SOCIALISM: An In-Depth Explanation

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, carrying 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.