Marx and Engels wrote that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ As Marxist-Leninists, we understand that history develops through contradictions rooted in the material conditions of society, and above all through the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production within which they are embedded.
Consistently, ‘The capitalist system is a system of contradictions. It rests upon a contradiction between the social character of production and the private mode of appropriation’ – that is, between labour and capital.
‘Capital is not a personal, it is a social power,’ wrote Marx; ‘not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established through things.’ This contradictory social relation gives rise to an antagonism between two classes: on one side, the workers, who can create new value; on the other, the capitalists, who accumulate the newly created value through the systemic exploitation of workers.
In this process, capital is not simply a certain amount of value but always value in motion: a self-expanding circuit in which money (M) is used to purchase commodities (C), including labour power, only to return as a greater sum of money (M’). The development of capitalism – and, consequently, of imperialism – cannot but sharpen this contradiction, driving it to ever greater intensity.
In this framework, the working class is revolutionary not because of any virtue, but because of its historical position. It is the only class that produces value, yet is systematically dispossessed of that value. For this reason, it has no objective interest in defending private property, and every interest in abolishing the wage relation that defines its exploitation.
As Marx wrote to Weydemeyer in 1852: ‘What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.’
The antagonism between labour and capital is not a static opposition; it is a living, sharpening contradiction. This contradiction will not resolve itself. As capital expands, concentrates, and globalises, it deepens the antagonism on which it rests. The task of Marxism-Leninism is not simply to interpret this movement, but to intervene in it – to organise the working class as a political force capable of breaking the wage relation and the rule of capital. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not an end, but a necessary transition: the conscious overcoming of capitalist contradictions and the opening of the path to socialism-communism.