Cla** Struggle and Mode of Production
KARL MARX
A brief but notable statement by Marx of what he considered most innovative in his an*lysis of the human historical process occurs in a letter of March 5, 1852, to his friend Joseph Weydemeyer, then living in New York.
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And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of cla**es in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this cla** struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the cla**es. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of cla**es is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, 2) that the cla** struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all cla**es and to a cla**less society.