Q. What is the Materialist Conception of History?
As explained by V.I. Lenin.

A. A realization of the inconsistency,
incompleteness, and onesidedness of the old materialism convinced Marx of the necessity of
"bringing the science of society... into harmony with the materialist foundation, and
of reconstructing it thereupon." Since materialism in general explains
consciousness as the outcome of being, and not conversely, then materialism as applied to
the social life of mankind has to explain social consciousness as the outcome of social
being. "Technology," Marx writes (Capital, Vol. I), "discloses
man's mode of dealing with Nature, the immediate process of production by which he
sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social
relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them." In the preface
to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral
formulation of the fundamental principles of materialism as applied to human society and
its history, in the following words:

"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite
relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.

"The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process
in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the
existing relations of production, or -- what is but a legal expression for the same thing
-- with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of
development of the productive forces these relation turn into their fetters. Then begins
an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such
transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of
the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of
natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic -- in
short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

"Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks
of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by its own
consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the
contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive
forces and the relations of production.... In broad outlines, Asiatic, ancient, feudal,
and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the
economic formation of society." [See
Marx's brief formulation in a letter to Engels dated July 7, 1866: "Our theory that
the organization of labor is determined by the means of production."]

The discovery of the materialist conception of history, or more correctly, the
consistent continuation and extension of materialism into the domain of social phenomena,
removed the two chief shortcomings in earlier historical theories. In the first place, the
latter at best examined only the ideological motives in the historical activities of human
beings, without investigating the origins of those motives, or ascertaining the objective
laws government the development of the system of social relations, or seeing the roots of
these relations in the degree of development reached by material production; in the second
place, the earlier theories did not embrace the activities of the masses of the
population, whereas historical materialism made it possible for the first time to study
with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses, and the changes
in those conditions. At best, pre-Marxist "sociology" and
historiography brought forth an accumulation of raw facts, collected at random, and a
description of individual aspects of the historical process. By examining the totality
of opposing tendencies, by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of life and
production of the various classes of individual aspects of the historical
process. By examining the choice of a particular "dominant" idea or in its
interpretation, and by revealing that, without exception, all ideas and all the various
tendencies stem from the condition of the material forces of production, Marxism
indicated the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the process of the rise,
development, and decline of socio-economic systems. People make their own history but what
determines the motives of people, of the mass of people -- i.e., what is the sum total of
all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of
production of material life that form the basis of all man's historical activity? What is
the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated
the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense
variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws.

Q. What is the Role of the Individual in History?
As explained by V.I. Lenin.

A. Marxism does not at all
deny the importance of the role of the individual in history, but only explains that the
role played by individuals or parties is circumscribed by the given level of historical
development, by the objective social environment which, in the last analysis, is
determined by the development of the productive forces. This does not mean - as has been
alleged by the critics of Marxism - that men and women are merely puppets of the blind
workings of "economic determinism". Marx and Engels explained that men and women
make their own history, but they do not do so as completely free agents, but have to work
on the basis of the kind of society that they find in existence. The personal qualities of
political figures - their theoretical preparation, skill, courage and determination can
determine the outcome in a given situation. There are critical moments in human history
when the quality of the leadership can be the decisive factor that tips the balance one
way or another. Such periods are not the norm, but only arise when all the hidden
contradictions have slowly matured over a long period to the point when, in the language
of dialectics, quantity is changed into quality. Although individuals cannot determine the
development of society by the force of the will alone, yet the role of the subjective
factor is ultimately decisive in human history.

A. "It is common knowledge that, in any given society, the
striving of some of its members conflict with the strivings of others, that social life is
full of contradictions, and that history reveals a struggle between nations and societies,
as well as within nations and societies, and, besides, an alternation of periods of
revolution and reaction, peace and war, stagnation and rapid progress or decline. Marxism
has provided the guidance -- i.e., the theory of the class struggle -- for the discovery
of the laws governing this seeming maze and chaos. It is only a study of the sum of the
strivings of all the members of a given society or group of societies that can lead to a
scientific definition of the result of those strivings. Now the conflicting strivings stem
from the difference in the position and mode of life of the classes into which
each society is divided.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles," Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto (with the exception of the
history of the primitive community, Engels added subsequently). "Freeman and slave,
patrician and plebeian, 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 each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not
done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the
bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class
antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and
Proletariat."

Ever since the Great French Revolution, European history has, in a number of countries,
tellingly revealed what actually lies at the bottom of events -- the struggle of classes.
The Restoration period in France [12]already produced a number of historians (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers) who,
in summing up what was taking place, were obliged to admit that the class struggle was
taking place, were obliged to admit that the class struggle was the key to all French
history. The modern period -- that of complete victory of the bourgeoisie, representative
institutions, extensive (if not universal) suffrage, a cheap daily press that is widely
circulated among the masses, etc., a period of powerful and every-expanding unions of
workers and unions of employers, etc. -- has shown even more strikingly (though sometimes
in a very one-sided, "peaceful", and "constitutional" form) the class
struggle as the mainspring of events. The following passage from Marx's Communist
Manifesto will show us what Marx demanded of social science as regards an objective
analysis of the position of each class in modern society, with reference to an analysis of
each class's conditions of development:

"Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie
today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and
finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and
essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the
artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction
their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary,
but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of
history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending
transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future
interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the
proletariat."

In a number of historical works, Marx gave brilliant and profound examples of
materialist historiography, of an analysis of the position of each individual
class, and sometimes of various groups or strata within a class, showing plainly why and
how "every class struggle is a political struggle." The
above-quoted passage is an illustration of what a complex network of social relations and transitional
stages from one class to another, from the past to the future, was analyzed by Marx so as
to determine the resultant of historical development.

Marx's economic doctrine is the most profound, comprehensive and detailed confirmation
and application of his theory.

Q. What Was Marx's View on the Tactics of the Class
Struggle of the Proletariat?
As explained by V.I. Lenin.

A. After examining, as
early as 1844-45, one of the main shortcomings in the earlier materialism -- namely, its
inability to understand the conditions or appreciate the importance of practical
revolutionary activity -- Marx, along with his theoretical work, devoted unremitting
attention, throughout his lifetime, to the tactical problems of the proletariat's class
struggle. An immense amount of material bearing on this is contained in all the
works of Marx, particularly in the four volumes of his correspondence with Engels,
published in 1913. This material is still far from having been brought together,
collected, examined and studied. We shall therefore have to confine ourselves here to the
most general and brief remarks, emphasizing that Marx justly considered that, without this
aspect, materialism is incomplete, onesided, and lifeless. The fundamental task of
proletarian tactics was defined by Marx in strict conformity with all the postulates of
his materialist-dialectical Weltanschauung. Only an objective consideration of
the sum total of the relations between absolutely all the classes in a given society, and
consequently a consideration of the objective stage of development reached by that society
and of the relations between it and other societies, can serve as a basis for the correct
tactics of an advanced class. At the same time, all classes and all countries are
regarded, not statistically, but dynamically -- i.e., not in a state of immobility -- but
in motion (whose laws are determined by the economic conditions of existence of each
class). Motion, in its turn, is regarded from the standpoint, not only of the past, but
also of the future, and that not in the vulgar sense it is understood in by the
"evolutionists", who see only slow changes, but dialectically: "... in
developments of such magnitude 20 years are no more than a day," Marx wrote to
Engels, "thought later on there may come days in which 20 years are embodied" At
each stage of development, at each moment, proletarian tactics must take account of this
objectively inevitable dialectics of human history, on the one hand, utilizing the periods
of political stagnation or of sluggish, so-called "peaceful" development in
order to develop the class-consciousness, strength and militancy of the advanced class,
and, on the other hand, directing all the work of this utilization towards the
"ultimate aim" of that class's advance, towards creating in it the ability to
find practical solutions for great tasks in the great days, in which "20 years are
embodied". Two of Marx's arguments are of special importance in this connection: one
of these is contained in The Poverty of Philosopy, and concerns the economic
struggle and economic organizations of the proletariat; the other is contained in the Communist
Manifesto and concerns the asks of the proletariat. The former runs as follows:

"Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown
to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this
common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of
resistance -- combination.... Combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into
groups... and in face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes
more necessary to them [i.e., the workers] than that of wages.... In this struggle -- a
veritable civil war -- all the elements necessary for coming battle unite and develop.
Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character. (Marx, The
Poverty of Philosopy, 1847) Here we have the programme and tactics of the economic
struggle and of the trade union movement for several decades to come, for all the lengthy
period in which the proletariat will prepare its forces for the "coming battle."
All this should be compared with numerous references by Marx and Engels to the example of
the British labor movement, showing how industrial "property" leads to attempts
"to buy the proletariat to divert them from the struggle; how this prosperity in
general "demoralizes the workers"); how the British becomes
"bourgeoisified" -- "this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently
aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat
alongside the bourgeoisie"; how its "revolutionary energy" oozes away how
it will be necessary to wait for a more or less lengthy space of time before "the
British workers will free themselves from their apparent bourgeois infection" how the
British labor movement "lacks the mettle of the Chartists how the British workers'
leaders are becoming a type midway between "a radical bourgeois and a worker"
(in reference to Holyoak, Vol. 4, p.209); how, owning to Britain's monopoly, and as long
as that monopoly lasts, "the British workingman will not budge" The tactics of
the economic struggle, in connection with the general course (and outcome) of the
working-class movement, are considered here from a remarkably broad, comprehensive,
dialectical, and genuinely revolutionary standpoint.

The Communist Manifesto advanced a fundamental Marxist principle on the
tactics of the political struggle:

"The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the
present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement." That was
why, in 1848, Marx supported the party of the "agrarian revolution" in Poland,
"that party which brought about the Krakow insurrection in 1846." In
Germany, Marx, in 1848 and 1849, supported the extreme revolutionary democrats, and
subsequently never retracted what he had then said about tactics. He regarded the German
bourgeoisie as an element which was "inclined from the very beginning to betray the
people" (only an alliance with the peasantry could have enabled the bourgeoisie to
completely achieve its aims) "and compromise with the crowned representatives of the
old society." Here is Marx's summing-up of the German bourgeois-democratic revolution
-- an analysis which, incidentally, is a sample of a materialism that examines society in
motion, and, moreover, not only from the aspect of a motion that is backward:

"Without faith in itself, without faith in the people, grumbling at those
above, trembling before those below... intimidated by the world storm... no energy in any
respect, plagiarism in every respect... without initiative... an execrable old man who saw
himself doomed to guide and deflect the first youthful impulses of a robust people in his
own senile interests...." (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848; see Literarischer
Nachlass, Vol. 3, p.212.)

About 20 years later, Marx declared, in a letter to Engels (Briefwechsel, Vol.
3, p.224), that the Revolution of 1848 had failed because the bourgeoisie had preferred
peace with slavery to the mere prospect of a fight for freedom. When the revolutionary
period of 1848-49 ended, Marx opposed any attempt to play at revolution (his struggle
against Schapper and Willich), and insisted on the ability to work in a new phase, which
in a quasi-"peaceful" way was preparing new revolutions. The spirit in which
Marx wanted this work to be conducted is to be seen in his appraisal of the situation in
Germany in 1856, the darkest period of reaction: "The whole thing in Germany will
depend on the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second edition of
the Peasant War" (Briefwechsel, Vol. 2, p.108). While the democratic
(bourgeois) revolution in Germany was uncompleted, Marx focused every attention, in the
tactics of the socialist proletariat, on developing the democratic energy of the
peasantry. He held that Lassalle's attitude was "objectively... a betrayal of the
whole workers' movement to Prussia" (Vol. 3, p.210), incidentally because Lassalle
was tolerant of the Junkers and Prussian nationalism.

"In a predominantly agricultural country," Engels wrote in 1865, in
exchanging views with Marx on their forthcoming joint declaration in the press, "...
it is dastardly to make an exclusive attack on the bourgeoisie in the name of the
industrial proletariat but never to devote a word to the patriarchal exploitation of the
rural proletariat under the lash of the great feudal aristocracy" (Vol. 3, p.217).

From 1864 to 1870, when the period of the consummation of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution in Germany was coming to an end, a period in which the Prussian and Austrian
exploiting classes were struggling to complete that revolution in one way or another from
above, Marx not only rebuked Lassalle, who was coquetting with Bismarck, but also
corrected Liebknecht, who had lapsed into Austrophilism" and a defense of
particularism; Marx demanded revolutionary tactics which would combat with equal
ruthlessness both Bismarck and the Austrophiles, tactics which would not be adapted to the
"victor" -- the Prussian Junkers -- but would immediately renew the
revolutionary struggle against him despite the conditions created by the Prussian
military victories (Briefwechsel, Vol. 3, pp. 134, 136, 147, 179, 204, 210, 215,
418, 437, 440-41). In the celebrated Address of the International of September 9 1870,
Marx warned the French proletariat against an untimely uprising, but when an uprising
nevertheless took place (1871), Marx enthusiastically hailed the revolutionary initiative
of the masses, who were "storming heaven".

A. From the foregoing, it
is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society
into socialist society and wholly and exclusively from the economic law of the development
of contemporary society. The socialization of labor, which is advancing ever more rapidly
in thousands of forms and has manifested itself very strikingly, during the half-century
since the death of Marx, in the growth of large-scale production, capitalist cartels,
syndicates and trusts, as well as in the gigantic increase in the dimensions and power of
finance capital, provides the principal material foundation for the inevitable advent of
socialism. The intellectual and moral motive force and the physical executor of this
transformation is the proletariat, which has been trained by capitalism itself. The
proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of
forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the
conquest of political power by the proletariat ("the dictatorship of the
proletariat"). The socialization of production cannot but lead to the means of
production becoming the property of society, to the "expropriation of the
expropriators." A tremendous rise in labor productivity, a shorter working day, and
the replacement of the remnants, the ruins, of small-scale, primitive and disunited
production by collective and improved labor -- such are the direct consequences of this
transformation. Capitalism breaks for all time the ties between agriculture and industry,
but at the same time, through its highest developed, it prepares new elements of those
ties, a union between industry and agriculture based on the conscious application of
science and the concentration of collective labor, and on a redistribution of the human
population (thus putting an end both to rural backwardness, isolation and barbarism, and
to the unnatural concentration of vast masses of people in big cities). A new form of
family, new conditions in the status of women and in the upbringing of the younger
generation are prepared by the highest forms of present-day capitalism: the labor of women
and children and the break-up of the patriarchal family by capitalism inevitably assume
the most terrible, disastrous, and repulsive forms in modern society. Nevertheless,

"modern industry, by assigning as it does, an important part in the
socially organized process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young
persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher
form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. It is, of course, just as
absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it
would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern
forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historic development. Moreover, it
is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of
both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of
human development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form,
where the laborer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production
for the laborer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery." (Capital,
Vol. I, end of Chapter 13)

The factory system contains "the germ of the education of the future, an education
that will, in the ease of every child over a given age, combine productive labor with
instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of
social production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings."
(ibid)

Marx's socialism places the problems of nationality and of the state on the same
historical hooting, not only in the sense of explaining the past but also in the sense of
a bold forecast of the future and of bold practical action for its achievement. Nations
are an inevitable product, an inevitable form, in the bourgeois epoch of social
development. The working class could not grow strong, become mature and take shape without
"constituting itself within the nation," without being "national"
("though not in the bourgeois sense of the word"). The development of
capitalism, however, breaks down national barriers more and more, does away with national
seclusion, and substitutes class antagonisms for national antagonism. It is, therefore,
perfectly true of the developed capitalist countries that "the workingmen have no
country" and that "united action" by the workers, of the civilized
countries at least, "is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the
proletariat" (Communist Manifesto) That state, which is organized coercion,
inevitably came into being at a definite stage in the development of society, when the
latter had split into irreconcilable classes, and could not exist without an
"authority" ostensibly standing above society, and to a certain degree separate
from society. Arising out of class contradictions, the state becomes "... the state
of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state,
becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down
and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the state
of the slave-owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as the feudal state was
the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern
representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labor by capital."
(Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,,a work in
which the writer expounds his own views and Marx's.) Even the democratic republic, the
freest and most progressive form of the bourgeois state, does not eliminate this fact in
any way, but merely modifies its form (the links between government and the stock
exchange, the corruption -- direct and indirect -- of officialdom and the press, etc.). By
leading to the abolition of classes, socialism will thereby lead to the abolition of the
state as well. "The first act," Engels writes in Anti-Duhring "by
virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of society as a
whole -- the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society -- is, at
the same time, its last independent act as a state. The state interference in social
relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The
government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the direction of
the processes of production. The state is not 'abolished,' it withers away." (Anti-Duhring)

"The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal
association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then
belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze
axe." (Engels,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State)
Finally, as regards the attitude of Marx's socialism towards the small peasantry, which
will continue to exist in the period of the expropriation of the expropriators, we must
refer to a declaration made by Engels, which expresses Marx's views:

"... when we are in possession of state power we shall not even think of forcibly
expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as
we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small
peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise
and private possession to co-operative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the
proffer of social assistance for this purpose. And then of course we shall have ample
means of showing to the small peasant prospective advantages that must be obvious to him
even today." (Engels The Peasant Question in France and Germany, published
by Alexeyeva; there are errors in the Russian translation. Original in Die Neue Zeit.)

A. Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic
nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history: he discovered the simple
fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat
and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion,
art, etc., and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of
subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people
or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal
conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been
evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of
vice versa as had hitherto been the case. (Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of
Karl Marx” - 1883)

A. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once
reached, continued to serve as the leading thread in my studies, may be briefly summed up
as follows: In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production
correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The
sum total of these relations of production constitutes the eco­nomic structure of society
- the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which
correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of
life. It is not the conscious­ness of men that determines their existence, but, on the
con­trary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of pro­duction in society come in conflict with
the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same
thing - with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms
of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then
comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the
entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.

In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the
material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined
with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or
philosophic - in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict
and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of
himself, so can we not judge of such a period of trans­formation by its own
consciousness; on the contrary, this con­sciousness must rather be explained from the
contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of
production and the relations of production. No social order ever disappears before all the
productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher
relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence
have matured in the womb of the old society.

Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking
at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when
the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the
process of formation. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the
feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress
of the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of pro­duction are the last
antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of
individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of
individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of
bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism.This social formation constitutes,therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric
stage of human society.

A. The expropriation of the immediate producers is accomplished with
merciless vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most
sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property [of the peasant
and handicraftsman], that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated,
independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by
capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of
others.... That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for
himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is accomplished
by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the
centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this
centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever
extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor process, the conscious technical
application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the
instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of
all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized
labor, the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market, and with this the
international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing
number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process
of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation,
exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always
increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the
process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the
mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under, it.
Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point
where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integument is burst
asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sound. The expropriators are
expropriated. (Marx, Capital, Volume I)