p As was shown in the previous chapter, historical progress is achieved on the basis of the development of the productive forces, which bring about corresponding changes in production relations and a transition from one mode of production to another.

p At a certain stage in the development of the productive forces society becomes divided into antagonistic classes-definite social groups of people with opposite economic interests. This is how the exploiter class and the class of the exploited comes into being. The slave-owners and the slaves were the first classes. Class relations, being in effect production relations, began to exert the decisive influence on all aspects of human life and on all social phenomena.

p From this moment in society’s historical development, not a single social phenomenon or change can be comprehended out of the context of classes, and the interrelations and struggle between them. The class approach is therefore the fundamental methodological principle of any social study in historical materialism, and an essential condition for probing into any social event.

p The problem of classes and class relations had attracted the attention of bourgeois scholars long before Marx’s time, and they came up with quite a few rational ideas. In particular, it was the classics of English political economy (Adam Smith and David Ricardo) who described capitalist society’s class structure. The French historians of the Restoration (Thierry, Guizot and Mignet) proved that the class struggle is the reason behind changes in society’s political system, etc.

p The pre-Marxist sociologists failed, however, to create a scientific theory of classes and class struggle. Since they were ideologists of the exploiting classes and idealists in their comprehension of the life of society, as a rule they did not associate the existence of classes with a specific level of development of material production, and failed to detect in the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie the seeds of the inevitable collapse of capitalist society and its replacement by the new, socialist society. Neither did they believe in the disappearance of classes and the emergence of a classless society. These questions were first scientifically dealt with by Marx and Engels, who discovered and scientifically substantiated the law-governed patterns of the emergence, development and disappearance of classes, and revealed the determining role of the class struggle in society’s transition from one socio-economic formation to the next, and eventually to the classless communist society.

“And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern 361 society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development ot production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society...”  [361•1  wrote Marx to Weydemeyer on March 5, 1852.