It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)
Introduction: Towards Scientific Socialism
In establishing a clear understanding of Actually-Existing Socialism, that is, Scientific Socialism, Socialism in the real, or Socialism as a tangible thing within the world rather than merely an ideal existing outside of it, one is met immediately with the question of whether or not any given country in the world today may be considered “truly” Socialist, and by what measure to assess such existence.