Class struggle

Class struggle is the struggle between exploiters and exploited, a manifestation of the irreconcilability of antagonistic class interests. The history of all societies, with the exception of primitive communal groups, is a history of class struggles. These struggles represent the driving force of social evolution in class society. The bourgeois revolution destroyed the feudal system, as the proletarian revolution destroys the capitalist system. The class struggle penetrates the economic, political, and ideological fields of class society and assumes the most varied forms. Virtually no aspect of class society can be understood apart from the underlying and persistent struggle of classes, and this includes developments and movements in religion, art, philosophy, science, and every other field. The struggle for the heliocentric hypothesis (that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa), was, for example, inseparably linked with the class struggle of its time. The conflict between formal genetics, with its doctrine of a hereditary substance totally removed from the conditions of life of the organism, and the teachings of the Soviet scientists Michurin and Lysenko that changed conditions of an organism’s life can change its heredity, is one reflection in science of the class struggle of our day. The most fundamental form of the class struggle is the struggle for political power, which, in the case of the working class today, is the struggle for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the necessary precondition for the emancipation of the working class and of all society from exploitation. With the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat the class struggle does not cease but takes on new forms. But its goal and ultimate end is the abolition of class struggle through the elimination of classes, thus raising society to a new and higher level where the good of all is the good of each.