According to Marx, the organisation of society in the epoch of civilisation, beginning in Greece with the dominance of Athens, and in Italy with the rise of Rome, fundamentally consists in the continual opposition and struggle between two classes; this struggle, he contends, makes up the essence and comprises the content of history; the mass of the working population is kept in subjection by the idle but dominant class, is kept in one form or another of social or political servitude. The state is the political expression of the dominant and oppressing class. In the modern era, class contrasts have become accentuated in the struggle between the proletarian masses and the capitalists. The proletarian masses undergo increasing impoverishment owing to the way in which the product of their labour, value and surplus value, is continuously absorbed by the capitalist entrepreneur; this process will continue until possessions become concentrated in the hands of a very small number of capitalists, and then will come the cataclysm, the definitive revolution, whereby the proletarians will reestablish communism. For in Marx's view, society in its most primitive stage was communistically organised, and primitive communism was swept away when the era of private property began. Extant capitalism is the terminal phase of private property, and in the comparatively near future will yield place to communism. This already imminent communism will doubtless differ in certain respects from primitive communism; it will be a complicated but deliberately thought-out system of social organisation. The coming of the communistic era can be foreseen by the scientific historian; and communism itself, therefore, is in part rooted in the historical process. Practically, socio-politically, the transformation inalterably determined by the objective dialectical process of historical evolution will be brought about in the following manner. In the very last phase of the capitalistic epoch the workers will gain control of the state (the dictatorship of the proletariat), will abolish the state, and will conduct society to the higher communistic stage of evolution. This stage will close the era of historical evolution.
Marx did not furnish a detailed account of the history of this evolution, but in his analysis of capitalist production and of the circulation of goods and commodities he endeavoured to elucidate the application of the dialectical process of evolution to the present day, to the most recent phase of history.
