How did Marxism explain class struggle?

In Marxism, class struggle is considered the central driving force of human history. Marx posited that history is a series of revolutionary upheavals defined by the material and economic conditions of each age.12

At the core of this theory is the relationship between the "material forces of production" (tools and raw materials) and the "social relations of production" (the division of labor). In every historical stage—from ancient slave societies to feudalism and capitalism—a dominant class has used its control over the means of production to exploit a larger, subordinate class.23

Under industrial capitalism, this conflict manifests as the struggle between the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labor to survive. Marx argued that capitalists extract surplus value from workers, leading to systemic inequality and alienation. These internal contradictions eventually create the conditions for a revolution, where the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie to establish a classless society, thereby ending the "prehistory" of human conflict.213