p Scholars knew that people were divided into classes and that the class struggle existed in society before the birth of Marxism. But, being idealists in their understanding of social life, they were unable to find the objective basis for the division of society into classes. They did not see that the reason for the class division of society should be sought in material production, the principal sphere of human activity.

p A comprehensive definition of classes was given by Lenin in his work A Great Beginning. “Classes,” he wrote, “are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.”  [239•* 

p The relation of a class to the means of production is its chief feature determining its place and role in social production, and also the way it obtains its income and the size of that income.

p The division of society into classes is not eternal. In primitive society, there were no classes. Production was at such a low level that it yielded only means of subsistence barely enough to keep the people from starvation. There was no possibility for accumulating material wealth, for the birth of private property, classes and exploitation.

p Subsequently, however, as the productive forces developed and labour productivity increased, people began to produce more than they consumed. It became possible to accumulate material wealth and appropriate means of production. Private property appeared, as a result of the increasing division of labour and growth of trade.

p The development of private property in place of communal property increased the people’s economic inequality. Some men, mainly the tribal nobility, became rich and seized the communal means of production. Others, deprived of the means of production, were compelled to work for those who became their owners. This was how the disintegration and the class stratification of the primitive community took place. This process was consummated in the birth of opposing classes and exploitation.

Classes arose when the primitive-communal system began to disintegrate and the slave-owning system began to take root. The antithetical position of classes in society was the source of their bitter struggle. For many centuries the class struggle was the primary feature in the development of mankind.