Antagonism (class society):
In class society, which is founded on private property relations, antagonism is a mode of destruction of an old social and economic order by the new classes and new productive relations that arise and develop based on qualitatively new means of production. Due to the existence of private property and classes, the antagonistic form of development is necessary to overthrow the old form of state power and to uproot the old institutions of the superstructure that represented and protected the old classes and old productive relations. Private property is the social power of an economic class to own the means of production as well as means of creation of wealth and the right to appropriate the surplus product.
Qualitatively new productive forces create new classes and a new social organization of labor, tear society from its mooring in the old social order and compel society to reorganize around new production relations. Momentarily, two sets of primary contradictions coexist, as new productive relations collide with old productive relations. In the 1938 Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, this process is called the “double contradiction.”
The new contradiction, which expresses new productive forces, develops in external collision and destroys the old form of property and the old classes. The rise to dominance of a new form of class and property, based on new productive forces, in the past achieved hegemony over society based on destruction of the old primary form of property and classes at the base of the old productive relations. This process is how society moves in class antagonism.
(See, Leap.)
Antagonism, (philosophy):
In Marxist philosophy, antagonism is one of the two basic modes of change, and contradiction is the other. Antagonism and contradiction are not the same. Antagonism is a mode of destruction. Contradiction is the unity and struggle of opposites internal to a process that serves as the basis of development. At a certain stage, under definite conditions, antagonism replaces and destroys contradiction.
As used in philosophy, antagonism and violence are not the same. Violence can happen during any form of change in society, whether motivated by contradiction or antagonism. The two poles of a class contradiction (slave and slave master, nobility and serf, capitalist and proletariat) sometimes collide violently with one another, but this is not antagonism. In class society antagonism is a mode of destruction bound up with the rise of new classes that develop in external collision with the classes and institutions of the old society. Antagonism is a mode of destruction, resolution and transition to a new quality. Antagonism replaces and destroys contradiction.
The incremental addition of qualitatively new means of production into society causes society to begin transition to a new social organization of labor. This new quality is incompatible with the old way of doing things and disrupts the law system governing the old system of production and draws people outside the old productive relations and into new productive relations that express the qualitatively new productive forces. As the leap – transition – develops quantitatively, it passes from disruption to increased destruction of the old series of connections that constituted the material bond that held the old system and old class contradiction together. This process is antagonism.
Society moves in class antagonism.
(See, Contradiction, Leap.)
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