PROBLEMS OF IiNDIAN HISTORY 15
The history of all hitherto existing society, is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome, we have patricians, km'ghts, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.1
Historical Materialism
The classical work of scientific socialism Manifesto of the Communist Party from which the above passage has been quoted, traces the epoch-making changes in the technique of production which destroyed the feudal society of the Middle Ages and gave birth to the modern bourgeois society. Explaining the process through which capitalism develops and inexorably goes on to its inevitable replacement by a new system, namely, socialism, it traces the origin, growth and the inevitable crisis facing the ruling class of capitalist society—the bourgeoisie. The penetrating analysis of the development of capitalism and its inherent contradictions and crises lead the authors to the following conclusion:
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians . . . . . . What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.2
The history of India and of its freedom movement should deal with the changes that arc always taking place in the techniques of production or the manner in which man tries to control nature; it should explain how