Class Struggle

All of history, said Marx, is the history of class struggle. All societies are divided into classes. In a capitalist society, the two main classes are the middle class (also known as the bourgeoisie) who owned the factories, and the working class who sell their labour to the factory owners. The working class is exploited by the factory owners who own the means of production. They are essentially wage slaves as the only way they can generate money for themselves is to labour for others' profit.

Workers want this to increase, while owners seek this to reduce this cost to them so that this can increase. Marx argued that no society is really stable. A struggle continues at all levels between classes. In the case of a capitalist society, workers constantly strive to increase their real wages - in effect by reducing profits for the factory owners. In a complex argument, he also showed that the middle classes sought to increase their profits by lowering workers' wages - in effect by increasing the exploitation of workers. Thus the classes were in a state of struggle, or even war, against each other.

The class struggle was not confined to capitalist societies, argued Marx. In a feudal society, the struggle was between the nobility who owned the land and the peasants who worked on it. Feudalism was replaced by capitalism when factory owners became the strongest class and industrial production replaced feudal agriculture as the most productive force in society.