Marxism's Monistic View of History Reduces Every Conflict to Class Conflict

From the outset, the Manifesto announced what the influential Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov called a “monist view of history,” according to which all historical conflict is reducible to class conflict and all political debate is reducible to the question of which class you represent or support. In History and Class Consciousness Georg Lukács reads the thought of Marx as an “expression” of “the standpoint of the proletariat.” Lukács offers an ingenious interpretation of Marxism as the unfolding “truth” of the class struggle. And in reducing questions of truth or falsity and right or wrong to questions of “class standpoint,” he is simply following the lead of the Manifesto.

--Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 100.