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Another classic Marxist idea follows:

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and
conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the
conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What
else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its
character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each
age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

For Marx, the culture and ideas prevalent in a society don’t exist independently, in
their own right. They merely reflect the interests and prejudices of the ruling class. In
the Middle Ages it was chivalry and Christianity. Under capitalism it’s laisser-faire and
Kipling. There’s a grain of truth in this, but it underrates how ideas have a life and
importance of their own. At this point, Marx pulls a conceptual rabbit out of the hat.
He explains that the phase of the class war they were living through will be the last:

“Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for
oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is
compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of
a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the
old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept
away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally,
and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old
bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an

association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all.”

Here we reach the core of Marxism. All history has been the history of class struggle,
he says. But no longer. The proletariat are the overwhelming majority; so once they
win their struggle with the bourgeoisie, there will be no more class war, because

there will be no more classes. Hence communism will represent both a new
beginning and an ending, the first and only classless society in history. Here is Marx’s
“end of history”. Is this conceptually and philosophically brilliant? Or a crafty bit of
sleight of hand? It certainly saves him the trouble of describing in any detail any of
the nuts and bolts of communism. He never tells us what the revolution will be like,
or what communism will be like to live under, or how it will all actually work.

But let’s conclude this section and bring things back down to earth. Marx could also a
down-and-dirty political street-fighter. He ends his magnum opus by giving his

political rivals the utopian socialists, a good kicking: