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though these things are.
It does not seem true that if we kicked this foundation away, Buddhism,
astrophysics and the Miss World contest would come tumbling down. They have
relatively independent histories of their own.
    So what is class
struggle fundamental to? Marx's answer would seem to be twofold. It shapes a great
many events, institutions and forms of thought which seem at first glance to be
innocent of it; and it plays a decisive role in the turbulent transition from
one epoch of history to another. By history, Marx means not ''everything that
has ever happened,'' but a specific trajectory underlying it. He is using
''history'' in the sense of the significant course of events, not as a
synonym for the whole of human existence to date.
    So is the idea of class
struggle what distinguishes Marx's thought from other social theories? Not
quite. We have seen that this notion is not original to him, any more than the
concept of a mode of production is. What is unique about his thought is
that he locks these two ideas—class struggle and mode of production—together,
to provide a historical scenario which is indeed genuinely new. Quite how the
two ideas go together has been a subject of debate among Marxists, and Marx
himself hardly waxes eloquent on the point. But if we are in search of what is
peculiar to his work, we could do worse than call a halt here. In essence,
Marxism is a theory and practice of long-term historical change. The trouble,
as we shall see, is that what is most peculiar to Marxism is also what is most
problematic.
    Broadly speaking, a mode
of production for Marx means the combination of certain forces of production
with certain relations of production. A force of production means any
instrument by which we go to work on the world in order to reproduce our
material life. The idea covers everything that promotes human mastery or
control over Nature for productive purposes. Computers are a productive force
if they play a part in material production as a whole, rather than just being
used for chatting to serial killers disguised as friendly strangers. Donkeys in
nineteenth-century Ireland were a productive force. Human labour power is a
productive force. But these forces never exist in the raw. They are always
bound up with certain social relations, by which Marx means relations between
social classes. One social class, for example, may own and control the means of
production, while another may find itself exploited by it.
    Marx believes that the
productive forces have a tendency to develop as history unfolds. This is not to
claim that they progress all the time, since he also seems to hold that they
can lapse into long periods of stagnation. The agent of this development is
whatever social class is in command of material production. On this version of
history, it is as though the productive forces "select'' the class most
capable of expanding them. There comes a point, however, when the prevailing
social relations, far from promoting the growth of the productive forces, begin
to act as an obstacle to them. The two run headlong into contradiction, and the
stage is set for political revolution. The class struggle sharpens, and a
social class capable of taking the forces of production forward assumes power
from its erstwhile masters. Capitalism, for example, staggers from crisis to
crisis, slump to slump, by virtue of the social relations it involves; and at a
certain point in its decline, the working class is on hand to take over the
ownership and control of production. At one point in his work, Marx even claims
that no new social class takes over until the productive forces have been
developed as far as possible by the previous one.
    The case is put most
succinctly in the following well-known passage:
    At a certain stage of
their development, the material productive forces of society enter into
contradiction with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal
expression of the same