Marx and Engels wrote: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" (7). How is "class" defined? Why is it...

Forand ,
modern society was based in conflicting relationships between owners and workers. These
conflicts pervaded history. While there had been times in the past where harmony characterized
social relationships, in a type of society they called "primitive communism," the
basis of that harmony was collective ownership of the means of production.

Once the concept of private property developed, class relations began to develop and
became rigid. The people who asserted their power by seizing the means of productionprimarily
land in agrarian societyeffectively pushed aside all the non-owners, and bound them in various
types of servitude, as serfs or peons.

Although Europe's feudal ruling
classes maintained dominance over the workers, in part by denying them property ownership, the
class struggle was not quite as firmly entrenched as it was to become once the Industrial
Revolution began. With the increasing concentration of capital in fewer hands, ever more people
had to go to work in manufacturing. These people, the proletariat, owned only themselves, and
the only thing they could sell was their labor. By doing so, they enriched the owners, or
bourgeoisie, and further impoverished themselves. As this process of alienation from the means
of production advanced further, and capitalism became a fully developed political and economic
system, everything including people was commodified. The full extension of this system resulted
in some people not just buying other people's laborthat is, paying them wagesbut buying other
people or turning people into propertythat is, enslaving them. In this respect, although slavery
is a cornerstone of capitalism, slaves cannot constitute a class because they cannot sell their
own labor, as proletarians do, because the system does not recognize them as persons with any
rights.

Marx and Engels were not optimistic that capitalism could be easily
dislodged, but they were convinced that ongoing class struggle would lead to violent revolution,
after which socialism would replace capitalism in its extreme imperialist
form.