Large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production. In his letter to Weydemer in 1852, Marx pointed out that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, the inevitable product of the development of the productive forces of society to a certain stage and the result of the contradictory movement between the productive forces and the relations of production. Engels also emphasized that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange – in a word, of the economic conditions of their time…
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