Someone had made what was possibly a troll thread on how could one believe a certain statement by Marx.
I had written up what I think is a pretty decent reply that got directly to the heart of the matter that I want to post here. Feel free to reuse it.
Here it is:
The interpretation of the statement "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
to mean that recorded human history is nothing but class struggle means the statement is trivially untrue; A single example can disprove it (Take Pythagoras providing a proof of the theorem of the relationship of the catheti to the hypoteneuse in a right angle triangle, this cannot be reduced to class struggle alone since it requires geometry)
To claim that Marx is making such a trivially untrue statement is to violate the principle of charity, to quote mine and to be anti-hermeneutic (ie. to interpret statements in such a way as to make them necessarily contradictory or false).
Here is a more complete quote: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
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