VI. History and Social Revolution
1. Class Struggle
a. Social Relationships: Regarding social relationships, Marx asserts in the Communist Manifesto,
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman – in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden now open fight, a fight that time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
b. Bourgeoisie and Proletariat: The present time, “the epoch of the bourgeoisie,” has simplified the class struggle as society splits more and more into two hostile, contending classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Writing in the nineteenth century, Marx asserts that the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, have gained such power over the proletariat or workers that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” (CM) This triumph of the bourgeoisie occurred over a long period of time due to a series “series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange” - - the introduction of steam and machinery revolutionizing industrial production at the same time that technological advances in navigation and transportation led to ever-expanding markets for goods. As a results, according to Mars,
The bourgeoisie, during is rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? (CM)
