But the industrial revolution which pushed the manufacturers to the front also brought an increase in the number of factory workers. It gave birth, to the modern working class. Formed out of the property less wage workers of the towns, the working class or proletariat, (as Marx called them) soon began to take the stage as an independent political force. In Britain it formed itself into the first modern workers" political party, the Chartists. On the Continent it played an ever more prominent role in the decade from 1831, when the first working class rising took place in the French city of Lyons. This was the decade when in all the advanced countries of Europe massive class struggles took place between the working class and the factory owners, even while the bourgeoisie was moving to political supremacy. Thus the class struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie forced itself to the forefront in all spheres of life, and in doing so compelled European leaders to consider history anew.
Already a revolutionary democrat, Marx was impelled by the great social movements of the period to make a study of the different forms of human society which had existed up to that time. He showed the overriding importance of economic development as the underlying cause of all important historical events and movements, singling out the class struggle as the motive force of history. In the course of his investigation and writing, he established and stated the main social and economic laws of development. .
In Marx view "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent on what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.