ON CONTRADICTIONS 5 to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement? "Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. ^It is only an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: "Combat or death: bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably put."5 Another passage, from the Text Book of Marxist Philosophy, prepared by the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, also is relevant to the points under discussion. It reads: "Bukharin, like all mechanists, identifies contradiction with antagonism. This is wrong. Those contradictions--carefully distinguished by Marx and Engels in their analysis of the complete forms of development of class society—are antagonistic, in which the struggle of the indissolubly connected opposites proceeds in the form of external collisions which are directed on the part of the dominant opposite so as to preserve the subordination of its opposite and of the type of contradiction itself, and on the part of the subordinate opposite to the destruction of the dominant opposite and of the contradiction itself. "The contradiction if any in process is resolved, not by some external force, as think the mechanists, but by the development of the contradiction itself. This is true also in regard to antagonistic contradictions. But in the course of development of antagonistic contradictions at its different stages, the premises for its resolution are prepared and ripen. The contradiction itself at every new stage becomes ever more intensified. An antagonistic contradiction does not pass beyond the stage of its partial resolution. "Antagonistic contradictions are resolved by the kind of leap in which the internal opposites emerge as relatively independent opposites, external to each other, by a leap that leads to the abolition of the formerly dominant opposite and to the establishment of a new contradiction. In this contradiction the subordinated opposite of the previous contradiction now becomes the dominant opposite preserving a number of its peculiarities and determining by itself the form of the new contradiction, especially at the first stages of its development. "But in contradictions that do not have antagonistic character, the development of the contradiction signifies not only to the growth of the forces making for its final resolution, but each new step in the development of the contradiction, is at the same time also its partial solution. "Not all contradictions are antagonistic. Thus the relationship