Karl Marx și Friedrich Engels

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1. 01

   Legal and political arrangements change, but the tension between those who hold land and power and those who work remains the engine of history.

   Manifestul Partidului Comunist · 1848

   The forms of oppression change, but the divide between those who own the land and those who work it remains history's engine.

   Marx and Engels argue that any social order is explained by the relation between owners and producers, and change comes when that relation can no longer be sustained by old forms. The mechanism is simple: property relations determine who holds power, and their conflicts become political conflicts. Their example is the passage from serf to worker: legal emancipation without land or means of labor produces a new, economic dependence. For Romanian history this schema was used heavily: the 1907 peasant uprising, the relation between boyars and peasants, later collectivization, all were read through it. The card does not settle whether the schema is right; it shows only that the source explains agrarian reforms as struggles over land, not as gestures of princely goodwill.

   “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.”

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