Marx saw human societies as fundamentally determined by the material conditions of the people—in other words, the most important thing, according to Marx, were the necessities of life which people must have in order to fulfill their basic needs such as feeding, clothing, and housing themselves and their families. He believed that all humans were in conflict with each other to acquire or control the resources or means of production that were essential to provide them with these necessities of life. He termed this conflict as class struggle and wrote in his communist manifesto:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
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He explained that history (up till his time) had gone through different stages with each stage or epoch creating a new class or invention that would ultimately lead to its downfall. However the downfall for him wasn’t necessarily a negative event, since with the new system, the humanity at large would benefit and oppression would be eliminated. Each passing stage would therefore probably raise the standard of living of the masses while at the same time be doomed to its own downfall in the long run as a result of the class conflicts. These stages of history according to him were Primitive communism, slave society, Feudalism, Capitalism, socialism and finally communism. (NO NEED TO GO INTO DETAILS OF