SORRY, but every science has lo operate with certain conceptual tools or technical terms, and Marxism is a science.

Never mind, we will make it simple for you.

Different people occupy different positions in the economic system, in the social arrangement of production and exchange; thus we have peasants, capitalists, workers and so on. These social positions, which basically determine the different incomes, life styles, outlooks etc. of these groupings, are called classes. Some of these, like peasants and workers, produce everything necessary for society but are exploited and oppressed — they are called producing classes or oppressed classes. Others like landlords and capitalists are called exploiting or ruling classes because they do not produce anything but exploit and lord it over peasants, workers and other toilers thanks to their ownership of land, capital etc. and control over state power.

Struggle between exploited and exploiting classes goes on uninterruptedly in different intensities and forms like wage struggle, agitation for political democracy, electoral battle for ousting a corrupt government, and so on. At critical junctures it flares up into revolutions which drastically change the economic, political and cultural shape of society. We may cite the classic example of French revolution where the then revolutionary bourgeoisie, supported by peasants and other loiters, seized political power from the feudal aristocracy represented by Louis XVI thus becoming itself the ruling class. In time, however, the bourgeoisie lost its revolutionary fervour. Not only in France but throughout the world it gave up the struggle against feudalism and became the champion of status quo, interested only in enriching itself and in perpetuating its class domination.

Classes carry on their struggle through their mass organisations like trade unions as well as through political parties representing them, or sections of them. In our country, for example, parties like the Congress, the BJP etc. represent and work for capitalists, landlords and kulaks.

A communist party represents the revolutionary interests of the modern working class, also called the proletariat. This does not mean, of course, that every member of a communist party should be actually a worker, just as every member or activist of a bourgeois party need not necessarily be herself/himself a bourgeois. What it essentially means is that a communist party is guided by the proletariat's revolutionary ideology or outlook, which finds scientific expression in Marxism-Leninism. Among all the toiling and exploited classes, it is the proletariat which is most organised and disciplined. It is organically connected with modern science and, having nothing to lose but chains of wage slavery, imbued with a forward looking vision and most consistent in revolution. This class forms the very base of the social pyramid. So when it rises against and overthrows its direct oppressors, the ruling bourgeoisie, it mobilises the support of all other toilers and thereby brings the entire pyramid — the whole oppressive highrise — down to the ground. This is the socialist revolution, humankind's gateway to an exploitation-free world, the world of communism.The above description is true in world-historic terms, but in the specific conditions of varying times and climes this is actualised in different forms and methods. For example, in our country, where the growth of capitalism is retarded and distorted by strong feudal remnants, to abolish the latter and accomplish radical land reform becomes the first task of the proletarian party. This involves an intermediary stage called peoples democratic revolution, which grows directly and uninterruptedly into the socialist revolution. We shall discuss this topic in some detail in one of our forthcoming booklets, devoting the present one to an elucidation of the general ideals of communism.