essed in the way individuals relate to class and the way they are controlled by that relationship. The workers sell their labor and are alienated from the product of their labor because of it. They do not own the means of production, while the capitalist who does sells the product of the labor of the workers. This exploitation of one class by another produces class hostilities which are constant and which are based on material inequalities. The class struggle is the defining fact of societal life and will lead in time to the violent overthrow of the capitalist class by the working class, producing the dictatorship of the proletariat for a certain period until a completely classless society is produced.
Marx writes in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party": "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Tucker, 1978, 473). This struggle defines the ongoing stream of historical materialism, based on the necessary social conditions defined by economic relations: "In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces" (Tucker, 1978, 4). The class consisting of the bourgeoisie developed during the feudal period, and as the bourgeoisie got the upper hand it "put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. . ." (Tucker, 1978, 475). Marx's language here, as in all his writings, is the language of conflict and struggle. He sees the interplay of classes in terms of domination, and at the present juncture, it is bourgeois society that dominates.
Marx's sense of human nature is seen in his concept of the force of history, i...