To avoid caricature …

Relations of production are class relations. They consist of the sum of economic, political, technical, and other interrelations among the social classes participating in the reproduction of the mode of production itself. The reproduction of the mode of production is, at least to the point at which the process undermines the social formation, the objective, so to speak, of class relations of production. In the Marxian theory the reproduction of the relations vital to the mode itself becomes increasingly difficult with the fettering of the productive forces; class struggles – a phrase merely summarizing ever more attenuated relations of production – become sharper and more clearly defined, not only to the outside observer, but even to the participants themselves (class consciousness). This is the thesis of class struggle, a struggle that assumes definite forms in the advanced capitalism, forms that we now proceed to distinguish and explain, beginning with Marx's own analysis.

There is a widely publicized although essentially distorted view of the class struggle that Marx envisioned within final phases of capitalist development. The picture so often tendered is of a world divided into numerically unequal classes, a small body of capitalists confronting a relatively larger industrial proletariat, the latter comprising the active labor army together with its own relatively growing industrial reserve of unemployed. Divided by an irreducible division of interests, these opposing classes are entangled in relations of sharpening tension.