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This article provides information about “How Social Classes are interrelated with Social Change?”:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
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According to Marx, Classes are formed based on objective material conditions. These are groups of people with a common economic position vis-a-vis those of other class. In essence, this economic interest is conflicting and contradictory to each other’s class position. These class relations get transformed to hostile action against each other with the intermediation of class consciousness. The objective material conditions form the basis for the formation of “class-in-itself” which get transformed into “class-for-itself” in the process of transferring of subjective class consciousness.
As per Karl Marx, though the class relation was very complicated in the earlier epochs of history, in the modern stage of capitalism this has been simplified. In the modern capitalist society new classes however have emerged with new condition of operation and new form of struggle between the bourgeoisie (the owners of the production i.e., the ‘haves’) and the proletariat (i.e. the ‘have-nots’).
According to Marx, under capitalism wage labourers are paupers who grow more rapidly than the population and wealth. The essential conditions both for the existence and sway of the bourgeoisie class is the formation and augmentation of capital. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourer, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association.
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The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, is its grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.