Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/63

Rh defining the nature of its economic laws; by pointing out and underscoring the transitoriness of and ever changing forms in the structure of the mode of production, and the inevitable consequences of competition and surplus-value appropriation, he entered an indictment of fact against capitalist society and proclaimed the ultimate collapse of this most "perfect" of all systems. Marx significantly and with the aid of his dialectical method, a method which you will recollect he had taken over from Hegel, pointed out that a system which originally started with private individual property had rapidly developed into a system of private social property, and was bound—through the dynamic force of class-antagonisms—to culminate into a system of collective social property. In other words, he was forced to conclude that the social character of production was bound to be supplemented by a social system of distribution, and this change was only possible through the abolition of the cornerstone and bedrock of capitalist exploitation—private property in the means of production. The negation or antithesis of private property Marx found in social property or—Socialism; and the negation or contradiction of the class struggle he located in the abolition of all classes and class prerogatives based on any form of property. To illustrate these philosophical deductions: Just as day implies the approach of night, and life portends death; just as truth is born by the lie, and virtue is but the creature of sin; just as morality is measured with the yardstick of immorality, and the law is but the product of an unlawful act; just as the city or town foreshadowed the province, and the province the nation; so the nation implies the inter-nation; capitalism finds its contradiction in SocalismSocialism [sic]; and private property, in its growing social aspects, must culminate into social property: thus ending the class struggle with the inauguration of a social peace based on economic equality. In the past the class struggle found its culmination in the victory and supremacy of various economic classes, however, these classes were always swept into power by virtue of certain economic might and holdings, and always asserted their victory to the