From Fresh Air from WHYY, on NPR
Unlike Most Marxist Jargon, 'Class Warfare' Persists
By Geoff Nunberg
"Class warfare" was a dodgy phrase from the outset. In one of the most famous sentences in the history of political thought, Marx and Engels wrote in their 1848 Communist Manifesto: "The history of all society up to now is the history of..."
That's where things get complicated. In the original German they wrote Klassenkampfen, which means "class struggles." But some of their critics rendered it more belligerently as "class warfare." That was the stock label they put on the bearded socialist agitator in political cartoons. And some socialists actually did use it, while others tried to turn it around to describe the capitalist oppression of labor. But "warfare" more readily suggested the disorderly violence that broke out from below. It conjured up the red flags, cloth caps and barricades of Les Mis, not the measured operations of the parliaments and law courts on the side of the bourgeoisie....
Like other dead metaphors, it has to be said just so. It's class warfare, not class war, which sounds disconcertingly European, where class isn't a forbidden subject. In a speech to a Labour Party Conference in 1999, Tony Blair famously announced, "The class war is over."...