all past history with the exception ofits primitive stages was the history
of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the
products ofthe modes of production and exchange — in a word, of the
economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure ofsociety
always furnishes the real basis from which we can alone work out the
ultimate explanation ofthe whole superstructure of juridical and political
institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of
a given historical period.
(Socialism, Utopian and Scientific,