Class
A class is a group within the population which shares the same relations to the means of production and role in the societal organization of labor. Classes emerge when the productive forces develop to the extent in which a social surplus of production comes into being and is allocated unequally to the benefit of another class. The differing relations of production along with the exploitation of one class by another results in class struggle on the basis of irreconcilable antagonisms which result, commonly leading to a social revolution on the part of the oppressed class or the mutual devastation of the whole society.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party, I. Bourgeois and Proletarians.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
"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 reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
"In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations."
"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."
