class struggles

The State Having declared in the opening sentence of the Manifesto that all history is the history of class struggles, Marx adds immediately in a footnote "of written history". For prior to the invention of writing, societies were nomadic, organised in tribes, each tribe made of less than 100 individuals. There was hardly any division of labour, other than sexual. The tribe would designate a chief, and modern ethnology tells us the chief had very little …

…In a François Truffaut film, there is this schoolboy who arrives late in class. He knows the teacher won’t believe any story about trains running late, bus accidents, and the usual excuses. So he makes a sad face and declares : "My mother just died". The whole school assembles immediately and offers sympathy ; no one suspects this tragic death could be a lie. Political lies have to be so gross as to be believed.