition. On the other side there is the sensible person, who rejects all that grim us-versus-them accounting, who believes we are individuals and not members of warring teams, and who thinks the whole “class” framework is an ideology you either swallow whole or spit out.

This feels right because it is tidy. It sorts people. And it flatters whichever side you are on: if you buy the class frame you are clear-eyed about power, and if you reject it you are clear-eyed about ideology. Either way, you get to feel like the one who sees through things. The belief is comfortable, it is common, and it is shared by people who agree on almost nothing else. It is also, on the most important point, backwards.

The turn

Marx did not discover that society is divided into hostile economic classes. He did not come up with the idea that the rich and the poor are, in some real sense, at war. That idea was not radical, not new, not left-wing, and not his. It was one of the oldest and most ordinary observations in the entire history of Western thought, so ordinary that the people who wrote it down expected no argument, the way you would expect no argument if you wrote that the strong tend to get their way.

The genuinely new and radical thing Marx said runs in exactly the opposite direction from what people think. It was not that the war exists. Everyone knew the war existed. It was that the war could end. That class itself could be finished, dissolved, gone, not managed, not softened, not balanced, but abolished, and abolished for good.

That is the move no one had made before him. The observation underneath it, that the city splits into rich and poor and they pull against each other, was common property for two thousand years before he was born. He sharpened it, gave it new machinery, argued in new ways about why the split happens. But the bare fact of the split, the thing you thought was his, he inherited. And once you see that the people you filed under “sensible, anti-class-war” were saying the class war was real and permanent centuries before Marx existed, the whole familiar menu falls apart. You have been giving Marx credit, or blame, for the part of the system he took secondhand from everybody.

Let me show you the everybody.

The philosophers took it as an axiom

Start with the man who is about as far from a firebrand revolutionary as Western thought produces: Plato, writing his Republic around 380 BC, laying out his careful, orderly, deeply conservative vision of the ideal city ruled by philosopher-kings.

In the middle of a discussion about how large a city should be, Plato has his speaker toss off a remark so casual it is easy to read past. Any city, he says, no matter how small, is not really one city at all. “Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.”

That is Plato. Not a pamphleteer, not an agitator. The founder of the whole tradition of political philosophy, saying as a plain matter of fact that every city that has ever existed is actually two cities, rich and poor, and that they are at war. He does not argue for it. He does not think it needs arguing for. He mentions it the way you would mention that water is wet, and moves on to his real question, which is how his ideal rulers should handle the fact.

His student Aristotle, a few decades later, built an entire science of politics on the same foundation. Aristotle went out and collected the constitutions of scores of actual Greek city-states and studied how they rose and fell, and what he found, over and over, was that the real division inside any state was not between tribes or families or regions. It was economic. “There are two classes out of which a state is composed,” he wrote in the Politics, “the poor and the rich.” Everything else, who votes, who rules, which laws pass, why revolutions happen, flowed from the tension between those two. Democracy, he noted dryly, tends to have the marks of “low birth, poverty, mean employment,” while oligarchy runs on “birth, wealth, and education.” A state was a standing arrangement between the few who had and the many who had not, and the arrangement was always under strain.

Now here is the part that matters for us. Aristotle saw the class war as clearly as any modern radical. But when he asked what to do about it, abolition never once crossed his mind. It was not an option he rejected. It was an option he could not even see, because it was not there to be seen. His solution was to manage the antagonism forever. Grow a large middle class, he advised, people with neither too much nor too little, to sit between the rich and the poor and keep either extreme from grabbing the whole state. Keep the poor from getting so desperate they revolt: “the true friend of the people should see that they be not too poor, for extreme poverty lowers the character of the democracy.” Balance the two forces. Buffer them. Referee the fight.

He assumed the fight was permanent, the way you assume the weather is permanent. You do not abolish rain. You build a roof.

And beneath even the rich-versus-poor split, Aristotle placed something harder and colder: the slave. The ancient economy ran on human beings who were owned, and Aristotle, the most careful mind of his age, argued in the opening pages of the Politics that some people are slaves by nature, born to be ruled, suited for nothing else, as naturally subordinate as the body is to the mind. This is the ancient world making the very bottom of the class ladder not just a fact but a law of nature. If the slave is a slave by nature, then the lowest class line is written into the universe, and asking to erase it is like asking to erase the difference between a person and a tool. The permanence went all the way down, and it went down by being called natural.

So the class war was not a discovery waiting for the nineteenth century. It was the starting assumption of Greek political science, stated flatly by its two greatest names. What they did not have, what they could not reach, was the thought that it might ever stop.

The founders said it too, and drew the opposite conclusion from Marx

You might grant all that and still say: fine, the Greeks noticed classes, but that ancient stuff is a museum piece. The modern world, the world of constitutions and rights and free citizens, was built by people who rejected all that gloomy talk of permanent class war.

It was not. It was built by people who believed in permanent class war so completely they designed the machine to run on it.

In 1787, James Madison sat down to explain to skeptical Americans why they should adopt the new Constitution. The essay he wrote, the tenth of the papers now called The Federalist, is one of the founding documents of the entire American system, studied by every law student, quoted by every side. And its argument is built, from the ground up, on the reality of economic class conflict.

Madison’s subject is “faction,” his word for the way people clump into hostile groups that push their own interest against everyone else’s. Where does faction come from? He runs through the possibilities and lands on the answer without hesitation: “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

That is close enough to Marx to be unsettling. The propertied and the propertyless have always formed opposed interests. Not sometimes. Not lately. Always, and by their very nature. Madison, the careful lawyer, the architect of a government meant to protect property, is telling you that the people who own and the people who do not are locked in a permanent conflict of interest baked into society itself. He goes further: “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” Not in a bad system. Not in capitalism, a word Madison did not have. In human nature.

If you had shown Madison this sentence with the name torn off, Marx would have nodded at it. The two men are looking at the same fault line. They are not identical: Madison thought property was only the deepest source of faction, not the only one, since people also split over religion, over leaders, over ideas, and that mattered enormously to him, because his whole cure depends on there being many rival factions that cancel each other out. Marx boils it down to two great classes heading for a collision. But on the core point, that the people who own and the people who do not are locked in a permanent clash built into society, the careful founder and the revolutionary agree completely.

They split, totally, on the cure. And this is the hinge of the whole thing.

Madison asks the obvious next question: if faction comes from the unequal distribution of property, could you just cure it by removing the cause? Could you get rid of the class conflict by getting rid of the class divide? He considers it, and rejects it, and his reasons are worth hearing exactly. You could only remove the cause, he says, by destroying liberty itself, since free people will always end up with unequal amounts of stuff, and “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.” The other way to remove the cause would be to make everyone think and want the same things, which is impossible for free minds. So the cause cannot be removed. His conclusion is one flat, final sentence: “the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”

The causes of faction cannot be removed. That is the entire pre-Marxist consensus in seven words, coming out of the mouth of the man who wrote the American constitutional order. The class antagonism is real, it is permanent, and the honest thing to do is not to dream of ending it but to build a clever enough machine to keep it from tearing everything apart. Madison’s machine was the large republic, spread over so much territory and so many competing interests that no single class faction could ever seize the whole thing. It is the same instinct as Aristotle’s middle class and Rome’s tribunes, scaled up and mechanized. Contain the war. Referee it. Do not imagine it ending, because imagining it ending is the mistake of a fool who would burn down liberty to do it.

Even the sharpest critics of the old order, the ones who hated the arrangement, still described it as permanent. A generation before Madison, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that law and government themselves were a trick the rich played on the poor. Property came first, he wrote, and then the rich, having the most to lose, invented government to protect what they had. He noted coolly that such a scheme was far more likely “to have been invented by those to whom it would be of service, than by those whom it must have harmed,” since “the poor had nothing but their freedom to lose.” That is a savage indictment. The state is the rich man’s security system. But notice: even Rousseau, burning with anger at the con, does not imagine the classes dissolving. He imagines the con being exposed, the terms being made fairer. The war is the water everyone swims in. The most radical thing anyone before Marx could picture was a better-refereed war.

What Marx actually added

So what did Marx do, if he did not invent any of this?

He kept the diagnosis, which he had inherited, and he attacked the one thing everyone before him had treated as bedrock: the permanence. He said the classes were not written into human nature, or into the body’s need for a belly, or into the will of the gods. He said they were written into something much smaller and much more temporary. They were written into the particular way a given society happened to produce its food and goods and wealth at a given moment. The cause of the class divide, in other words, was not fixed human nature but a passing economic arrangement, and an arrangement can be replaced. Since the way of producing had already changed many times, from ancient slavery to feudal lords and serfs to modern owners and workers, there was no reason it could not change once more, into something with no classes at all.

His writing partner Friedrich Engels laid out the core of it as plainly as it can be put. In every historical period, he wrote, summarizing the idea he credited to Marx, “the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch.” That is the famous “materialist” theory of history, and notice what it actually claims. It is not mainly a claim that classes fight. Everyone already believed that. It is a claim that classes are made, produced by an economic arrangement, and therefore the kind of thing that can be un-made when the arrangement changes.

That is the switch that flips everything. Madison said the causes of class conflict were “sown in the nature of man,” so they could never be removed. Marx said the causes were sown in a specific, temporary economic system, so they could. The whole disagreement between the most conservative and the most revolutionary reading of society comes down to a single question that has nothing to do with whether class war exists: is the class divide natural, and so permanent, or historical, and so temporary?

And then Marx took the last step, the one that had never been taken, and said out loud the thing no philosopher or founder had let themselves think. He said the war could reach a final battle after which there would be no more war, because there would be no more classes. In the passage Engels used to sum up the whole system, he wrote that a stage would come where the exploited class, the workers, “cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class” without “at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”

Once and for all. Those four words are the actual radical content of Marx, and they are the four words that Plato and Aristotle and Madison and Rousseau never wrote and never could. The war, for the first time, has an ending. Not a truce. Not a fairer referee. An ending, after which the two cities of the rich and the poor become one city, and Menenius’s body has no idle stomach in it because there is no longer a class that only consumes.

Someone will object that at least one ancient did imagine abolishing property: Plato, in the Republic, takes private property and even the family away from his ruling guardians. But look at what that communism is for. Plato strips the guardians of property so they will rule the lower orders without the corruption of private greed. His city has three fixed ranks, the rulers, the soldiers, and the producers, and the producers keep their property and stay exactly where they are. It is communism for the top, designed to make the class structure beneath it more stable, not to dissolve it. Even the one ancient who abolished property did it to lock the classes in place.

It is also worth being fair about the modern dreamers who came before Marx. Thomas More imagined an island with no private property in his Utopia in 1516. Radical religious communities pooled everything they owned. In the 1790s a Frenchman who took the name Gracchus Babeuf plotted a revolution to abolish private property outright, and was executed for it. So the wish is old. But those were places to build from scratch or gardens to withdraw into, visions held up against history and defeated by it. Others, too, had sensed history moving somewhere better: the Enlightenment had its faith in progress, and Henri de Saint-Simon, a few years before Marx, wrote of history driving toward the end of the exploitation of man by man. What Marx added was the engine. He named the thing that carries history from one arrangement to the next, and the thing was the class conflict itself, grinding against the limits of each mode of production until it breaks through to the one after. The utopians offered an exit from history. Saint-Simon felt the current. Marx claimed to have found the motor, and claimed it was carrying us, on its own, toward the end of class. That is the version of “it can end” that shook the world.

Whether Marx was right about this is a real and serious question, and reasonable people have spent a century and a half fighting over it, and the fights over how it was attempted are some of the darkest chapters of the last hundred years. But that is a fight about the cure. And the strange thing, the thing worth carrying out of all this, is that when people today argue about “class war,” they almost always think they are arguing about the diagnosis. They think the question on the table is whether society is really divided into hostile economic classes. That question was answered yes, again and again, by the founders of Western political philosophy and the founders of the American republic alike. It was never the interesting part. The interesting part, the only part Marx actually put on the table, is whether the division is permanent.

The thing Marx wanted to end is older than money

And here the argument gets stranger, because once you go looking for how deep the class divide runs, it turns out to run deeper than money, deeper than property, deeper than anything Marx or Madison were arguing about.

The economist Thorstein Veblen went looking for the root of the whole thing in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, and he argued that the oldest class line was not between the rich and the poor at all. It was between the people who worked and the people who were exempt from working.

Veblen’s history is speculative and of its era, and you can take or leave his story about barbarian tribes. What is hard to shake is where he says it ends up. The honored class, he argued, was never simply the class with the most goods. It was the class that did no ordinary labor: the warriors, the priests, the chiefs. What made you high was not owning more. It was not having to work. And the tasks got sorted into two piles that Veblen calls exploit and drudgery. “The worthy employments are those which may be classed as exploit,” he wrote; “unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no appreciable element of exploit enters.” Fighting, hunting big game, ruling, performing the sacred rites: worthy, honorable, high. Digging, planting, hauling, cooking, making: unworthy, low, the mark of the subject class. The employments “which imply subservience or submission,” he wrote, “are unworthy, debasing, ignoble.”

This is the class line as an honor line, not a money line, and Veblen’s real jolt is that we never left it behind. We just stopped noticing it. Why do we feel, somewhere below thought, that a person in a suit who moves money is doing something more dignified than a person in coveralls who fixes the machine the money was spent on? Why does “menial” work carry a whiff of shame that has nothing to do with how hard it is or how much it pays? Veblen’s answer is that we are running barbarian software. “Our habitual aversion to menial employments,” he wrote, is a straight inheritance from the ancient world’s split between the class that fights and rules and the class that works. The possession of wealth, in the end, was never really about the stuff. “The possession of wealth confers honor,” Veblen wrote; “it is an invidious distinction.” We chase money because money buys us out of the low, working class and into the high, exempt one, and that hunger is thousands of years older than any factory.

This is where the ancient slave comes back, and where the very first pair in the old division, the slave and the free man, turns out to be the pattern for all the rest. The deepest class line, the one Aristotle called natural, was exactly this: the free man is the one who does not have to labor, and the slave is labor itself, a working body that belongs to someone else. Every later class divide, between lord and serf, between owner and worker, is a softer echo of that first hard line between the one who is exempt from work and the one who is the work.

What Marx was proposing, then, is more audacious than it first sounded. He was not just proposing to even out incomes, or to hand the poor a bigger slice. He was proposing to erase a distinction older than coined money, a distinction so deep that Aristotle thought it was a fact of nature and Veblen thought it was carved into our instincts about honor and shame. He wanted a world where being a worker was not the badge of a lower order, because there would be no higher order to be lower than. Set beside a divide that ancient, “once and for all” is either the most hopeful sentence ever written about human society or the most reckless. But it is not a small sentence, and it is certainly not the boring, obvious, everyone-agrees part. It is the whole gamble.

And here Veblen turns in Marx’s hand and cuts the other way. If the class line is really about honor, about the hunger to be the kind of person who does not have to do the low work, to be marked out above your neighbor, then it may not be about ownership at all, and changing who owns the factories may not touch it. The wish to rank above other people would simply find a new ladder to climb. It is worth saying plainly that this is roughly what happened where Marx’s cure was tried: the private owners were abolished, and a new class of Party officials and managers took the high ground, with its own honors and its own exemptions, as the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas wrote from inside it. So Veblen makes Marx’s target look ancient and deep, which was the point above. He also hands us the worst suspicion about Marx’s cure: that the root of class is a permanent fact about wanting status, and that no rearrangement of property will ever pull it out.

Even its friendliest analyst couldn’t cure it

There is one more voice worth hearing, because it belongs to a man who wanted the modern state to work, who was no revolutionary, and who still could not find a way out.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, writing in 1820, believed the modern world had basically gotten it right. His Philosophy of Right is a defense of the rational modern state, private property and all. He is the last person you would expect to hand the revolutionaries a weapon. And then he looks squarely at poverty, and he flinches, and he tells the truth.

Below a certain point, Hegel saw, poverty is not just a shortage of money. It does something to people. When a large mass of people falls below the standard of a decent life, he wrote, and loses “the sense of right and wrong, of honesty and the self-respect which makes a man insist on maintaining himself by his own work and effort, the result is the creation of a rabble of paupers.” A whole class produced not just with empty pockets but with a broken relationship to the society that made them. And at the same moment, he noted, the same process piles up “disproportionate wealth in a few hands.” The two happen together. The bottom falls out and the top swells, from one motion.

Then Hegel does the honest thing that costs him. He asks whether modern society can fix this out of its own resources, and he works through the options, give the poor money directly, or give them work directly, and shows that each one either destroys their self-respect or floods the market with goods no one can buy. He arrives at a conclusion that must have pained him to write: “despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough,” even a rich society, drowning in wealth, “to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble.”

That is the philosopher of the modern state admitting that civil society cannot solve its own class problem out of its own resources. His remedies, when he reaches for them, are telling: charity, the guild-like corporations, and above all pushing outward, seeking colonies and foreign markets, exporting the problem, because it could not be dissolved at home. Every one of them is a way to manage the antagonism, move it around, referee it. None of them ends it. The rabble is the place where the great defender of the modern state runs out of road and quietly admits it.

So the account comes out even. From Plato to Hegel, the greatest minds of more than two thousand years agreed that the class war was real, and agreed, just as strongly, that there was no cure, only better and worse ways to live with the disease. That is the wall Marx ran at. The real question he forced onto the table was never “is there a class war,” a question every one of them had already answered yes. It was the question every one of them had answered no: can it ever actually end?

Back to the hill

Now the men on the hill outside Rome look different.

When the workers walked out in 494 BC, they were not confused about whether they were a class with interests opposed to the rich. They said it plainly on the way out the gate: they were dying in wars to protect their creditors’ property, and they had had enough. They understood the class war perfectly. What they could not imagine, what literally no one in the ancient world could imagine, was walking out to end the existence of classes. They walked out to get a better deal within a system they assumed would last forever.

And they got one. The tribunes, the new officials sworn to protect them, were a genuine gain. But look at what the tribune actually was. It was a referee. It was Rome’s version of Aristotle’s middle class and Madison’s large republic and Hegel’s reluctant management: a device for keeping the permanent war between the belly and the members from destroying the body they shared. Menenius told the workers a story whose entire moral was that the arrangement is natural and eternal, that the stomach and the hands need each other and neither can be removed, and the workers believed him, because everyone believed him, because for the next twenty-three centuries there was no other story to believe.

Marx’s whole life was an argument that Menenius was lying. That the body could be rebuilt so that no part only consumed and no part only labored, so that there was nothing left for a tribune to referee because there was nothing left to fight over. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe the belly is load-bearing and the body dies without it, exactly as Menenius warned the men on the hill. Maybe Veblen was right that the hunger to rank above your neighbor is older than any economy and will outlast any change of ownership, and the tribune can never be dismissed, only renamed. But that argument, about whether the oldest arrangement in human society is a law of nature or just a very long habit, is the actual argument. It always was.

The next time someone tells you that class war is a Marxist idea, you will know they have it exactly backwards. The war is the part everyone always agreed on. Plato and Aristotle and Madison were counting the same two cities that Marx counted. What was new was the peace.