The Marxists (with Marx, in this, at their head) find the Marxist questions frequently illuminating in historical work, and so they assume that they have uncovered a sort of secret machinery which drives the social process. Because it is often helpful to ask: 'What conflicts of interest would one expect in this society, given that its productive efforts are organised in this way?', they go on to assume that it is conflict between classes which determines the total pattern of historical development; or, as they put it, that the dialectic in human society is between conflicting classes. The thesis is the socially dominant class, the antithesis those with opposite interests. Out of their struggle is born the synthesis, the new socially dominant class, which in turn begets its antithesis; and so on, but in this case not indefinitely. So on, until the people's revolution, by creating one common economic interest throughout the whole of society, brings about a condition in which there is no longer any possible human antithesis, and so the dialectic can no longer be between man and man, but must be between man and nature; so that the classless society inaugurates the great age when man ceases to struggle with his brother, and turns at last to the common enterprise of struggling with man's secular enemy, his environment. Hence the firmness with which, during the period of proletarian dictatorship, one must prevent the emergence of separatist economic interests, and hence the boundless faith in the possibilities of science, and especially science of a 'practical', Lysenko, type, as the prime weapon against the environment.
(I. M. Crombie, "Social Clockwork and Utilitarian Morality," in Christian Faith and Communist Faith: A Series of Studies by Members of the Anglican Communion, ed. D. M. MacKinnon [London: Macmillan & Company, 1953], 98-113, at 103 [footnote omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 