With the change of the economic basis the whole vast superstructure becomes slowly or rapidly revolutionized."
At any given stage of the development of society based on the private ownership of property that social class which owns the tools of production then in use dominates that society politically. When the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the old conditions of production, a new class has arisen in that society, which disputes the political supremacy of the old dominating class, the class which owns and controls the new material productive forces, and a struggle for life and death then ensues between these two classes. In this struggle the new class invariably comes out victorious. In the social revolution which follows the victory of the new class the new material productive forces are unchained and are given free scope to assert themselves, and the new class, controlling these forces, becomes politically supreme.
"A form of society never breaks down until all the productive forces are developed for which it affords room. New and higher relations of production are never established until the material conditions of life to support them have been generated in the lap of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets for itself only such tasks as it is able to perform; for upon close examination it will always be found that the task itself only arises where the material conditions for its solution are already at hand or are at least in process of formation.
"The industrial relations arising out of the capitalistic method of production constitute the last of the antagonistic forms of social production; antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism, but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of individuals. But the productive forces which are developed in the lap of the capitalistic society create at the same time the material conditions needed for the abolition of this antagonism. The capitalist form of society, therefore, brings to a close this prelude to the history of human society."
