Class is the objective and concrete division of society based on the division of labor.
Classes, from the Marxist-Leninist point of view, are primarily defined by their respective relations to production.
Every society in history so far has been a form of class society:[1] in slavery, the master and slave; in feudalism, the lord and serf; in capitalism, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In socialism, which sublates capitalism, the proletariat becomes the ruling class and seeks to end the cyclical becoming of class society by putting the means of production in the peoples' hands.
Each stage of class society develops unevenly, and each develops differently according to its local conditions. Secondary or non-principle classes have existed since the beginning of class society as well; there are some transitional periods and features of each stage of class society which develop over their lives; and further, there are discursions which cause rapid or even immediate transition to further stages, such as Russian or Chinese serfdom's quick transformations into socialism, or American slavery's transition into capitalism.
Primitive Communism[edit | edit source]
The fundamental division of labor was based on sexual difference (men and women had different jobs owing to a difference in relation to the reproduction of the tribe/humanity).[2]
Slavery[edit | edit source]
Feudalism[edit | edit source]
Capitalism[edit | edit source]
The stage in which class society rots and decays once and for all is capitalism; the stage which takes it's place and paves the road out of class society is (the mode of production of) socialism. The real movement of the people, the seizure of private property and the sublation of the bourgeois state by the proletarian class, is Communism.
Socialism[edit | edit source]
Karl Marx said that socialism will first appear very similar to capitalism. Deng Xiaoping said "to get rich is glorious."