4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST enmity and hostility, etc. While characterising social and class contradictions as antagonistic and non-antagonistic, the antagonistic contradictions will have to be defined as those between the exploiting and exploited classes, say, between slave-owners and slaves, between feudal lords and serfs, between capitalists and workers and between imperialists and the anti-imperialist forces etc. These are irreconcilable contradictions. When the struggle between the two opposed poles or aspects of this contradiction reaches the point of final resolution, and when it is finally resolved, both the aspects in the antagonistic contradiction get dissolved, and that specific contradiction, in that specific form disappears. In this connection the following statements by Marx would enable us to grasp the significance of the issues under discussion. "The whole contradiction is nothing but the movement of both sides, and the condition for the existence of the whole lies in the very nature of the two sides. ... "Proletariat and wealth are opposites, as such they form a single whole. They are both forms of the world of private property. The question is what place each occupies in the anti-thesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole. "Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the contradiction, self-satisfied private property. "When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.5'2 "The very moment civilization begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and actual labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law civilisation has followed up to our day. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of antagonism.!93 "The bourgeoisie begins with a proletariat which is itself a relic of the proletariat of feudal times. In the course of historical development, the bourgeoisie necessarily develops its antagonistic character, which at first is more or less disguised, existing only in a latent stage."4' "An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. ... "The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism and there will be no more political power properly called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. "Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried